Christine Smallwood - La Captive

In the fifth published title of ​the Decadent Editions series, Christine Smallwood explores Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of Marcel Proust’s The Prisoner, the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time, in a text that moves elegantly between Akerman’s films, Proust’s novel, and Smallwood’s own life. ‘Christine Smallwood creates both a portrait of Akerman and her films – the most illuminating I’ve read – and a portrait of herself.’ Joanna Hogg ‘Smallwood’s La Captive is a delightful, engrossing book. Her study of Chantal Akerman’s film is profound, entwining Akerman’s and Proust’s resonant themes: mothers and daughters and sons, love and loss, passion and passivity, freedom, obsession, and time. A beautiful, masterful work that miraculously marries art to life, life to art.’ Lynne Tillman The Decadent Editions is a series of ten books about ten films, one for every year of the 2000s. Each a deep dive into a single film, the ten book-length essays shift attention away from entrenched classics and the churn of mainstream releases, spotlighting milestones of contemporary cinema. These idiosyncratic studies, by some of today’s most compelling cultural critics, are ambitious and insightful, yet playful and inviting. Together they offer an eclectic view of cinema in the first ten years of the new millennium – a decade now ripe for reappraisal. The first four books in the series have already been published: Nick Pinkerton’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), Erika Balsom’s TEN SKIES (2004), Dennis Lim’s Tale of Cinema (2005) and Melissa Anderson’s Inland Empire (2006). The remaining titles will follow at irregular intervals: K. Austin Collins’s Domestic Violence (2001), Anwen Crawford’s Morvern Callar (2002), Ed Halter’s At Sea (2007), Rebecca Harkins-Cross’s The Headless Woman (2008), and J. Hoberman’s Disorder (2009).