Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday

by Ivone Margulies

Through films that alternate between containment, order, and symmetry on the one hand, and obsession, explosiveness, and a lack of control on the other, Chantal Akerman has gained a reputation as one of the most significant filmmakers working today. Her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is widely regarded as the most important feminist film of that decade. In Nothing Happens , Ivone Margulies presents the first comprehensive study of this influential avant-garde Belgian filmmaker.
Margulies grounds her critical analysis in detailed discussions of Akerman’s work—from Saute ma ville , a 13-minute black-and-white film made in 1968, through Jeanne Dielman and Je tu il elle to the present. Focusing on the real-time representation of a woman’s everyday experience in Jeanne Dielman , Margulies brings the history of social and progressive realism and the filmmaker’s work into perspective. Pursuing two different but related lines of inquiry, she investigates an interest in the everyday that stretches from postwar neorealist cinema to the feminist rewriting of women’s history in the seventies. She then shows how Akerman’s “corporeal cinema” is informed by both American experiments with performance and duration and the layerings present in works by European modernists Bresson, Rohmer, and Dreyer. This analysis revises the tired opposition between realism and modernism in the cinema, defines Akerman’s minimal-hyperrealist aesthetics in contrast to Godard’s anti-illusionism, and reveals the inadequacies of popular characterizations of Akerman’s films as either simply modernist or feminist.
An essential book for students of Chantal Akerman’s work, Nothing Happens will also interest international film critics and scholars, filmmakers, art historians, and all readers concerned with feminist film theory.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Art, Feminism, Criticism, Theory

288 pages, Paperback

First published February 9, 1996

Reviews

[fioo ! ♡ ∗ ˚ ˖࣪ ∗ ‎˖ ݁ . ° · ˚ ₊ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chantal Akerman is god. That's it. That's my statement.

[Harris]

There's a WHOLE lot in here. Way more than I was expecting tbh. I'm constantly reading above my reading level.

Akerman has slowly become one my very favorite directors, if not my #1. This book explores her relationship with Deleuze and Guattari, especially how their concept of a minor literature influenced her. The author is unfortunately very careful not to go too far drawing parallels of her work with Kafka, which I would have enjoyed reading. There's a lot of Lefebvre as well, and a great discussion of his shortcomings, as he was so interested in the quotidian. It's a fabulous book. It's also a shame that this book was written before Akerman made her Proust movie.

Worth the read if you're floored by Akerman's movies - and who wouldn't be? other than those who claim "nothing happens."

[Chris Burkhalter · Rating 5 out of 5]

If anyone has written a more comprehensive and sensible piece on Chantal Akerman, I haven't read it. (Which is to say, no such thing has been published.)

[César Castillo Vega · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un completo ensayo en torno a las características fundamentales del cine de Akerman, que permite no solo recorrer las obras sino también profundizar en sus efectos y en sus distinciones con otras y otros directores que han trabajado los mismos problemas.