Chantal Akerman: Filmmaker and Philosopher

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.

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).