About the Book

The first philosophical exploration of the work of the French auteur, Chantal Akerman.

Book Synopsis

Chantal Akerman turns her pioneering camera on neglected contexts from transitional spaces like hotel lobbies and street corners, to domestic spaces like kitchens and bedrooms.

Through her wide ranging films, Akerman addresses subjects such as home and homelessness, work and social reproduction, self and identity, and desire in its many forms. This book is the first philosophical study of Akerman's oeuvre. Andreja Novakovic looks at patterns of staying put and moving on in the Belgian auteur's deeply personal body of work, drawing on writers from Cavell to Beauvoir, and Federici. It is an absorbing reinterpretation of one of the most important directors of European cinema, whose Jeanne Dielman was recently selected as Sight and Sound's Greatest Film of All Time

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).