Description: The first philosophical exploration of the work of the French auteur, Chantal Akerman.
Brief description: Costica Bradatan is a Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, USA, and an Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy at University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author or editor of several books, and his work has been translated into many languages, including Dutch, German, Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Farsi. Bradatan writes regularly for such publications as the New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, Aeon, Dissent, and The New Statesman, and serves as the Religion/Comparative Studies Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Review Quotes: 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