Ivone Margulies

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