Chantal Akerman - (Philosophical Filmmakers) by Andreja Novakovic (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Belgian auteur Chantal Akerman's ouevre is profoundly philosophical, exploring everything from home and homelessness, work and social reproduction, self and identity, to desire in its many forms. In particular, Akerman turns her camera on contexts that had been previously neglected, such as transitional spaces like hotel lobbies and street corners as well as the domestic sphere, revealing their significance in structuring experience.

Andreja Novakovic looks at the role of rituals, gestures and habits in Akerman's (auto)fictional worlds drawing on writers from Hegel to Butler, Beauvoir and Federici. Chantal Akerman is a fascinating philosophical reinterpretation of one of the most important directors of European experimental and independent cinema.

Review Quotes

A fantastic resource: compelling philosophical insights and an indepth knowledge of Akerman's oeuvre, paying attention to those better known works such as Jeanne Dielman alongside the less frequently explored later films. Accessible, erudite and enthusiastic.

Chantal Akerman loved the banal everyday: even when nothing happens, something happens, "little nothings" that are "the core of everything." In this humane and astute study, Andreja Novakovic examines the many ways in which Akerman attends to this little everyday core, and generously invites us viewers to pay attention with her. Novakovic gives us an expansive Akerman: serious, beautiful, boring, comic, tragic, daring. Drawing from across Akerman's works-her
short films, narrative films, documentaries, memoirs, letters and interviews-and calling on an array of thinkers-including Hegel, de Beauvoir, Heidegger, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis-Novakovic develops
a reading of Akerman as an artist of enormous range, both engaged with philosophical questions about the nature of work, gender, home, desire, time, and committed to the pleasures, and frustrations, of watching human beings projected and illuminated on screen. Novakovic's book achieves what any great book on film should do: send us back to the screen, to watch, and watch again, with fresh resources and new questions.
Francey Russell - Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College and Columbia University

About the Author

Andreja Novakovic is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Berkeley, USA and affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory. She is the author of Hegel on Second Nature in Ethical Life (2017).