Overview

“Lucid, lively and extremely knowledgeable.” Sight & Sound Catherine Fowler’s study positions Jeanne Dielman as a ‘contrary’ classic, its contrariness arising from director Chantal Akerman’s decision to frame an unliberated housewife through a kind of ‘slow looking’. By choosing to stay with Jeanne in the kitchen, the film both ‘differences’ the canon and diverges from Akerman’s liberated early films, which involved the rejection of domestic space, married life and the heterosexual script. Fowler draws on original footage, scripts, unmade and unseen projects, interviews and other documents to painstakingly piece together the making of the film, discovering an alternative origin story which centers upon female alliances, forged through a combination of shared film culture and lived sexism. Those viewers who take up Akerman’s invitation to spend time with Jeanne will find their expectations of cinema are changed. Because more than any other film before or since, it reminds us that we give our time to a film; and in making us look both harder and for longer it asks us to feel time slipping away, for ourselves as much as for its protagonist.

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9781839022821

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Reviews

Lucid, lively and extremely knowledgeable. -- Hannah McGill * Sight & Sound * Another must for the feminist bookshelf. Unprecedented and long-awaited, this detailed, comprehensive analysis of this first film in the feminine will, like the film itself, offer hours of endless contemplation and fascination. -- Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Author of To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema Catherine Fowler's intricate and compassionate reading of Jeanne Dielman's feminist poetics, politics and aesthetics is a very welcome addition to the BFI Classics series. Long considered a cardinal work of art with regard to the feminist filmmaking canon, I am delighted to see this entirely unique and subversive film finally getting the attention it deserves from this series. This book will be a vital resource to feminist film scholars and students as well as film enthusiasts. It contains extensive historical and contextual detail that serves to re-position Dielman as a film brought into being through feminist collaboration and alliance. Fowler attends carefully to Seyrig's astonishing gestural performance and the precise mechanics of Akerman's use of space and time to build a profound and generous reading of this much-loved film. Highly recommended. -- Anna Backman Rogers. University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Another must for the feminist bookshelf. Unprecedented and long-awaited, this detailed, comprehensive analysis of this first film in the feminine will, like the film itself, offer hours of endless contemplation and fascination. -- Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Author of To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema Catherine Fowler's intricate and compassionate reading of Jeanne Dielman's feminist poetics, politics and aesthetics is a very welcome addition to the BFI Classics series. Long considered a cardinal work of art with regard to the feminist filmmaking canon, I am delighted to see this entirely unique and subversive film finally getting the attention it deserves from this series. This book will be a vital resource to feminist film scholars and students as well as film enthusiasts. It contains extensive historical and contextual detail that serves to re-position Dielman as a film brought into being through feminist collaboration and alliance. Fowler attends carefully to Seyrig's astonishing gestural performance and the precise mechanics of Akerman's use of space and time to build a profound and generous reading of this much-loved film. Highly recommended. -- Anna Backman Rogers. University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Author Information

Catherine Fowler is Associate Professor in Film at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She has been a student of Chantal Akerman’s cinema for some twenty five years, having written her PhD on Akerman's ‘cinema of displacements’ and has published an article on Jeanne Dielman in the edited volume 24 Frames: The Cinema of the Low Countries (ed. Mathijs, 2004).

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