"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.
Autorentext
Dr Catherine Fowler is the 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 published aspects of it in various edited collections. Her most recent book on British film-maker Sally Potter, published 2008, offers the first book length survey of a director who uses song, dance, performance and poetry to expand our experience of cinema beyond the audiovisual.
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Acknowledgments
1. Looking Back - The making of a myth
2. Looking Harder - Jeanne Dielman, housewife
3. The Look of Jeanne - on Delphine Seyrig
4. Looking Longer - Slowness and the Cinema
5. Looking Now - Jeanne Dielman today
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Bibliography