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"A significant and original contribution, not just to Akerman scholarship, but to film studies generally."--David James, University of Southern California
List of contents
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
About the author
Ivone Margulies
