Born in 1950 in Brussels (BE)
Died in 2015 in Paris (FR)
1975
35mm film, transferred on DVD, colour, sound
Durée : 200'
Year of Purchase: 2003
Chantal Akerman’s second fiction film after Je tu il elle (I You He She, 1974), Jeanne Dielman is a key piece in her career, and sets the pattern for many later developments. This remarkably long (3 hours and 20 minutes), hypnotic work is carried along by the diaphanous presence of the actor Delphine Seyrig, who plays the part of a forty-something widow living alone with her son. The film retraces her every gesture over three days. Through this real time approach to everyday life, Chantal Akerman marks a clean break with traditional filmmaking. The most straightforward action becomes an event, standing out against absolute platitude. Housework, shopping, washing-up, clearing up, the insignificant life of this anti-heroine is mechanically regulated and timed. Even the favours she grants to passing customers, every afternoon. Each day is the same as the last one and the one before, and the one before that, until a disruption upsets and derails this immutable timetable. This disruption is the murder of this customer who dared to give pleasure to Jeanne Dielman. Her ritual is suddenly broken, freeing her pent-up fear; is she for all that delivered from the void of her existence? Or wanting to get back to it? «For me, she had two solutions’, is the artist’s analysis; to kill someone or to kill herself.»1 Imposingly slow and languid, with an aesthetics of seemingly dead time, with this behaviourist fiction Chantal Akerman creates something never before seen in cinema. There are signs of the influence of the American avant-garde, which she had then just discovered on a trip to New York, particularly the films of the Canadian Michael Snow, based on the duration and dilatation of time. In her previous films such as La Captive (2000), Akerman held onto the meaning of de-dramatization and absolute understanding of the still shot. Devoid of any link shot or close¬ups, her montage is poles apart from any form of classicism. Her magnificent frames play with a cold, plastic symmetry that the heroine’s back comes to haunt, like a sign of her behaviour that remains impenetrable until the film’s final second. They make the violence of the narrative that much duller. «I really left Jeanne Dielman to live her life in the middle of the frame, to be in her space. The only way to shoot this film was to avoid chopping this woman up into a thousand pieces, avoid cutting up the action into a hundred places.»2 Always face-on, the camera uniformly adopts what Akerman fines as the viewpoint of «a woman’s eye», never approaching, and not retreating. «The opposite of voyeurism, because you always know where I stand», she analyzes. «I do think [Jeanne Dielman is] a feminist film because I give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily gestures of a woman. They are the lowest in the hierarchy of film images. But more than content, it is because of the style. If you choose to show a woman’s gestures in such a precise way it is because you love her. In a way you recognize these gestures that have always been denied and ignored. Feminist not because of what is said but because of what is shown, and how it is shown.»3
Emmanuelle Lequeux
1 In interview with Camera Obscura, November 1976, reproduced in Art and Feminism, Phaidon, London, 2001. (English edition only).
2 Idem.
3 Ibid.