Toward a Corporeal Cinema: Theatricality in the \'70s
Ivone Margulies

Akerman's visit to the USA in the early 1970s put her in touch with the experimental cinema, Minimal Art, new American dance and performance art. The camera in »Hotel Monterey« and »News from Home« represents a variant on structural minimalism. Akerman's narrative film art presents a cinema of indifference. The relationship between spiritual contemplation and theatricality sustained in »Jeanne Dielmann«, »Je tu il elle« and »Les Rendez-vous d'Anna« indicates a desire to use performance as a means of experiencing the choice between turning one's face towards the scene or turning to the audience. Akerman's films do not just mess up an essential way of reading images by making them lurch constantly between categories that are meant symbolically and literally, but the films also undermine the concepts of type, figure and author, thus creating an inner turmoil in terms of representing the subject. [more]

Hyperrealism Pop Art and Minimalism Performance vs. Film Akerman’s Minimalism Narrations Bresson as a Point of Reference Brecht vs. Bresson Overflow and Overload The Role of the Text Between Theater and Film