Podcast for Social Research, Episode 61.5, Shortcast: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
In this shortcast, recorded live before a screening of Chantal Akerman’s “love film for my mother,” BISR’s William Clark, Paige Sweet, and Isi Litke offer a sweeping overview of the film’s technical innovations, thematic stakes, and its film-historical context. Their talk touches on Akerman’s deft hybrid of experimental and narrative traditions, formal techniques as narrative strategies, the domestic terrain of diminished sovereignty, the uncanny activation of everyday objects, ten static minutes of making meatloaf, haunted houses, whether unleashed aggression might result in repose, and what sort of genre conventions this endurance test of a film may be partaking in after all.
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This episode of the Podcast for Social Research is produced by William R. Clark. If you like what you’ve heard, consider subscribing to Brooklyn Institute’s Patreon page, where you can enjoy access to all past and future episodes of the podcast.