Jeanne Dielman
23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,
Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Yves Bical, Chantal Akerman.
Recommended
reading:
Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday
by Ivone
Margulies.
Published by
Duke University Press Books.
Published
1996.
ISBN-10:
0822317230
ISBN-13:
9780822317234
Description:
Through films
that alternate between containment, order, and symmetry on the one hand, and
obsession, explosiveness, and a lack of control on the other, Chantal Akerman
has gained a reputation as one of the most significant filmmakers working
today. Her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080
Bruxelles is widely regarded as the most important feminist film of
that decade. In Nothing Happens, Ivone Margulies presents the first
comprehensive study of this influential avant-garde Belgian filmmaker.
Margulies
grounds her critical analysis in detailed discussions of Akerman’s work –
from Saute ma ville, a 13-minute black-and-white film made in 1968,
through Jeanne Dielman and Je tu il elle to
the present. Focusing on the real-time representation of a woman’s everyday
experience in Jeanne Dielman, Margulies brings the history of
social and progressive realism and the filmmaker’s work into perspective.
Pursuing two different but related lines of inquiry, she investigates an
interest in the everyday that stretches from postwar neorealist cinema to the
feminist rewriting of women’s history in the seventies. She then shows how
Akerman’s “corporeal cinema” is informed by both American experiments with
performance and duration and the layering present in works by European
modernists Bresson, Rohmer, and Dreyer. This analysis revises the tired
opposition between realism and modernism in the cinema, defines Akerman’s
minimal-hyperrealist aesthetics in contrast to Godard’s anti-illusionism, and
reveals the inadequacies of popular characterizations of Akerman’s films as
either simply modernist or feminist.
An essential book for students of Chantal Akerman’s work, Nothing Happens will also interest international film critics and scholars, filmmakers, art historians, and all readers concerned with feminist film theory.
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