The One Who Dethroned Cold sweats at the top of the classification Sight and Sound of the greatest film of all time, the immense Jeanne Dielman, 23 Trade Pier, 1080 Brussels indicates the address of the timeless masterpiece of Chantal Akerman. Demanding, gruelling, we will try to launch some tracks to tackle this indispensable monument now sublimated by its spring at Capricci and available on the catalogue of MUBI !
Me, Jeanne D., mother at home, prostitute...
Jeanne Dielman lives at the 23th Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels, we will have understood thanks to the title to extend the feature film. She is a mother but also a widow, housewife and occasional prostitute. His life follows rhythms that would seem to be programmed: awakening of his son, buzzing of the percolator, breakfast, laundry, shopping, meals, cleanings, bed preparation, supper and finally sleep before starting a new cycle... An ordinary life, maybe too ordinary. An alienated existence, the days of which start again, start again and start again. Yet a grain of sand in the wheel gradually twists its routine and initiates a devious disorder that will poison its life.
Hard to summarize Jeanne Dielman. Too much to say would be taken away from the strange feature film from which he subtly looks from plan to plan. Not revealing it enough would risk disgust the spectator of approaching a film too long at first seeming to be greyer than life. But it's nothing! Jeanne Dielman could hardly function if it was shorter and in no way trimmed by the opioids of a bewildering naturalism, on the contrary...
To ensure a proper viewing, it is necessary to approach the film more like a pure sensory experience, a device set up to play with our senses and against which our body could react epidermally if the viewer does not let himself go to the most total abandonment. A film that titillates the nerves, amuses us in a torpor almost meditative before creating a prodigious tension without any artifice... Let's try to lay out some leads to approach it with the tools necessary to appreciate it as much as possible!
Chantal Akerman : a short biography
A Belgian film director born in 1950, Chantal Akerman is born in a carcan bleeded by contemporary history. Born into a Polish Jewish family, her two grandparents and her mother were deported to Auschwitz and only the latter returned. It's the viewing of Pierrot the fool Godard's cinephilic vocation is triggered, giving birth to a prolific filmic impulse: she will thus create short films, lengths of fiction, documentaries and multiple installations of contemporary art. It's the short Jump my town (1968), anarchist and punk, which opened the start of a long career for Belgian filmmaker.
Following on from the experimental cinema on the other side of the Atlantic, Akerman vivote between food jobs and film shoots, multiplies encounters and film creations. Between New York, Israel and Paris her many creations were born, but in 1975, at the very beginning of her career, she made one of her greatest films: Jeanne Dielman, which interests us today. Chantal Akerman will end a life full of creations on October 5, 2015, ravaged by manic-depressive disorders and the death of his mother a little earlier.
A selection of castings
It's almost all the plans. Delphine Seyrig that Akerman castes in the role of Jeanne Dielman, and this is definitely not a chance! First, she is the director behind the documentary still burning up news Be beautiful and shut up!, referred to in this issue of France Culture and evoking the living conditions of actresses in the resolutely oppressive matrix of the film industry. But in addition to this, Seyrig came mainly from the (very) high bourgeoisie, having turned for Buñuel, Truffaut or Resnais. It is knowingly having in mind this social situation that Akerman propels her into her "little" Belgian film where she gives her the role of a mother, widow, trapped in an apartment too small whose corridors she haunts as an invisible ghost to meet the needs of others. Peeling of potatoes, breading of escalopes, she multiplies in front of the camera these gestures that it would seem anodized but that she definitely does not control. She's clumsy, paaudy, and instils in her role a strangeness that's only going to swell during the film (we'll come back).
Film at the rhythm of reality
Level directed, feature film intrigue. Total absence of extra-diegetic music. Chapter indicating the day of the action. Long planes, very widely in fixed sequence of several minutes. Printing sometimes approaching the experience proposed in The Area of Interest in the daily life lived by the character of Sandra Hüller : passages from room to room, rhythmic by the metronomic clicks of the switches, immersion in a banal daily and terrifying at the same time and obviously this aspect "camera of surveillance", capturing dailyity with the confusing aspect of real time.
This film-device plays along its length (3h25 anyway!) to take its spectator consenting in a strange waltz of an intriguing daily. And in addition to the fact that Akerman hired almost only women for the production of his film (at a time when technical positions were very often reserved exclusively for men), one of the obvious readings of Jeanne Dielman is his resolutely feminist aspect!
Jeanne Dielman, feminist film...
Jeanne is an alienated woman, to life dictated by a vertical and oppressive patriarchate. Men whom she satisfies almost in a ritual way in a room of her home, following the same habits. A man – his son – whom she serves despite a rather ungrateful recognition. Another man, who died – her husband – seems to exercise an equally powerful power over her, as dictated overtly.
All his actions and gestures seem automatic, until the intromission of an almost terrifying inhumanity in this mechanical repetition. And the experience of Delphine Seyrig, we come back to it, facing the material that she has to manipulate in front of the focal points of Akerman (it is very much to bet that the actress has never had to bandage a escalope in her life, see excerpt above) breathes into these multiple repeated gestures a disturbing strangeness that infuses the feature film. These ordinary gestures are, once projected on the screen, put at a distance, a kind of absurd choreography where body and matter dance together on a dissonant score.
And these busy days like music paper, and tirelessly repeated, lead to horror. The slightest grain of sand in this usual machinery becomes unbearable. The mind stubborn by this daily seems to go in search of a problem, until it, however small, becomes obsessive and imposes itself as an unsurpassed obstacle. Thus, the care that she gives to others (men, in general) leads her to forget herself, the repeativity of her ordinary gestures annihilate her own condition and the appearance of time for herself that seems to lead to the life of a housewife is therefore merely a facade. A crepe passed tirelessly, day after day, on a carpet of anxiety that will soon resurface...
...but not just!
Indeed, if feminist reading is inevitable, it would amputate much of the incredible wealth of this work that to circumscribe. Jeanne Dielman certainly evokes the mental burden of the housewives, but more generally the film touches with finger a notion how much Kafkaian alienation related to the common and usual life. A fact that Akerman himself evokes in this quote, about his own film:
« [Jeanne Dielman is] a film on how to organize her life so as not to have any free time, so as not to be overwhelmed by the anguish and obsession of death. »
Indeed, how much time in our modern lives is devoted to the common, recurring tasks that we do without even accounting for. At work, at home, even during the so-called free time, there are habits that are necessary to calm a mind that wanders and risks simmering in indelible reflections... Obsession of death watch (noting the omnipresence of clocks in the last third of the Jeanne Dielman), children who grow up and emancipate by becoming quasi-foreigners (the discussion between Jeanne and her son about sexuality) or family dislocation (her husband's death dismantled part of her family ties, which a letter from Canada recalls during the film), there are many sources of anxiety for Jeanne. And it will be necessary to wait for this tiny disruption in its programmes to be traced so that they reappear and become unbearable.
To conclude
A film-monster by his fame, by his director's aura, by his duration but also by the palette of emotions that his spectator is passing through (which does not necessarily exclude a possible part of boredom). Importantly important for many of the great names of today's cinema (Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, Michael Haneke s'en fully claim), Chantal Akerman created with Jeanne Dielman the cornerstone of a feminine, harsh and demanding cinema. Referring as much to alienation crushing the housewife as to the constant pressure of a patriarchate that is insinuating everywhere until they are self-assimilated, the film is adorned with a deeper and more universal discourse on the effect of time on the body and mind. A crazy film, which should be addressed in the right conditions, but which does not detract from its place at the top of the prestigious 10-year ranking of Sight and Sound. To see streaming on MUBI or in its spring increased by many bonuses at Capricci !
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