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Beschreibung
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 layerings 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.
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 layerings 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.
Über den Autor

Ivone Margulies is Associate Professor in the Department of Film & Media at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Inhaltsverzeichnis
Acknowledgments ix
Chantal Akerman's Films: The Politics of the Singular 1
1. Nothing Happens: Time for the Everyday in Postwar Realist Cinema 21
Charting the Everyday in Postwar Europe 24
A Realism of Surfaces: Bazin and Neorealist Film 27
From Surface to Structure: Barthes, Godard, and the Textualization of Reality 33
Beyond Cinematic Postivism: The Antirescue Cinema of Andy Warhol 36
2. Toward a Corporeal Cinema: Theatricality in the '70s 42
The United States in Real Time: Minimal, Hyperreal, and Structural 48
Quotation Reconsidered: European "Theatrical" Cinema 54
3. The Equivalence of Events: Jeanne DIelman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 65
Excess Description: Robbe-Grillet and Cinematic Hyperrealism 69
Bracketing Drama: The Other Scene 73
The Murder, and, and, and . . . : An Aesthetics of Homogeneity 80
The Automaton: Agency and Causality in Jeanne Dielman 88
4. Expanding the "I": Character in Experimental Feminist Narrative 100
The Lure of Center in Rainer's Work: A Cautionary Tale 104
The Eroded Index: Liminality in Je tu il elle 109
An Alogical, Fitful, Evidence 112
"Here Is": Redundant Description 118
A Mock Centrality: An A-individual Singularity 121
5. "Her" and Jeanne Dielman: Type as Commerce 128
For Example, "Her": Godard and the "Natural" Sign 131
Jeanne Dielman: An Exceptional Typicality 140
6. Forms of Address: Epistolary Performance, Monologue, and Bla Bla Bla 149
Epistolary Performance: News from Home 150
Talk Blocks: Meetings with Anna 154
Postscript: The Man with the Suitcase and A Filmmaker's Letter 161
What is Wrong with Signing? A Filmmaker's Letter 166
7. The Rhythm of ClichÉ: Akerman into the '90s 171
Eight Times "Oui": Singularity in Toute une nuit 173
Night and Day and Night: The Cycle Revisited 182
So Let's Sing: The Eighties and Window Shopping 185
Echoes from the East: Histoires D'AmÉrique and D'est 192
To Conclude: It Is Time 204
Filmography 213
Notes 215
Bibliography 247
Index 263
Details
Erscheinungsjahr: 1996
Genre: Importe, Kunst
Rubrik: Kunst & Musik
Thema: Theater & Film
Medium: Taschenbuch
Inhalt: Einband - flex.(Paperback)
ISBN-13: 9780822317234
ISBN-10: 0822317230
Sprache: Englisch
Einband: Kartoniert / Broschiert
Autor: Margulies, Ivone
Hersteller: Duke University Press
Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, D-36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr@libri.de
Maße: 234 x 154 x 21 mm
Von/Mit: Ivone Margulies
Erscheinungsdatum: 09.02.1996
Gewicht: 0,567 kg
Artikel-ID: 121030435

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