Still life with scissors

If I have a reputation for being difficult, it’s because I love the everyday and want to present it. In general people go to the movies precisely to escape the everyday.–Chantal Akerman

1975 was a big year – I finished school and Gough’s government came to an end. At the same time Chantal Akerman was releasing a film called Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. A feminist film. At that time I owned a copy of The Female Eunuch though it was more for the look on my bookshelf than a well-thumbed text. I got into Greer a bit later than this. But I thought of myself as a feminist – and still do.

I saw Jeanne Dielman for the first time on Saturday night. I might not have gone if I’d realised that it was three and a half hours long but it was fabulous. It tracks the life of a widow over three days, at times seemingly in real time, and with about 15 minutes of dialogue in the entire film. Enticing? Oui. (It was set in Belgium and described as a masterpiece of French minimalist cinema. In fact I think every film maker should see it for the quality it has of being experiential cinema. We are forced to endure the tedium of Jeanne’s life as she is living it. We become attuned to small changes in her domestic routine as harbingers of a kind of breakdown. And even though there is one major dramatic event in the film it does not linger as the talking point or provider of residual images. What does linger are the long takes of Jeanne making meat loaf, endlessly pushing and prodding the pink mince until it resembles a large and horrible visceral thing (If ever something was going to send me into a vegetarian state, it would be that scene), or the scene of her washing, endlessly, compulsively or the scene of her sitting in a chair waiting for nothing. For a long time. For a very long time cinematically. We are used now to relentless action as the mode of telling a story; this film shows another way.

Jeanne is widowed and prostitutes herself by day to make enough money to support herself and her almost grown son. Her life constructed and maintained with immense care and precision; as if a light left on inadvertently or a door left ajar will bring everything undone. It’s a film about a woman trapped in the home; trapped by financial poverty and by a kind of limited horizon that seems to be the fate of many women of that time. It reminded me of the flip side of Mad Men, the TV series now playing. All those wives at home going quietly mad. Some 2009 critics have referenced the film Revolutionary Road as a new print of Jeanne Dielman came out about the same time as Revolutionary Road. It’s not a film I liked much, I found it emotionally cold; I felt nothing for the characters. Jeanne Dielman works in a much stronger way because the film forces the viewer to sit with the tedium and pain, the quiet bleakness, the existential meaninglessness and loneliness of the life of main character. It forces you to be in the film, not to just watch which is what it felt like with the Wheelers in RR. One reviewer contrasts the films really well - (not a fan of Sam Mendez either). Kenji Fujishima describes it as “Akerman’s refusal to present easy explanations for her predicament” in contrast to Sam Mendez (in Revolutionary Road) “predictably pins it all on the suburbs and on stifling social codes regarding marriage.”

It has been described as a ‘still life film”. Scott Foundas, writing in LA Weekly, said

“ It is also about repetition and routine as a justification for existence, and
how such things might drive someone mad without anyone realizing it, least of all the person herself. That it was all told from a woman’s point of view, at a historical moment that was not particularly robust for women either as subjects or makers of films, sealed the movie’s status as a classic — albeit one that has been nearly impossible to see for the past three decades. “There was a lot about Jeanne Dielman that I didn’t understand when I wrote it,” Akerman told me in a 2004 interview. “I had a script that was quite precise, but I didn’t even know before I started the first few shots that it was going to be a long movie. After two or three days, I said to the actress, ‘You know, it’s going to be a very long movie.’ But it was not planned.””

The woman who introduced the film described it as a masterpiece of the French minimalist cinema. I know little about this. And there’s quite a bit on the web about her film making techniques including a long essay, written in the 70s by Jayne Loader. It says (the essay) as much about the concerns and language of the times as it does about the film and is a provocative read. Some of it is about technique:

“The most striking formal technique in JEANNE DIELMAN is Akerman's use of the static camera. We see Jeanne's life as if it were a painting which we have all the time in the world to study. Thus we are not manipulated by dollies in or out of space that force us to focus on some particular point of action, or by changing camera angles which hurtle us up or down emotionally. Akerman has said that she saw no reason to move the camera in her film, and for the most part I agree with her: her character's actions speak for themselves.

Since Jeanne is the heart of the film, this is expressed visually by her placement in the still frame. She is centered precisely within it, and unless she moves from one room to another, Akerman not only holds the camera steady but holds the shot as well. There are no cuts except when absolutely necessary, and Jeanne is almost always on screen. Akerman's cinema focuses our attention on her smallest gestures, gestures that reveal character but would be lost in a more flamboyant film: a knife that almost slips when a potato is peeled, a light turned off unnecessarily, a facial expression of disquiet or of frustration, the curious act of making coffee in a thermos in the morning for drinking at lunchtime. The effect of such details, repeated and ritualized, is cumulative. Slowly the portrait is pieced together.

Amazingly, Akerman was only 25 when she made this film. I am in awe of her achievement and her courage and will finish with this quote about it: “Because Akerman's scenario and her realization of it are so provocatively heterogeneous, and because the interpretations of the film's place in the canon of great cinema are so varied (and also because Akerman's editing rhythms and pacing are as methodical and unhurried as Stanley Kubrick's), some have called it the "domestic 2001."