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Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

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( 45 ratings, 7 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is an in-depth study by Catherine Fowler that explores Chantal Akerman's groundbreaking film. The film centres on an unliberated housewife portrayed through a meticulous, slow-paced gaze, focusing on domestic life to challenge cinematic conventions and feminist narratives.

Fowler reconstructs the film’s making using original footage, scripts, and interviews, revealing a feminist collaboration rooted in shared experiences and cultural context. The work invites viewers to reconsider their relationship with time and the cinematic experience itself.
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This book appeals primarily to readers interested in feminist film studies, cinema theory, and arts and culture scholarship. It is well-suited for academics, students, and film enthusiasts who wish to deepen their understanding of feminist filmmaking and alternative narrative structures.

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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Lucid, lively and extremely knowledgeable. Sight & Sound

Catherine Fowler’s study positions Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 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 centres 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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Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Sight & Sound praises the book as “lucid, lively and extremely knowledgeable.” Sandy Flitterman-Lewis calls it a “must for the feminist bookshelf,” highlighting its comprehensive analysis and capacity to inspire profound contemplation. Other reviewers appreciate Fowler’s intricate and compassionate reading of the film’s feminist poetics, politics and aesthetics, recognising it as a vital resource for feminist film scholars and enthusiasts alike.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781839022821

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 18 November 2021

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: BFI Publishing

Illustration: 60 colour illus

Audience: Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 6.0mm

Width: 134.0mm

Height: 194.0mm

Weight: 160g

Pages: 96

About the Author

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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