Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 9781839022852, 9781839022821

Citation preview

6

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Acknowledgments First, highly belated thanks to Ginette Vincendeau as supervisor for the PhD thesis in which I first wrote about Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The account of the making of the film could not have been written without the attentive and generous help of Celine Brouwez at CINEMATEK and the Chantal Akerman Foundation. Several key documents were sourced from visits to the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique in the 1990s. Also offering their invaluable support were Babette Mangolte, the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir and Marilyn Watelet. Marion Kalter, Catherine Deudon, Jane Stein, Léopold Veuve and Patricia White all helped with sourcing visual material, while Paola Voci was an attentive reader. The University of Otago supported the writing of this book through research and study leave and the acquisition of images via a Division of Humanities grant. Finally, staff at the University of Otago library offered essential help for sourcing inter-loans and borrowing audiovisual material.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 6

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

7

1 On Canons, Classics, Plots and Movie Theatres: A Challenge This is a book about a film that shouldn’t have been possible. Since when does a young woman of 24 with no training in film-making and only one previous feature-length film to her name1 create a 201-minute2 unique experience that remains hailed as a masterpiece forty years later? This is a book about a film that should have been unwatchable. Who goes to the cinema to watch the mundane daily tasks that we have come to escape? Especially when those tasks are filmed in a flat, uninflected style that seems to ignore our presence. This is a book about a film that shouldn’t have been visible. A film made up of ellipses from the first eighty years of cinema that have gone before it: actions, gestures, spaces, objects, glances, silences cut out of other films. In my mind I imagine the 24-year-old Chantal Akerman gathering up a towering pile of celluloid to make her film from the elisions, abridgements, contractions and compressions of film history. Impossible; Unwatchable; Invisible; these are just a few of the reasons that Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) sits awkwardly in the BFI Film Classics series. Plenty of praise was heaped on the film at its release and a revival of interest since its availability on DVD has provoked renewed admiration. Yet the acts of canonisation in which classics play a part have historically excluded the female, the radical and the feminist, let alone the Belgian. For example, French critic Louis Marcorelles was sure that the film was a work of art yet, his words suggested, one which needed a new category: ‘the first work of art in the feminine in the history of cinema’.3 Therefore, paraphrasing Griselda Pollock, to declare Jeanne Dielman a classic is to difference the [film] canon.4 Crucially, the challenge that Jeanne Dielman presents to taste cultures is a reminder

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 7

08/06/2021 13:44

8

BFI FILM CLASSICS

of why we should value it, because it reveals the prejudices not simply of history-making, but also of image culture, prompting us to consider why it remains more of a challenge for women film-makers to sustain a career, why a woman washing up is unwatchable to us,5 and why such images have remained invisible. Admittedly then, Jeanne Dielman is not your typical candidate for the BFI Film Classics series. But let’s try for a moment to employ the usual parameters of these books, which is to begin with a summary of the ‘plot’. Jeanne Dielman takes place over three days of Jeanne’s life, beginning at 5.30 p.m. on a Tuesday and ending at approximately the same time on a Thursday. Jeanne is a widow in her late forties, with a son of 16. In her proposal for the film Chantal Akerman writes: ‘We penetrate, or invade, the quotidian life of a woman, seeing that which is not normally shown, that which is silenced.’6 Jeanne is a housewife whose daily routine of tidying up after her son’s departure for school then preparing for his return, we are shown in wearying detail. Less evident, at least for the first two days, is the fact that Jeanne also receives money for sex. In the afternoons, between cooking dinner and serving it, she hosts male visitors who disappear with her into her bedroom and then, when they reappear, thrust money into her hand and quietly arrange their next rendezvous. Over the course of the full and partial days we become accustomed to Jeanne’s daily routine, noting changes in the small repetitions that order her world. After the departure of Wednesday’s visitor she seems less calm. A change in camera angle, coupled with a drop in efficiency, suggest that something unexpected may have occurred in the bedroom. This unsettling feeling continues into Thursday, as disruptions to her perfectly ordered world continue, until finally we see her in the bedroom with Thursday’s visitor. After sex, she stabs him with a pair of scissors. There follows 7 minutes in which she sits motionless at the dining room table, blood across her blouse, her head eventually bowed and a strobe light from outside flashing across her figure. We watch and wait; then the film ends.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 8

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

9

Chantal Akerman sits beneath a poster of Jeanne Dielman (© Marion Kalter)

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 9

08/06/2021 13:44

10

BFI FILM CLASSICS

There are two problems with giving the plot of Jeanne Dielman at the beginning of this study: it affords a false sense of control over the film and it risks implementing a directed rather than open and careful form of attention. First, the apparent epistemological certainty that drives the rhetoric of the ‘plot’ gives a distorted impression of what it is actually like to sit through Jeanne Dielman. When I say ‘sit through’ I’m explicitly referring to pre-video practices of spectatorship. That time then before we had remote control of the viewing experience, when we had to submit to the film’s rhythm and duration.7 Post-video, it is an even bigger challenge to introduce the film to an audience whose experience of cinema ‘is mediated through the small screen, with the light on’.8 This is how Jane Giles, programme manager for the former Scala Theatre, London, characterises the viewing experience in the digital age. Of course, when Jeanne Dielman was made in the mid-1970s, the only way to stop the film was to leave the theatre, which unfortunately many viewers did in early screenings.9 To stop the film or to do other things while watching it is to have control over its unfolding. Instead, Jeanne Dielman works only when we surrender our control to it; when we know that we cannot leave and instead we have to endure it. Coming to the second problem of the plot, I face the challenge of what to give away about Jeanne Dielman every time I screen it for students, which I have been doing in feminism and film classes since 1994. The term ‘give away’ says it all. Each detail I tell them makes me feel like I’m giving them something for free, which they haven’t earnt, or which they’ve stolen from Jeanne. Most of all, I don’t want to give away the murder at the end, because I feel that if they are aware of this, then they will fail to take everything that occurs before the murder, all 194 minutes, for what it is. By anticipating the murderous end from the very beginning, they would be treating Jeanne pathologically. I remain convinced that when we first meet her on Tuesday Jeanne does not know what will happen on Thursday, so it’s important to me that my students give careful attention to

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 10

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

11

her routine and follow her lead, instead of getting ahead of her and judging her every move. Adding to the list of aspects that escape the reductions of the plot, a careful form of attention is demanded by Jeanne Dielman, since the film provides a kind of audiovisual detox from our usual privileged viewing position. Our problems begin when we try to treat time and space as external to the ‘action’, when in fact they are protagonists with as much importance as Jeanne herself. Akerman found her gaze in the cinema when she encountered Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and La Région centrale/The Central Region (1971), and space has never operated as background in her films since then. When we try to provide a plot for Jeanne Dielman we tend to focus entirely on changes in Jeanne’s psychology, unable to convey the drama of sunlight, shadows, emptiness and fullness through which the film ‘takes place’. Akerman deletes the full range of devices through which a film can be said to interpret the surface of the world and inflect it with levels of significance, leaving a flat, unaffective style of filming. Suddenly, actions take their full duration with no intervention. There are no close-ups or zooms, no camera angles or camera movements, and our position in relation to Jeanne remains at a neutral distance. Similarly, there are no point-of-view shots to show us what she is seeing, or to promote identification or indicate significant narrative information, to heighten emotional intensity or comment on the characters or situation. The deletion of devices and consequent disruption to our expectations should reinforce the ingénue Akerman’s courage. In refusing to ‘add’ and ‘interfere’, Jeanne Dielman could be construed as having an absence of style, thereby offering a direct challenge to the conception of the skilled authorial voice and to bourgeois norms of consumption, both elements that make the job of critical appraisal easier. When trying to organise an argument for Jeanne Dielman’s inclusion in this series we find, then, that the film’s impossibility manifests on several different levels. It demands that we scrutinise acts of canonisation and places the notion of a classic under the

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 11

08/06/2021 13:44

12

BFI FILM CLASSICS

microscope; it refuses to be easily reduced to a plot and insists that we analyse it through its unfolding in the movie theatre. I can’t help imagining Chantal Akerman again as I wrestle with these challenges. Notoriously intense and passionate, in interviews she could come across as difficult, so I picture her here at the start of this book, demanding, refusing and insisting. Turning to my solution to the film’s impossibility, having argued strongly that we must follow Jeanne’s lead through the film, I feel the need to ignore my own instructions. As Janet Bergstrom cannily noted in 1976: ‘the film’s sense depends very much on the strict, chronological progression of its events’; however, this places the writer in a bind, as ‘[t]he temptation is to retell the plot step by step.’10 There are many fine close analyses of the film ‘step by step’11 and one can easily imagine a BFI Film Classic that breaks down its chapters according to Jeanne’s three partial days; however, my approach will be different. My concerns in this book are twofold: to interrogate the collaborative efforts that produced Jeanne Dielman and to analyse the ambivalence that so strongly accompanies the work of the housewife and mother that the film puts on display. The book unfolds in five chapters. In Chapter 2 I consider the intricate creative collaborations that came together in the making of the film. I recalibrate the film’s origin story to include female alliances and explore how the written and the phenomenological underpin Akerman’s emerging practice. In Chapter 3 I focus on the political context for Akerman’s work in the form of the rise of women’s liberation movements in the US and France. By including unmade and seldom seen projects, I reveal how Akerman develops a critique of marriage, motherhood and family that aligns with second wave feminism’s emphasis on personal relations as the site for liberation. Positioning Jeanne Dielman in relation to Akerman’s emerging practice, this political context helps us to understand the contrary and unique nature of the film’s unliberated content. In Chapter 4 I return to the creative collaborations that came together in the making of the film to

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 12

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

13

consider Delphine Seyrig’s input. We find that in the ways in which she held and moved her body and responded to the spaces around her, Seyrig was in training for the role of Jeanne well before she met Akerman. Finally, in Chapter 5, prompted by Akerman’s revisiting of Jeanne Dielman through the installation Woman Sitting After Killing (2001), I intensify my analysis of her slow style by taking a detour via the visual arts in order to think more deeply about the ethical dimensions that underpin both her choice of content and the slow looking that is developed in Jeanne Dielman.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 13

08/06/2021 13:44

14

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Some of the production crew. From left: Delphine Seyrig, Éliane Marcus (make-up), Bénédicte Delesalle (camera operator), Bénie Deswarte (sound recordist), Babette Mangolte (cinematographer), Danae Maroulacou (script girl), Chantal Akerman and Marilyn Watelet (assistant director) (© Virginia Haggard-Leirens. Collections CINEMATEK, Chantal Akerman Foundation)

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 14

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

15

2 The Making of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles The date is some time in February, 1975. Chantal Akerman is kneeling on the floor next to Delphine Seyrig, who sits slightly higher than her, dressed in Jeanne’s dressing gown and gesticulating with her cigarette. Both women are engrossed in reading the script. They discuss a scene at the start of day two before Jeanne has woken Sylvain, when she is moving about the flat. It is the order in which Jeanne does things that Delphine tries to grasp. Delphine pauses the conversation to read the script to herself, at which point Chantal becomes self-conscious and, glancing up at the video camera that is filming them, licks then bites her lower lip, trying to hold onto a nervous smile. This scene opens the on-set documentary Autour de Jeanne Dielman/Around Jeanne Dielman.12 The footage included was shot largely by Seyrig’s partner, Sami Frey, with the intention that Seyrig could look at the material taken during the morning rehearsals in order to help put together her performance. The scenes that we witness in Autour de Jeanne Dielman lift the veil on aspects of the making of the film that have never been spoken of, such as how Seyrig modified her technique in the rehearsals (more of which in Chapter 4). But my interest in this footage lies elsewhere. My fascination is instead with the glimpse we get into the collaborative process, involving how Akerman directs Seyrig and either makes her intentions known or refuses to say too much, but also the interactions of the on-set crew. When I watch this documentary I am hoping it will show me how Akerman and her collaborators managed to bring about the impossible. Despite her nervous looks when the camera is on her, in Autour de Jeanne Dielman we witness Akerman in command of

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 15

08/06/2021 13:44

16

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Autour de Jeanne Dielman (1975): Chantal surpresses a nervous smile

the production, making decisions and coaching Seyrig. Yet what is most striking are the moments when rehearsals pause and discussion ensues. Chantal and Delphine discuss the rhythm with which Jeanne would brush her hair or read the letter from her sister, and the wider crew are involved in discussions of the stages to go through when making Wiener schnitzel and how to dress Jeanne’s bed. Autour de Jeanne Dielman reinforces the fact that there were more players involved in bringing about the impossible than Akerman alone, yet

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 16

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

17

this production process has been recorded in only a fragmented way. Therefore, in Chapter 2 I will offer an account, based on published and unpublished interviews, scripts and documents from the Chantal Akerman Foundation, of how Jeanne Dielman came to life. What Autour de Jeanne Dielman also shows about Akerman’s creative practice is that the written and the phenomenological are paramount in this project. Whereas some of her other films would come together in the editing suite,13 Jeanne Dielman relies heavily on two performances: those of Seyrig performing the script’s directions and of the apartment, carefully lit, framed, dressed and designed. While these two creative poles – the written and the lived – continue as core trajectories across Akerman’s work, in 1975 they introduce us to a kind of creative bricolage at the heart of her practice that also characterises how Jeanne Dielman came to life. In other words, the film relied on the patching together of experiences, coincidences, chance encounters, influences, institutions, traditions and collaborators, all of which coalesced prior to January 1975. One version of the origin story for Jeanne Dielman has been told repeatedly by Akerman. It goes something like this: Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) inspired Akerman to make films and Michael Snow’s Wavelength liberated her gaze. She showed her first film, Saute ma ville/Blow Up My Town (1968), to a man in Flemish television, Eric de Kuyper, who screened it in the series ‘L’Autre cinéma’/‘Other Cinema’, after which it was reviewed on the radio by André Delvaux. Delvaux then told Akerman about the Belgian government’s avance sur recettes/advance on receipts production scheme. Chantal made Je tu il elle/I, You, He, She (1974), wrote a script and applied to the scheme, and funding for Jeanne Dielman was secured. The key protagonists of this story established influences from France, the US and Belgium which would be sustained across Akerman’s career. The story also illustrates the creative bricolage driving Akerman’s development, bringing together agents that ordinarily stood apart or were even in opposition to each other, as she tried out and added elements taken from different cinematic territories and traditions.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 17

08/06/2021 13:44

18

BFI FILM CLASSICS

However, this story deserves to be more detailed and it needs to include the female alliances, forged through a combination of shared film culture and lived sexism, which influenced the politics of Jeanne Dielman and ensured that, for the first time, Akerman was able to communicate her vision. Before she made Saute ma ville Akerman wanted to be a writer and had written novels and scripts since she was in her teens. Both the draft script with which she secured state funding and the actual, significantly changed final script for Jeanne Dielman offer insights into how for her writing and directing relate to each other. An early bio14 lists numerous pieces of writing between 1968 and 1970, some of which have been mentioned in interviews, while others remain more mysterious. The bio begins by listing a feature from 1967, À toi Rome/Rome Is Yours; this is perhaps the longer piece of writing Akerman mentions in interviews, on which Je tu il elle is loosely based.15 Saute ma ville is followed by a number of unmade projects, several of which would have been written when she moved to Paris after May ’68: a short, Une histoire d’amour/A Love Story, a script, L’Enfant mort/The Dead Child and a novel, Les Enfants et le conteur/ The Storyteller’s Children, for which no further details exist. She also worked with her cousin Jonathan on a theatre piece based on the letters of Vincent van Gogh and his brother Théo, Un atelier qui jette ses racines en plein dans la vie même/A Workshop that Throws its Roots Right into Life Itself.16 Finally, the bio lists a novel in progress: Revanche sur un samedi passé au lit/Revenge on a Saturday in Bed.17 In among her writing projects Akerman’s experience of making Saute ma ville was very positive. Collaborating with René Fruchter (camera), whom she met during her three months spent at the Belgian film school, INSAS (founded in 1962),18 and Geneviève Luciani (editing), the film was shot in a night.19 Legend has it that to pay for the 35mm film stock she made a stock book and sold certificates on the Diamond Bourse in Antwerp, making US$200–300.20 A year passed before Akerman was able to complete the sound mixing and

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 18

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

19

Chantal with René Fruchter shooting Saute ma ville, c. 1967/8 (photographer unknown; courtesy Jane Stein)

editing, and a further year before the film would see an audience.21 While her footage languished in the lab in Brussels, in Paris Akerman worked various jobs, took courses at the Université internationale du théâtre and attended lectures and seminars from Lacan, Deleuze and Lévinas, the latter at the École normale israélite orientale (ENIO). Despite the fact that Akerman left Belgium so early in her career, there is no doubt that the country’s film culture nurtured her early efforts in film-making. She has to thank both Belgium’s healthy tradition for short films and BRT (Flemish television), who strongly supported experimental films, for the fact that Saute ma ville was shown on television. The ‘L’Autre cinéma’ programme testified to a commitment to profiling emerging film-makers, as well as those immersed in the tradition of the short. She was probably unaware of the company she was keeping: Warhol, Fassbinder and Syberberg had also had work in the same programme.22 The encouragement Akerman received at this early stage from Dimitri Balachoff, who

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 19

08/06/2021 13:44

20

BFI FILM CLASSICS

owned the laboratory Meuter-Titra in which the footage foundered for two years,23 Eric de Kuyper, who programmed ‘L’Autre cinéma’, and André Delvaux, who reviewed the film on the radio, was no doubt offered in recognition of the difficulties of establishing oneself as a film-maker when one comes from a small country. Film-makers in their own right, de Kuyper and Delvaux were genuine champions for Akerman. She has described de Kuyper as a lifelong friend with whom she visited festivals and, more publicly, later wrote three scripts, Le Domaine/Le Manoir (2000), La Captive/ The Captive (2000) and Demain on déménage/Tomorrow We Move (2004).24 While her acquaintance with Delvaux did not extend to creative collaboration, his status as Belgium’s most respected and successful fiction film-maker who had broken into Europe – later overtaken only by Akerman – makes his endorsement significant. In 1977, when asked about promising figures in Belgian cinema, he listed Raoul Servais and Robbe De Hert and Harry Kümel on the Flemish side, with Jean-Jacques Andrien on the French side, closing with the assessment that Akerman ‘is probably the most interesting young film-maker in Belgium’.25 Making use of the information Delvaux gave her, Akerman wrote a short script about a girl who poisons her parents – discussed in Chapter 3 – which was approved by the Commission but rejected by the Ministère de la Culture française de Belgique.26 Besides broadcasting her film de Kuyper reportedly gave Akerman a little money,27 and it was with this that she made L’Enfant aimé ou je joue à être une femme mariée/The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman, her second film, in early 1971. De Kuyper was closely involved in the shooting, which took place in a villa on the Côte d’Azur.28 Akerman’s dissatisfaction with this film29 appears to stem from a mixture of inexperience – not knowing how to plan a shoot and work with actors and technicians to get what she wanted30 – and a cinephilia that was still relatively immature and would need to develop. The mismatch between her promising writing skills (evident in the film’s dialogue) and her conception for the form and

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 20

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

21

mise en scène illustrates how influential her detour through New York’s non-narrative scene would be on the development of the phenomenological character of her film-making. The alternative films, film-makers and film culture of New York would soon inspire her to work with space and time differently. The last chapter of this stage of her origin story closes with the screening of Saute ma ville at the Oberhausen Film Festival in May 1971 and, at some point, Akerman acting as assistant director on three of director Yvan Lagrange’s features.31 Before we leave the Belgian context for France and New York, it is worth reflecting a little more on how Akerman’s interactions with its film culture shaped Jeanne Dielman. For a start, the state funding system (avance sur recettes) was designed to encourage just the kind of auteur cinema that Akerman would pursue across her career, with funding conceived as a vote of confidence in the director more than the project. Once a script was accepted, a film-maker was allowed to simply make something else.32 Had Akerman stayed in the US she would have been faced with self-funding, as was the fate of her French colleague Babette Mangolte, who made her first feature, What Maisie Knew, in New York in 1973–4. Alternatively, artists were dependent on (meagre amounts of) private patronage or arts funding to support their work. Working from Belgium gave Akerman resources to make feature-length films. Jeanne Dielman came together thanks to state funding from the Ministère de la Culture française de Belgique and the formation of the production company Paradise Films led by Akerman’s friend Marilyn Watelet, which would go on to produce all of her films. On a number of different levels Brussels, or more broadly Belgium, allowed Akerman to be herself and make the films she wanted to make in her own way. To better explain the enabling relationship between Akerman’s will and what Belgium made possible, we can draw an analogy with the scene in Jeanne Dielman in which Jeanne says goodbye to her first visitor, played by Belgian filmmaker Henri Storck, well known for making short documentaries

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 21

08/06/2021 13:44

22

BFI FILM CLASSICS

with a social, moral and lyrical bent. Storck was one of the founders of the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique (since renamed CINEMATEK, now home to the Chantal Akerman Foundation) and a foremost champion of cinema in Belgium.33 No doubt Storck would have been slightly puzzled about Akerman’s intentions when he read her script; nevertheless, he performs his role almost perfectly until he gets to the part where he ‘takes Jeanne’s hand’ and says, ‘à la semaine prochaine’ (‘until next week’). According to the script, as the visitor pays her, Jeanne leaves her hand in his for a few seconds, then withdraws it languidly. However, in the film itself we see Storck squeeze Seyrig’s hand as he gives her the money and smile warmly as he says his line, while Seyrig – almost reluctantly – returns his smile. In the first few minutes of Jeanne Dielman we discover a gesture of conciliation that is analogous to what Belgium provides for Akerman’s creative career. Storck’s is not an overbearing pressure, more a fleeting moment of connection with another human being that says ‘I understand’. Reading Storck’s gesture of benevolence extratextually, we can see it as an encouragement for the rookie

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 22

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

23

Akerman from Belgium’s then most experienced and longest-serving director. Storck’s gentle squeeze of Seyrig’s hand effectively passes the creative baton from one generation to the next. Without wanting to take anything away from those figures in Belgium who helped Akerman on her way, not only does the regular origin story – repeated by Akerman – suggest that she was dependent on powerful male industry figures, it also insists on a past written only through opportunities, which overlooks the importance of relationships. Between these well-known nodal points exist less familiar connections through friendship, cinephilia and shared passions. Alongside Marilyn Watelet, with whom she wrote a draft script for Jeanne Dielman and formed a production company, the most significant connection is with fellow continent-hopping French cinematographer, photographer and film-maker Babette Mangolte, while the most overlooked (and the subject of Chapter 4) is with actress Delphine Seyrig. Beginning with Akerman and Mangolte, together the two would undergo an adventure in perception that would be formative for both their personal and shared practice.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 23

08/06/2021 13:44

24

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Babette Mangolte with Chantal Akerman, shooting Mangolte’s Le Caméra: I/The Camera: Je (1977) (© 1976 Babette Mangolte. All reproduction rights reserved)

Akerman and Mangolte would come to share a way of working and approaching the duration of the shot and the film frame. However, Mangolte’s creative experiences were very different to Akerman’s, largely because to train she needed to enter the film school system. In the early 1960s, after studying mathematics, she applied to IDHEC (Institut des hautes études cinématographiques) to study cinematography but was turned down and offered directing, editing or scriptwriting instead.34 Mangolte ‘was told that women could not be a director of photography in France’35 but, determined to study cinematography, she applied and was accepted into the École nationale de la cinématographie et de la photographie, which was a technical school. Akin to Akerman’s origins, in which Saute ma ville became a passport to entry into film culture, Mangolte’s first short, made in collaboration with two other students, was accepted for the 1965 Thessalonika Film Festival, where it was awarded first prize. This success led to contact with the head of the jury, Marcel Hanoun,

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 24

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

25

who provided her with experience before taking her on as assistant camera person for his film L’Été/Summer (1968). Unlike Akerman, who has admitted to seeing very few films before Pierrot le fou, Mangolte’s education in film culture was prolific, consisting of almost daily screenings at the Cinémathèque française which included involvement in Noël Burch’s screenings of experimental films. Following May ’68, and as Akerman was arriving in Paris, Mangolte was filming L’Été for Hanoun. While Akerman was writing novels and scripts, Mangolte had encountered Annette Michelson, who was a friend of Noël Burch and admirer of Hanoun’s second film, Le Printemps/Spring (1971). Discussing experimental film together and bonding over a shared interest in the interaction between photography and film, Michelson urged Mangolte to come to New York to experience its experimental film culture and see Wavelength (which had been shown at Knokke-le-Zoute Film Festival in 1970, but which was not distributed in France). In October 1970 Mangolte left Paris for New York; months later Akerman made her second film on the Côte d’Azur, before screening Saute ma ville at the Oberhausen Film Festival. Mangolte’s baptism into the New York scene was swift and decisive. Michelson took Mangolte to Anthology Film Archives, where she met Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage. Working in a darkroom and photographing theatre by Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson among others, Mangolte was, as she puts it, ‘experimenting and trying everything’.36 Akerman arrived in New York in October 1971, travelling with her friend Samy Szlingerbaum.37 She had been given Mangolte’s contact details by Hanoun, whom she had met a few months before at the Jerusalem Film Festival.38 Mangolte, as if passing on the tutelage she had received from Michelson, now took Akerman along to Anthology Film Archives. At Anthology Akerman showed Jonas Mekas Saute ma ville, which he reportedly loved, and L’Enfant aimé, which he did not. Mekas differed from Akerman’s first critics, de Kuyper and Delvaux.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 25

08/06/2021 13:44

26

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Living and creating via an ethos of autodidactic avant-gardism, he had little tolerance for scripted, state-funded film-making, a fact which explains his initial hostile reaction to Jeanne Dielman several years later.39 The possibility also remains that Mekas was put off by the feminist consciousness of both her second film and Jeanne Dielman. It was with Mangolte that Akerman watched Snow’s La Région centrale, sitting in the theatre on and off across a 24-hour period. About her arrival in New York Akerman has said: ‘if I didn’t know Babette, how would I have known that I should go to Anthology Film Archives or to look at [plays by] Richard Foreman? I had never heard those names.’40 The two also bonded over the difficulties of being a woman ‘in charge’, and Chantal shared frustrations she had accrued working on her second film, in which she felt unable to realise her vision with the male crew she had assembled.41 Meeting Babette meant that the training and rehearsal for what would become Jeanne Dielman had begun; more specifically, through this union Akerman secured a unique collaborator with a co-experience of the New York avant-garde and European narrative film who saw the importance of and would carefully light and frame the ‘protagonist’ elements of space, time and mise en scène in Jeanne Dielman. Very quickly the friendship between Mangolte and Akerman turned into a working relationship. With La Chambre (1972) and Hotel Monterey (1973) they put into practice the liberation of time and space they had engaged with so strongly in Michael Snow’s films. Because there was no funding available, the two films came together through a mix of luck and Akerman’s entrepreneurial spirit, using celluloid that Akerman had ‘found’, money she had stolen as a cashier at the 55th Street Playhouse42 and the camera that Mangolte was using to film Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers in April 1972. In La Chambre, which consists of three 360-degree pans around a room in which Akerman lies in bed, the arts culture of New York, with its accent on improvisation, infuses the aesthetic. In Hotel Monterey, a study of the hotel from dawn to dusk and foyer to rooftop, the longer

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 26

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

27

length allows both Akerman’s phenomenological and rhythmic understanding of space and time and Mangolte’s acute technical skills with lighting and framing to be recognised. In the three years that passed between their co-created New York films and Jeanne Dielman, Akerman and Mangolte would work together twice more, while at the same time pursuing their own feature-length projects. This second set of co-creative experiences may have produced no finished films, but they did help both women to understand the way of working that would be most productive for them in the future. The first experience concerns the project known as Hanging Out Yonkers (1973, unfinished), which came together as a commission to make a documentary about a rehabilitation centre for teenagers. The second project occurred when both Akerman and Mangolte returned to Paris for a short period in 1973, Mangolte to shoot Hanoun’s L’Automne/Autumn (1972) and Akerman to edit the two New York films with Geneviève Luciani, who had also edited her first two films. Their paths crossed briefly in the summer and Akerman involved Mangolte on a woman-only film project led by Antoinette Fouque based on Freud’s ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’ (1920) (Mangolte as camerawoman and Akerman as advisor for direction).43 The unscripted Hanging Out Yonkers appears to have prepared the way for the observational documentary shooting that Mangolte would accomplish in News from Home (1976). For Akerman it provided a chance to explore being a director in an unpressured and slow way. She and Mangolte would travel to Yonkers to talk with and film the teenagers. They were collecting footage with no preconceptions, just letting their subjects dictate what was filmed. By contrast, the woman-only project involving Antoinette Fouque had none of Yonkers’ flexibility and careful looking. Both left the project before the end, unimpressed in particular by the separatist attitude of the production, which, akin with the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) at the time, was strongly against any type of involvement with men. Mangolte has suggested that this

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 27

08/06/2021 13:44

28

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Footage from Hanging Out Yonkers (1973) (Collections CINEMATEK, Chantal Akerman Foundation)

Filming of Hanging Out Yonkers. From left: Epp Kotkas (programme participant), Babette Mangolte, Chantal Akerman, Myra Farhy (© Jane Stein)

experience was formative for Akerman and herself, helping them to work out how their own beliefs might translate into ways of working collaboratively rather than collectively.44 Although they parted ways – Mangolte to return to New York to work on What Maisie Knew, and Akerman to make Le 15/8 (1975) with Samy Szlingerbaum – perhaps the experience also spurred them on to work together again in the way they had achieved in their three New York projects. It should be evident from this account that it is in the viewing of their work that Akerman and Mangolte have gained their breaks: from Delvaux reviewing Saute ma vie and Hanoun judging Mangolte’s first short, to Michelson seeing Le Printemps. It is no

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 28

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

29

surprise, then, that a further crucial piece of the puzzle fell into place at a screening at the 1973 Nancy Film Festival. It was at Nancy that Akerman crossed paths with Delphine Seyrig. Seyrig entered the frame at a time when her image as the beautiful, graceful French actress of theatre and cinema was being shattered by her involvement in the women’s movement and her new label as an outspoken feminist (to be discussed in Chapter 4). At Nancy, Seyrig was accompanying Jane Fonda, with whom she had recently filmed a version of A Doll’s House (Joseph Losey, 1973), who was showing slides taken in Vietnam. Akerman recalls hearing her name being called over the tannoy and arriving to see Seyrig waiting for her. Seyrig asked Akerman if she would consider swapping her 8 p.m. screening time for a 10 p.m. slot. Rather than being overawed by this grand actress of French cinema, Akerman agreed on condition that Seyrig would stay for her films. Seyrig did, and a lifelong friendship was initiated almost immediately, with the agreement that Seyrig would consider acting in a future film by Akerman.45 As well as bringing her feminist consciousness to the role of Jeanne, it seems important that, like Akerman and Mangolte, Seyrig also had an understanding of the creative crossroads of EuroAmerican culture. From the age of 10 she had lived in New York with her family from 1942 to 1946, and then moved there with her husband, American painter Jack Youngerman, and infant son from 1956 to 1960, occasionally acting in the theatre and making Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank) in 1959. Along with this cross-cultural background, Seyrig joined the production of Jeanne Dielman at a turning point in her own career (discussed further in Chapter 4), after which she would largely only work with women directors: Marguerite Duras, Patricia Moraz, Márta Mészáros, Ulrike Ottinger, Pomme Meffre, Brigitte Roüan and Claudine Delvaux. With the promise of Seyrig as an actor in a future project, Akerman retreated back to scriptwriting, using part of a novel she had written at 17 as the basis for self-funded Je tu il elle, which was completed so that she could secure funding from the Ministry,

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 29

08/06/2021 13:44

30

BFI FILM CLASSICS

and was largely screened after Jeanne Dielman. As well as proof that she could make a feature-length film, Akerman presented a script written with Marilyn Watelet46 with the title Elle vogue vers l’Amérique/She Sails Towards America and the proposition that the production would feature an all-female crew because ‘at that point everybody was talking about women … and it was the right time’.47 It took nearly a year for the funding to come through, at which point Akerman had misgivings about the script and had been unable to secure her first choice, Bulle Ogier, for the role of the second female lead. As legend has it, the premise for the second script, which became Jeanne Dielman, came to her in a flash, and she wrote it in a matter of weeks between November and December 1974.48 Once confirmation of funding was received, pre-production was established at pace, the main task being to find the apartment and prepare it for shooting. Several of those with whom Akerman had worked on Je tu il elle joined her again, while others were friends of friends.49 In the last week of January Mangolte flew in from New York to prepare, having just completed the grading on What Maisie

Delphine Seyrig pauses momentarily during the shoot (© 1975 Babette Mangolte. All reproduction rights reserved)

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 30

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

31

Knew.50 Seyrig arrived fresh from working on two films with women directors, India Song with Marguerite Duras (filmed in July 1974) and Aloïse with Liliane de Kermadec (filmed late 1974).51 The shoot for Jeanne Dielman, involving a crew of seventeen, began on 27 January and lasted through February and March.52 As this account of the elements that led to the production of Jeanne Dielman illustrates, Akerman’s journey involved institutions such as the Ministère de la Culture française de Belgique, individuals such as her friend Marilyn Watelet, who would later turn producer, and influences such as Babette Mangolte, with whom she would undergo an adventure in perception. What is equally evident is the way in which Akerman’s Euro-American wanderings – from Belgium to Paris to New York to Paris and then to Brussels – proved instructive, as she found her gaze liberated by New York avant-garde films yet returned to the authorial script-based European model. We can think of this approach as a practice of creative bricolage, since it takes a winding route towards production, necessitated perhaps by Akerman’s desire to ‘be “marginal” and make “marginal films”’, as de Kuyper has put it.53 Turning to the shooting of the film, the importance of the written and the phenomenological can be addressed in more detail. As we see in Autour de Jeanne Dielman, rehearsals would occur in the morning, then shooting would run from midday until the evening; we can also see how definitive the script was on the shoot. In the copy that exists at the Chantal Akerman Foundation, it is largely Jeanne’s movements and gestures that are described, along with details that flesh out the apartment and its contents. Comparing the script with the video documentation of the rehearsal period and the final film we find that some elements assume less significance, while others appear to have been developed with Seyrig. By way of example, bedtime preparations on day one are described as follows: She puts on a long-sleeve nightdress with a Peter Pan collar; she does the buttons all the way up to the neck and then puts on a light blue combed

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 31

08/06/2021 13:44

32

BFI FILM CLASSICS

wool bathrobe, the buttons of which she also closes up to the neck, and then fastens the belt. She sits at her dressing table, takes off her wedding and engagement rings.

In the finished film, when we cut to Jeanne in the bedroom she has already changed into her nightdress but does not yet have on her robe. The buttons of her nightdress are not done up and we don’t see her take off her rings. She puts them next to a photo in which we can see a much younger Jeanne next to a similarly young man standing on some steps. She wears a grey suit and has a bouquet of white flowers in her arms, he is wearing a raincoat and belt. Neither of them smiles. The photo is black and white and measures approximately 13cm by 18cm, and stands in a cardboard frame.

We can indeed see the photo as described. On the dressing table there are also the kind of objects we would see in Hollywood films from the 1950s, a comb, a large silver hair brush, bottles. Jeanne brushes her hair energetically.

There are indeed a selection of objects as described. This kind of acute detail as to the design, props and choreography lends the script a novel-like quality, reinforcing Akerman’s leanings as a writer.54 The largest deviation from the script, though, reminds us of Akerman’s equal phenomenological obsession – perhaps first expressed in Hotel Monterey – with how the lived body occupies and moves through space. In this case, when going from script to shoot, a brief moment in which Jeanne brushes her hair becomes prolonged in lieu of the actions of putting on the bathrobe and taking off the rings. Akerman seems to be emphasising embodied actions, over actions that would have been read semiotically, as signifiers of her marriage. Whereas we can imagine how the actions involving the bathrobe and the rings would have been brief and measured, the hair brushing becomes a

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 32

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

33

Autour de Jeanne Dielman (1975): Chantal struggles to explain to Delphine the speed and rhythm of the hair brushing scene

In the finished film Delphine has accomplished Akerman’s demands

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 33

08/06/2021 13:44

34

BFI FILM CLASSICS

challenge for Seyrig to perform. We see a rehearsal of this scene in Autour de Jeanne Dielman. Delphine goes first, pulling the brush efficiently through her thick hair, which is coiffured less neatly than in the finished film. She asks Chantal to explain exactly what she wants. We see Chantal look blankly at her; ‘just try’, Delphine adds, handing the brush over to Chantal, who, obediently, pulls it through her own hair in a faster, more uneven way. ‘So you want her to be more dreamy?’ Delphine asks. Chantal replies that, no, she does not want psychology. In the finished film Seyrig does appear to accomplish Akerman’s required rhythm without psychology, and we are aware that the act of brushing tells us something about Jeanne, while at the same time revealing very little. Since the chronology of Jeanne’s days, step by step, is so crucial for the meaning of the film, it is remarkable to remind ourselves that the order of shooting was not chronological; instead, it was organised according to the camera angles and lighting set-ups.55 So, for example, all the wide-angle scenes shooting through the kitchen doorway would be shot in one go, albeit adjusting the lighting according to the time of day, followed by all the hallway scenes, all the bedroom scenes, with Seyrig making costume changes throughout. The highly skilful continuity of costume, make-up, mise en scène, sound and performance is evident once one realises the impact of this choice. With the emphasis of the script being on action and description, inevitably Akerman developed a shooting script or ‘découpage’. Based on the fragment that is available at the Chantal Akerman Foundation, it would seem that, again, there was no room for improvisation on the set, yet some changes did occur between preparation and production. The types of lighting, whether natural or artificial, are indicated in the shooting script, as well as sound effects, such as the doorbell or the door closing. Of particular note is the fact that several panning shots are written into the shooting script. For example, when the visitor from day one hands Jeanne his coat she hangs it in the cloakroom, then turns to go towards the bedroom, at which point

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 34

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

35

‘we follow her with a panning shot from right to left and the man too enters the shot and follows her down the corridor’. Then when the pair exit from the bedroom ‘we follow her with a panning shot from left to right as she goes to the cloakroom’. Other panning shots are mentioned, suggesting that they would be used across the duration of the film. Seeking to understand why the scripted camera movement was elided in the course of the shoot, we can perhaps point to how the actual apartment would play a decisive role in Akerman’s conceptualisation of Jeanne’s use of her time and space. From the directions in the shooting script we can see how the panning shots would have offered a way of emphasising the vanishing line that the entry into the bedroom represents. Jeanne’s secret disappears into the bedroom with her, not to be revealed until day three. However, in light of the expressive stillness of the finished film, it is hard to imagine how panning – with its very different kind of camera consciousness – would have worked. A more pragmatic reason for the deletion of any camera movement could have been due to the tightness of space in the apartment. The shooting script indicates that there is an actual cloakroom with a door in Jeanne’s hallway, whereas in the finished film this consists of an alcove with a curtain, thereby allowing for no space to employ a panning movement. While there is no reference to these changes in Autour du Jeanne Dielman, we do see Chantal in the kitchen discussing with Babette how to film Jeanne’s food preparation from the angle of the table given that the camera can barely fit behind it and the back wall. The limited size of the kitchen had an impact; as a consequence of the wide angle required, Seyrig feared that her face would look distorted and this led to a one-week reshoot in a studio of the kitchen scenes, though none of this footage made it into the final film. The process of going from script to set has been largely hidden from view in accounts of Jeanne Dielman; by contrast Akerman’s assemblage of an all-women crew, which was presented as part of

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 35

08/06/2021 13:44

36

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Autour de Jeanne Dielman (1975): shooting on set in the cramped corridor outside the kitchen …

… versus in the open studio

the package of the film when applying for funding, has been well documented. The ideal of an all-women creative space responds to an idealised notion of ‘women’s cinema’ as a cinema made wholly by and for women and in which women would work together harmoniously and productively. Significantly, Jeanne Dielman itself was a retort to essentialist notions that to make women visible, or to address sexism in the film industry, one simply had to place more women in the frame or in the crew. The film revealed that what was

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 36

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

37

required instead was, as B. Ruby Rich puts it, the invention of a new language.56 Yet, returning to the recruitment of ‘all women’, we should address the allegations that the dynamics with some members of the crew were far from ideal. The first release of Autour de Jeanne Dielman on the DVD by Cinéart upholds this version of the shoot by including a heated argument between Delphine and sound recordist Bénie Deswarte and camera operator Bénédicte Delesalle.57 In the argument Delphine chastises them for the casual way in which they speak to the director (Akerman). I can’t help thinking that this overemphasis on discord becomes just another way to undermine female creatives. Just as the origin story for Jeanne Dielman overemphasises institutions over relationships, so the most repeated version of the film’s shoot, picked up in interviews and glimpsed in Autour de Jeanne Dielman, highlights those who were not supporting Akerman’s vision over those who were. If we draw instead on throwaway remarks in this discourse, then we find that a rich and impactful picture of collaboration emerges. For example, Akerman has revealed that she and Delphine would often have breakfast together in the same café. The song that plays on the radio on the second day, ‘Bonsoir Madame la Lune’, was chosen because it was always playing in that café.58 A further curious example of the particular kind of femalecentred collaboration of Jeanne Dielman involves the scene in which Jeanne makes Wiener schnitzel. In the film Jeanne’s actions are efficient and assured, but in the rehearsal scenes we witness the patchwork of lived experiences of cooking that have come together to create that scene. First, we see Mangolte consulting Akerman about the camera angle, then Seyrig begins practising. As she goes through the various stages, dipping the veal in flour, egg and breadcrumbs, so Seyrig gives a running commentary on what she is doing (in stark contrast to Jeanne’s habitual silence) as a way to seek Akerman’s corroboration. While Seyrig largely talks in terms of what ‘she’, meaning Jeanne, would do, other expert housewives virtually and literally also

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 37

08/06/2021 13:44

38

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Babette Mangolte

‘My mother said you then put them in the fridge wrapped in aluminium foil’

Éliane, Seyrig’s make-up lady

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 38

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

39

enter the frame. First there is Akerman’s mother: ‘My mother said you then put them in the fridge wrapped in aluminium foil’; then Éliane Marcus, Seyrig’s make-up lady: ‘but Éliane’, who we learn is a very good cook, ‘says that’s not possible’. Éliane then appears at the end of the scene, critiquing the fact that they are rehearsing on an uncovered (therefore unhygienic) table. This scene of the rehearsal involves moments of both identification (from those who have made Wiener schnitzel) and disidentification (from those who have not). At the same time, what is most striking is how all involved – Mangolte, Seyrig, Marcus, Akerman and her mother – are so concerned that we perceive Jeanne correctly, with understanding and without judgment. No doubt this collaboration is exactly the kind that Akerman and Mangolte were hoping for when they first began working together. Akerman is notorious for referring to how many of her realitybased films came together in the editing suite, where she constructed them according to her feelings. Yet the editing process for Jeanne Dielman would have been relatively straightforward, since there were at most two takes for each shot, leaving very few decisions to be made at the editing stage. Based on accounts of the length of the shoot and then the one week that followed for reshooting in the studio, during which time there were return visits to the apartment to pick up extra soundtrack, it would appear that editing took place towards the end of April. It seems incredible to think that shooting began on 27 January and Jeanne Dielman was ready for its first public screening in May. On 22 May the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs/Directors’ Fortnight section. Akerman and Seyrig sat together at the back of the theatre, while Mangolte would not get to see the film until the end of 1976. Unlike future screenings which occurred in the wake of the film’s critical success, this debut event must have been hard for Akerman to endure. As well as the click-clacking of seats as people left the theatre, Akerman reportedly had to contend with the reaction of Marguerite Duras (whose India Song, also starring Seyrig, was in the festival),

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 39

08/06/2021 13:44

40

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Chantal Akerman at the Q&A following the screening of Jeanne Dielman at MoMA, November 1983, curated by Larry Cardish (© 1983 Babette Mangolte. All reproduction rights reserved)

who reportedly called Jeanne a ‘madwoman’.59 However, the day following the screening Akerman received around fifty requests to show Jeanne Dielman at other international festivals, including the Berlinale, Locarno, Edinburgh and Venice, and she would tour the world with the film for several years after. The next day, then, she has said, ‘I was a cinéaste, and not just any film-maker; at 25 suddenly everyone was telling me I was a grand cinéaste.’60

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 40

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

41

3 Choosing NO Liberation: The Housewife, Feminism and the Women’s Movement Film Classics come in many shapes and sizes: from ‘the first …’ and ‘the best …’ to the most artful, the most affecting, the most controversial and the most unforgettable. Jostling for consideration from within this growing list, Jeanne Dielman can be made to fit all of these criteria, yet if I had to pick a particular adjective it would be one bordering on a noun: contrary. Jeanne Dielman is the most ‘contrary’ of feminist classics. This is because it puts on display the ambivalence that so strongly accompanies the work of the housewife and mother. Those who saw the film on its first release agreed that Jeanne Dielman shows actions hardly ever seen before in the cinema, and what is more it shows them in excruciating detail. The fact that these actions and details graphically described the habitually overlooked routine of many women in the domestic space made the film an ur-text for both second wave feminism and feminist film theory in the mid- to late 1970s. This dual appeal – to battles in the streets and on screen – derives from the potency of the figure of the housewife at the time. She was both fought for and fought against, rejected as signifying what was wrong with women’s lives and foregrounded as illustrating the effect of the patriarchal system. In this chapter I argue that Akerman’s decision to stay with Jeanne in the kitchen at a time when many liberation movements were burning their dishcloths61 was significant. Jeanne Dielman accomplishes something that very few other films have managed: it makes the housewife and mother seen. I have never analysed why I feel so overprotective about Jeanne when screening the film to my students. Perhaps it has something to do with the guilt of feminist disidentification that the figure of the woman at home, as one crystallisation of ideals of femininity, evokes. I am

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 41

08/06/2021 13:44

42

BFI FILM CLASSICS

not alone in this contradictory feeling; as Charlotte Brunsdon puts it in her book on the feminist, the housewife and the soap opera, which includes an image from Jeanne Dielman on the cover, the act of drawing our attention to the housewife, as representative of the ordinary woman, was central to the emergence of a whole generation of feminist intellectuals in media studies. Yet implicit in this act, indeed essential to it, was the intellectual’s disidentification with that woman.62 In arguing for Jeanne Dielman’s classic status, it is necessary to face up to what the figure of the woman at home evokes: a fundamental ambivalence which sees her by turns embraced for her self-sacrifice and rejected for her passivity. The contradiction of feeling overprotective of Jeanne while confessing to a distance from her resounds across the production and reception of the film. First, we have Chantal herself confessing numerous times to placing on screen her memories of being a young girl in the company of her aunts and her mother,63 drawing from her reservoir of memories of her aunts cooking and often seen from behind bending over.64 Akerman has been forthright about wanting to place authentic actions and gestures centre stage in her drama, and their evidence is everywhere: the film literally borrows the address of one of her aunts for its title;65 in Autour de Jeanne Dielman Delphine refers to how Chantal’s aunt would have made Wiener schnitzel when they are rehearsing this scene; and Delphine reveals that Chantal’s aunts are a reference point for how Jeanne puts her house together, such as the particular way in which one of her aunts folded her quilt on her bed. Hence, Jeanne Dielman, inspired by what Akerman observed while a child in the company of her female relatives, carefully reconstructs those domestic spaces and the gestures and actions going on within them. Despite her loving recreation of aspects of her aunts’ domestic lives, we should not forget that their stay-at-home domesticity was firmly rejected by Akerman.66 The endless waiting that we experience in Jeanne Dielman is converted to wandering in much of Akerman’s other work, as Jeanne Dielman’s image of domestic confinement is

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 42

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

43

Chantal Akerman on the set of Jeanne Dielman, January/February 1975 (Collections CINEMATEK, Chantal Akerman Foundation)

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 43

08/06/2021 13:44

44

BFI FILM CLASSICS

rejected in films which explore the city spaces of New York, Brussels and Eastern Europe. News from Home, Toute une nuit/All Night Long (1982) and D’Est/From the East (1993) exchange the security and familiarity of Jeanne’s daily routine for the rootless sense of alienation and non-belonging of a stranger in a strange city. Looking back on Akerman’s entire oeuvre, as we are able to do since her death in 2015, the association of the domestic with her mother is galvanised, in particular, in her final film, No Home Movie (2015). The second instance of passionate defence accompanied by disidentification can be attributed to Seyrig. Unlike Akerman, she did have the experience of being ‘at home’ with a young infant – her son, Duncan, when she lived with Youngerman in New York in the 1950s – and has revealed of Jeanne Dielman, ‘In this role I experienced the things I’ve been trying to get away from all my life.’67 In both a television interview in 1976 and in Autour de Jeanne Dielman, she illustrates her escape by confessing to never having made coffee from scratch. The lengthy scene on day two in which Jeanne grinds the beans, boils the water and then filters the coffee grounds carefully, so as to refresh her spoilt morning cup, would have required much instruction and rehearsal for Seyrig. As we see in Autour de Jeanne Dielman, the same applies to the scenes in which Seyrig has to make meat loaf and Wiener schnitzel. While Akerman’s attachment to Jeanne’s existence can be explained as intimate and personal, Seyrig’s motivation for defending the creation of Jeanne would have been more extrinsic, driven as much by her recent involvement in the feminist movement and subsequent search for non-sexist female roles. Hence, like Akerman, Seyrig has not lived the life that Jeanne leads, and she is never likely to do so, yet her strident feminist politics mean that she also feels an empathy for Jeanne and the urgency for the protagonist’s depiction on screen. The third instance of affirmation68 of the housewife, shadowed by distance, returns us to Brunsdon’s premise: that feminist media scholars felt they were fighting for the figure of the housewife, seen as emblematic of the ‘ordinary woman’, when they defended soap opera

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 44

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

45

and women’s genres as worthy of academic study. For my part, I have seen how Jeanne Dielman ‘works’ on students who are newly encountering feminist film theory and practice. They feel freed, maybe for the first time, from a voyeuristic viewing position, and can come to understand Jeanne on her terms thanks to the care taken in such scenes as the hair brushing and making of Wiener schnitzel discussed in Chapter 2. Perhaps they remember being around their own parents; whether or not this is the case, they feel that they are different from Jeanne. As part of a so-called postfeminist generation, they see her life as archaic and representative of a pre-feminist sensibility, before staying at home could become a lifestyle choice rather than an assigned role and therefore no choice at all. The ambivalent positions held by Akerman, Seyrig and feminist media scholars towards the figure of the housewife are reproduced across the period of second wave feminism in the 1970s. Second wave feminism opened the field of political action to include personal relations, making it necessary to look at the domestic context as a site of complex social and cultural negotiation. In France the women who became active after May ’68 wanted to ‘transform the private as well as public world’;69 this included opening up housework to public scrutiny. The Wages for Housework demonstrations in the UK, Italy, Canada and the US (all on 3 May) need to be seen in the context of feminism’s sustained battle for equal rights for women. Earlier feminist examples include the suffragettes’ campaign for women’s right to vote, and the international struggle for legal abortions, contraception and childcare. Housework differs from these other struggles, since it inserts many women’s daily occupation, formerly seen as a woman’s ‘natural’ occupation, into the category of paid work. In demanding wages for housework, women were, in effect, demanding recognition of their status as workers, and of the importance of their ‘women’s’ work. Before we can explore this context further, though, it is worth commenting on Akerman’s perspective on feminism.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 45

08/06/2021 13:44

46

BFI FILM CLASSICS

A fundamental ambivalence towards identifying with the word feminism characterises Akerman’s practice after Jeanne Dielman, such that those familiar with Akerman’s interview persona may feel the need to read Jeanne Dielman in light of her subsequent disavowals. However, these disavowals can be explained by the way in which Jeanne Dielman typecast Akerman as a particular kind of austere, feminist – read marginal – film-maker, creating difficulties for her when she wanted to finance other types of films: documentaries, musicals, Jewish epic dramas, romances.70 Arguably, Akerman was entirely comfortable engaging with the zeitgeist for women’s content and involvement in films in the early 1970s. In addition, as we will see, her concerns strongly aligned with many currents of women’s liberation at the time. Therefore, by holding onto Akerman’s feminist credentials as we approach Jeanne Dielman, the different levels of her understanding, knowledge and intervention can be appreciated. In interviews promoting Jeanne Dielman Akerman was often asked whether she considered herself a feminist; at the time, her short answer was ‘yes’,71 but the question belies the actual complexities of the terms feminist and feminism. With what kind of feminism did she identify? There were plenty on offer, especially as she traversed the continents of America and Europe in the 1970s. During her stay in New York from 1971 to 1973, one wonders whether she came across NOW (National Organisation of Women), founded by the liberal feminist Betty Friedan, which campaigned on broad equality issues rather than more significant changes such as alternatives to traditional forms of gender relations. Or whether she was aware of radical feminist Kate Millet’s book Sexual Politics, which inspired second wave feminism’s claims that the personal is political and argued that women’s oppression can be blamed as much on ideological indoctrination as economic inequality. As we will see, Akerman’s early films pull apart marriage, motherhood and the family in ways that connect with some of these currents of feminism.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 46

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

47

In France and Belgium feminism took similar and different forms to its expression in the US. Had she been in Brussels (rather than New York) in 1972, Akerman could have joined the first demonstration by Belgian women,72 one current of which led to the formation of the pluralist journal Les Cahiers du GRIF.73 Given that the journal’s mission aimed to make women seen and heard, it is of no surprise that it would declare (in a review of Les Rendezvous d’Anna/The Meetings of Anna, 1979) that Akerman ‘makes films that concern us not only by their themes but above all by their composition and structure’.74 While there is no record of whether Akerman was cognisant of these feminist currents in the US or Belgium, we do know that she encountered the rise and impact of the MLF in Paris when she left New York in 1973 to edit Hotel Monterey and La Chambre. The MLF was heterogenous rather than homogenous and its various agendas shifted over time. It was notoriously riven with factionalism, as Lisa Greenwald describes: Members of groups such as Psychanalyse et Politique (Psychoanalysis and Politics, or Psych-et-Po), the Mouvement démocratique féminin (MDF; Women’s Democratic Movement), and the Féminin-masculin-avenir (FMA; Feminine-Masculine-Future), which would later become Feminismemarxisme-action, addressed different aspects of women’s experience and promoted different theories on women’s oppression.75

Akerman has revealed that she stayed on in Paris largely because of her interest in the emerging women’s movement and that she and producer Marilyn Watelet wanted to write a script that spoke to the moment.76 As discussed in Chapter 2, along with Babette Mangolte, Akerman encountered the politics of the Psych et Po group when she became involved in a film project led by Antoinette Fouque. Moving on from the question of whether or not Akerman was influenced by American or Francophone feminism, of more significance is the fact that in the early 1970s we find that the figure

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 47

08/06/2021 13:44

48

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Demonstration against the UN’s International Women’s Year and François Giroud, France’s Secretary of State for the Condition of Women (1974–6), 1975 (© Catherine Deudon/Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand/Roger-Viollet)

of the housewife becomes emblematic of the struggle to improve women’s situation across the world. In France, references to the domestic space feature in slogans for what women’s liberation might actually mean in reality. For example, in 1972 a feminist march on Mother’s Day down the Champs-Élysées saw protesters dressed as girls chanting ‘Women in the street, not in the kitchen!’77 Equally, an important magazine, more DIY than Les Cahiers du GRIF, within which women would write about their oppression, took the title of Le Torchon brûle, which translates as ‘the burning dishcloth’, immediately suggesting how the domestic sphere and the work therein would be central to its struggle. On the one hand, the housewife and her struggle in the domestic space were central to the women’s movement, yet on the other hand, liberation could only come by leaving this figure behind, which typically meant overlooking her. In other words, attempts to understand or spend

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 48

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

49

time with the unliberated housewife are rare. Paradoxically, without her there would be less of a fight, yet because she is unable to leave the kitchen for the streets, the housewife, and particularly the mother, could be treated as a traitor by some of her contemporaries. Once we appreciate the capacity for disidentification that the housewife inspires, and Akerman’s own ambivalence, Jeanne Dielman can be understood as extraordinary because it stays with Jeanne in the kitchen rather than following the zeitgeist and freeing her from that space.78 The flash decision on Akerman’s part has two consequences, political and personal. First, staying in the kitchen ensures that the film offers an analysis of oppression as deriving from ‘the patriarchal system in its entirety’79 – that is, on economic, ideological and symbolic levels – which connects it strongly with currents in French feminism. Second, staying in the kitchen ensures that Jeanne Dielman diverts from the path that Akerman appeared to have been taking in a series of earlier unmade and unseen projects, including the first draft of the script, effectively becoming a ‘contrary’ film for Akerman also. Jeanne Dielman’s emphasis on the oppressiveness of the patriarchal system coincides with one faction of the MLF, that is the FMA (Féminin-masculin-avenir) group’s mix of revolutionary theory and activist engagement, which they came to in part inspired by American feminists such as Betty Friedan and Kate Millet. The FMA approved of Friedan’s analysis of the cultural and psychological aspects of women’s oppression in The Feminine Mystique and of Millet’s claims that the personal is political. As we will see, this group’s campaigning on misogyny, monogamy and sexual pleasure chimes with concerns revealed in Akerman’s projects prior to Jeanne Dielman. Akerman’s critique of the patriarchal system, specifically in the form of the family and its gender hierarchies, begins with Saute ma ville. In this film it is implicitly not only her town that Akerman blows up, but also the role of the woman in the domestic space. With her sloppy cooking, messy cleaning and failed polishing, Akerman

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 49

08/06/2021 13:44

50

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Chantal the unruly housewife in Saute ma ville (1968)

implies that the vision of the perfect housewife is flawed and certainly not for her. This formative dissection of the family continues, buried in her never or rarely seen projects. In the early unmade script for a short film (in 1970) we glimpse the roots of the rather macabre ending of Jeanne Dielman. A young girl hears her parents making love one afternoon in the room next to hers. The mother asks the girl to go and squeeze some oranges and bring her parents some juice. The girl does so, but also adds poison, thus killing her parents.80 The action in this script appears to be a kind of reiteration of Saute ma ville, with the family destroyed, although in this case the cause is perhaps more symbolic, suggesting that sexual as well as domestic relations enter into Akerman’s critique of the family.81 We can identify a developing engagement on Akerman’s part with the problems and inequities of the institution of marriage when she switches her focus from the daughter figure to a young mother in her second short, L’Enfant aimé, which has rarely been seen due to Akerman’s dissatisfaction with it.82 The film takes place in and around the mother’s apartment and we see her caring for her young daughter, Daphna, and performing daily tasks that echo those of Jeanne Dielman. In this 35-minute film the young mother appears to be a transitional figure in-between Akerman’s persona in Saute ma ville and the character of Jeanne. She is close to Akerman in age and

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 50

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

51

Akerman and actor Claire Wauthion on the set of L’Enfant aimé ou je joue à être une femme mariée (1971) (Collections CINEMATEK, Chantal Akerman Foundation)

L’Enfant aimé ou je joue à être une femme mariée (Collections CINEMATEK, Chantal Akerman Foundation)

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 51

08/06/2021 13:44

52

BFI FILM CLASSICS

played by her friend Claire Wauthion, whom Akerman would cast as her lover in Je tu il elle three years later. Established feminist critiques of the mother as alienated, bored and unfulfilled are evoked through the mother’s monologue, yet there are also shifts in mood across the film which allow more room for self-expression. Having lost her sense of individuality and confined to the home space through her role as carer, the mother reflects: ‘I was waiting at home all day, waiting for him to come back …’. On the monotony of being at home: ‘Now sometimes I get depressed, I can’t bear even the ticking sound of a clock, a church bell … I feel my time is completely useless’; and on being kept financially: ‘I can do whatever I want, arrange the house exactly as I wish, buy anything I want.’83 The wife’s opening few monologues in L’Enfant aimé could easily have been extracted from Betty Friedan’s study of 1950s housewives in the US, The Feminine Mystique.84 Famously, Friedan found that far from living the American consumerist dream, stayat-home mothers across the country were bored, frustrated and sometimes even depressed. Closer to Akerman’s home, the wife’s monologue would not be out of place in Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Chronicles of everyday sexism’, a special section in her journal Les Temps modernes, or even Le Torchon brûle; that is to say, it captures the tone of many of the complaining voices at the time. For de Beauvoir the figure of the housewife represented all that needed to change in women’s lives. In The Second Sex she notes, ‘Woman is doomed to the continuation of the species and the care of the home – that is to say, immanence.’85 Friedan, inspired by de Beauvoir, saw an escape from immanence in ensuring women have choices about careers or motherhood, but she did not attend to the sexual division of labour in the home. Returning to L’Enfant aimé, in the final third of the film we find a concentration on the mother’s subjecthood beyond how her husband and child define her. Interestingly, Akerman appears in-frame in most of the film, sometimes off to the side, at others closer to the mother, but always listening, a decision we could see as akin to

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 52

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

53

her stated desire to avoid voyeurism in her films. But in the final third, during which the mother is naked and examines herself in a mirror, Akerman is now absent and we see only the mother and the mirror and hear her scrutinising her own body: ‘I have a pretty mouth, I have almost no waist, I have a very curved back.’ Clearly, there is a shift of tone here, with the critique of marriage and motherhood making way for the restoration of a sense of subjecthood to the mother. It is as if when Akerman disappears off screen to become a viewer rather than a companion, the mother can look at herself and become a subject again. Aspects familiar from Jeanne Dielman are evident in L’Enfant aimé. We have a housewife and mother and we learn about her work conditions and follow her daily routine, which includes washing up and tidying the house. However, the style of filming is very different. It is hard to orient oneself in space and the long takes are overridden somewhat by the often anxious tone of the mother and her chaotic sense of space.86 When considered alongside the unmade script of the daughter who poisons her parents, the mother’s monologue in L’Enfant aimé reinforces Akerman’s concern with sexuality, again suggesting her alignment with the more radical MLF faction, the FMA, who insisted that the battle for personal relations between the sexes must be threefold: ‘against the oppressive role of men, sacrosanct monogamy, and the taboos against the sexual pleasure of women in general’.87 The three short narrative films that preceded Jeanne Dielman paint a picture of Akerman’s sexual politics that suggests the critique of patriarchal structures in the home, accompanied by an enquiry into female sexuality. It is clear, once we consider L’Enfant aimé, that Je tu il elle continues some of that earlier film’s preoccupations. More surprising, though, is the fact that the first draft of the script for Jeanne Dielman, entitled Elle vogue vers l’Amérique (with which Akerman secured funding from the Ministère de la Culture française de Belgique), builds on this radical critique of marriage, motherhood and the family.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 53

08/06/2021 13:44

54

BFI FILM CLASSICS

In Elle vogue vers l’Amérique Jeanne’s husband is alive rather than dead and would leave her housekeeping money on her bedside table in the mornings after sex. Jeanne leaves her husband once their son gets married and sets herself up in an apartment as a prostitute. Once again the money gets left on her bedside table; however, this is not the end of the story. The first script gives Jeanne a way out from her oppression. We meet several of the neighbours in Jeanne’s building, who all seem to represent different ways of living the heterosexual contract. Jeanne becomes close to one neighbour, Marie, a mother of two. The two decide to go out and look for work. They are unsuccessful, but they end up sleeping together. They are discovered in bed by Marie’s husband, Daniel, who turns out to be a liberated husband and tells Marie that he too is leaving the marriage and going off to the US. In the final scene, the two women wave him off together on his departure.88 In the draft script the widespread ambivalent attitude to the housewife that I have been analysing comes down on the side of liberating her, through a relationship with another woman. The script seems to tell us that marriage is the same as prostitution, monogamy is oppressive, and only by being freed from both can women find themselves. Only one of these three messages – the first – finds its way into Jeanne Dielman. When juxtaposed against the creative, liberational trajectory deriving from Saute ma ville, the daughter who poisons her parents, L’Enfant aimé and Elle vogue vers l’Amérique, Jeanne Dielman feels like a roadblock or retreat. Instead of blowing up her town, Jeanne carefully tidies it; rather than changing her life once her husband dies, she substitutes son for father, as if nothing has changed. There is no liberation in second wave feminism’s terms in Jeanne Dielman. In retreating back to the housewife in the kitchen and insisting that we share time with her and pay attention to how she lives her life, Akerman exposes how the patriarchal system works, thereby insisting that we remember the lives of those who can’t just drop everything and walk in the streets. This reference to Jeanne

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 54

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

55

Dielman as a film that asks us to remember the housewife takes on broader connotations years later thanks to Akerman’s rising Jewish consciousness. Her rather whimsical remark at the time that Jeanne Dielman was a love film to her mother and that Jeanne’s daily routine was inspired by her childhood memory of her aunts may appear to sit awkwardly alongside the critique of the institution of marriage, motherhood and the family that runs as an undercurrent beneath the films that lead up to Jeanne Dielman. Yet by reintroducing the personal, we can understand the retreat to the housewife not simply as a gesture against patriarchy, but also as giving space to Akerman’s aunts and mother as a particular generation of Jewish women who had survived the Holocaust and were untouched by feminism. Evoking these real women in the background of Jeanne Dielman lends further dimensions to Jeanne’s obsessive attempt to keep her mind busy. It is not only patriarchy that is to blame, then, but in Akerman’s own words the ‘stillness of the camps’ evoked in this film by ‘the loud stillness in the kitchen’.89

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 55

08/06/2021 13:44

56

BFI FILM CLASSICS

4 Delphine Does the Dishes Jeanne Dielman does not start at the beginning of Jeanne’s day; instead, it opens in media res: on a Tuesday, around 5 p.m. We are left to imagine what life before Tuesday at 5 p.m. would have been like for Jeanne, with only a few clues existing in the diegesis, buried within Sylvain and Jeanne’s nocturnal dialogue.90 It seems inevitable that Seyrig would have thought about Jeanne’s life before the slice of time that the film depicts; in fact there’s a strong sense in which she has performed that life on screen before. For example, in 1959 as she wakes up a sleepy loft on the Bowery, in New York’s East Side, her every move is narrated for us by Jack Kerouac: The wife is getting up, opening up the windows … the room’s in a mess, there’s her husband’s coat on the chair … she has to get the kid up to go to school. She’s saying ‘you get your coat and get your little hat and we’re going to go off to school’.

The role in Pull My Daisy, Seyrig’s first on film,91 could not be further from Akerman’s creation of Jeanne Dielman. Seyrig’s character has no autonomy and instead she is depicted by Kerouac’s narration and Robert Frank’s direction and editing as a kind of shrewish spoilsport, referred to only as ‘the wife’. It seems that the wife is there purely to disapprove of the men and highlight their bad behaviour. Despite the fact that we are told that she is a painter, she does not get to join in with the men and we do not see her paint; instead, she plays the responsible adult among infantile men. While Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and Milo goof around, drinking beer, talking nonsense and then improvising jazz, the wife sets the table, serves food and drink, argues with her husband and, as Kerouac puts it on the soundtrack, ‘runs around fixing everything’. Seyrig’s account

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 56

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

57

Delphine Seyrig as ‘the wife’ in Pull My Daisy (1959)

The wife surrounded by infantile artists who goof around

of the production of the film is that it was chaotic and ‘machiste’, meaning macho; by contrast, she described the time she spent filming Jeanne Dielman as ‘an experience worth treasuring’.92 Contrasting Seyrig’s roles in Pull My Daisy and Jeanne Dielman reveals her as well placed to understand how fervently Akerman’s film intervenes in the representation of the housewife and mother. The way in which Jeanne Dielman is shot, edited, choreographed and performed coalesces to make Jeanne our only source for meaningmaking. There is no narration of her every move, whether literally

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 57

08/06/2021 13:44

58

BFI FILM CLASSICS

through voiceover, or figuratively through camera angles and camera movements, editing and mise en scène. No one can tell us about Jeanne and we are not asked to judge her or given a particular point of view on her. For Seyrig, such an absence of additional expressive elements increases the pressure on her performance, which must carry the burden of meaning. While the unusual choice of Seyrig to play housewife and widow Jeanne Dielman has been regularly remarked upon, few have ventured further to analyse her contribution in more detail; such is the intention of this book.93 Yet before we do so, it is worth analysing how, while Seyrig is pivotal to Jeanne Dielman’s success, Jeanne Dielman is important for Seyrig also. It is fair to say that Jeanne Dielman stands as a bridge between her formation as an actress in male auteur films (Frank’s Pull My Daisy; Alain Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year at Marienbad, 1961, and Muriel, 1963; François Truffaut’s Baisers volés/Stolen Kisses, 1968; and Luis Buñuel’s Le Charme discrèt de la bourgeoisie/The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972, to name just a few) and her increasing activity in films by key female auteurs, including Marguerite Duras, Liliane de Kermadec and Ulrike Ottinger. If we understand a little more of her life and work just prior to Jeanne Dielman, we will see how the film contributed to Seyrig’s self-transformation as an actress and her determination no longer to passively please but instead to communicate, particularly with and to women.94 On the one hand, Jeanne breaks Seyrig’s on-screen image but on the other, it fits perfectly into her burgeoning off-screen reputation as a radical feminist, forged through activism and collective video practice. Attending MLF meetings since 1968 and campaigning for contraception and the legalisation of abortion, in 1971 Seyrig was a signatory to the petition of the 343, scornfully labelled by the French press ‘343 salopes’. Those women who signed were effectively admitting to having broken article 317 of the penal code in having had an illegal abortion, which could bring about court proceedings. Seyrig also appeared beside Simone de Beauvoir, Françoise Fabian

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 58

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

59

Delphine Seyrig taking part in a march for women, Paris 1971, with film-maker Agnès Varda in the foreground (© Carlos Santos/GAMMA RAPHO)

and thirteen other well-known women who gave account of their abortions in the trial of a 17-year-old who was being charged with illegal abortion.95 Public traces of her activism show a very different image of Seyrig to that portrayed in her films with Resnais, Truffaut or Losey and help explain her sympathy for Akerman’s project. Most strikingly, archive footage of Seyrig’s appearance on an Actuel 2 debate on the liberalisation of abortion captures a very natural Seyrig, with flushed cheeks, no make-up and wild curly hair, breathlessly taking the panel to task for their patronising discussion of female sexuality. Seyrig shows herself unafraid of courting controversy, as she makes the point that ‘it is more traumatising – and all women know this – to raise children than to have an abortion’.96 In the same year Seyrig appears again on French television in a discussion on ‘happiness’, denouncing the unequal

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 59

08/06/2021 13:44

60

BFI FILM CLASSICS

division of power between men and women. Her words could be a manifesto for Jeanne Dielman: The question of happiness, let’s talk about it, women earn less money than men, women are also obliged to work in the home, which is unpaid, because when a man marries, he gains a housewife for free. Happiness is independence.97

Perhaps it was because of the disdainful treatment of feminism on television, evident in the Actuel 2 debate, and rising consciousness at the sexism of cinema (manifest in her experience of filming A Doll’s House with Jane Fonda),98 that Seyrig turned to DIY video as a media outlet for her activism. The year before Jeanne Dielman, along with her friend Ioana Weider99 and the video pioneer Carole Roussopoulos, she formed the video collective Les Insoumuses, a neologism which means the ‘defiant muses’. Defiance here took

Delphine Seyrig filming for the video collective Les Insoumuses (© Alain Voloch/ GAMMA RAPHO)

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 60

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

61

a number of forms: documenting what they saw as injustices to women, deconstructing mainstream media and creating a space for women to speak on camera, all via a low-fi, no-frills video aesthetic.100 Most relevant to Seyrig’s experience to come with Jeanne Dielman is the video she was making at the time with Roussopoulos, Sois belle et tais-toi/Be Beautiful and Shut Up, in which she interviewed twenty-four French and American actresses. The responses these actresses give represent a deep and troubling testimony to the sexism, ageism and racism of European and American cinemas. Seyrig’s radicalisation through her activism, whether in the public sphere or through video, undoubtedly affected her desire to support the much younger Akerman in the promising project of Jeanne Dielman. This chapter will show that the success of Jeanne Dielman owes much to Seyrig and the memorable creation of a convincing housewife on screen that her collaboration with Akerman produced. ‘[I]f we saw someone making beds and doing dishes who we normally saw doing those things, we wouldn’t really see that person, so it had to be someone we didn’t normally see doing dishes.’101 Akerman’s assertion that Jeanne had to be played by someone we would not expect to see washing dishes is an indication of the political nature of the film, revealing also what is at stake in Seyrig’s performance.102 Evidently, the manner of filming, using long takes and action that is carried out until its end, serves to concentrate our gaze on Jeanne, and we are subject to her occupation of space and time. But given Seyrig’s attractive appearance and her reputation for playing desirable characters, how will non-seduction be achieved? Jeanne Dielman contributed to disrupting Seyrig’s star image, leading one reviewer to declare that with Jeanne Dielman Seyrig is ‘démarienbadisée’.103 Yet once we examine how Seyrig puts her performance together, what becomes apparent is that the foundation she uses is the same. What we also learn is how the same body can be made and unmade as a source for the kind of dubious visual pleasure that Laura Mulvey attributed to mainstream narrative cinema.104

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 61

08/06/2021 13:44

62

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Pull My Daisy was a confusing experience for Seyrig, to the extent that she wanted to hide it from the eyes of discerning European audiences.105 In the film she is the only person who is acting a part, amid a group of friends who are fooling around. It was her role in her next film, L’Année dernière à Marienbad, though, that incarnated Seyrig’s reputation for seduction, and if we add in Accident (Joseph Losey, 1967), Baisers volés and Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kümel, 1971), we can see her repertoire develop. The shared factor in each of these films is that Seyrig’s seduction of her leading men (or women, in the latter) occurs in an ambivalent way. It is important to note that despite general agreement as to Seyrig’s attractiveness, she rarely played young, innocent ingénues on screen: that is, those roles that were typically designed to be pleasing to the eye and nothing more. As a consequence of escaping these roles, Seyrig avoided playing mere objects of desire; instead, the majority of her characters have a self-possession about them and an embodied confidence.106 This pattern of being a kind of elder figure is set in motion in Pull My Daisy, in which she is the wife and mother rather than the bishop’s daughter, played by (dancer/choreographer) Sally Gross, who, at 26, was a mere year younger than Seyrig. In Marienbad, Baisers volés and Daughters of Darkness she is married and surrounded by attractive women who are much younger than her. Even in Accident, in which her character Francesca is single, she acts as a substitute for Anna (Jacqueline Sassard), whom Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) cannot have. Unlike other French actresses of the time such as Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau and Bernadette Lafont, Seyrig is freed from playing virgins, innocents or victims. On screen, Seyrig’s femininity is called upon to be knowingly put on display, as if in quotation marks, in a series of modernist, comedic and genre-centric roles. In the modernist Marienbad Seyrig is required to create an emphatically stylised performance to match the fragmentation of the storyline, the reflexive focus on how meaning is produced and the rejection

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 62

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

63

of those conventions typically used to convey reality. Seyrig would become a favourite actress for such productions, being cast in roles on screen by Losey, Duras and Ottinger and on stage in Beckett, Pinter, Pirandello and later Fassbinder. Marienbad sets the stage for a performance style that eschews psychology in favour of decomposed movements, through which we experience Seyrig’s ability to create shapes with her body that express the nature of her characters. Accentuated stereotypical shapes for femininity exist, from the curvaceous bodies of actresses such as Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot or Marilyn Monroe that sway from side to side, to the energetic gamine figures of Jean Seberg, Audrey Hepburn or Leslie Caron. Seyrig’s silhouette is ‘slim’ (as Truffaut’s

L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) sets the foundation for Seyrig’s mastery of the stylised performance

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 63

08/06/2021 13:44

64

BFI FILM CLASSICS

character Antoine Doinel puts it when asked to describe Fabienne Tabbard in the scene below), yet she frequently unbalances her silhouette by raising a shoulder to her ear, shifting her weight onto one foot, or tipping her head dramatically to one side. The result of her studied gaucheness is a sort of queering of the body in space. In Marienbad the framing and cinematography accentuate Seyrig’s fashion-shoot poses: draping herself against doorways, walls and furnishings, which exhibit the decorative and malleable aspects of her body. She manages to be both a surface covering for the decor behind her and an immaterial presence, as capricious as the central narrative of the meeting between ‘A’ and ‘X’ last year at Marienbad is uncertain. Some of Seyrig’s Marienbad posing survives in her performance in Accident, as we again find her with her shoulder raised statuesquely. A sense of the pose is palpable in our first glimpse of her. Seyrig, playing Francesca, an old flame of Stephen, appears suddenly in a close-up shot with her head down and her short blonde wavy bob hiding her face. She gracefully lifts her head up until her face is thrown back, looking off screen, as if in a challenging or defiant way. The camera zooms out as she walks across the room to Bogarde. We next cut to Bogarde sitting in a chair, before there is a cut to an

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 64

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

65

As Francesca (Seyrig) performs for Stephen’s (Dirk Bogarde) gaze in Accident (1967)

empty doorway; after a few seconds she walks into frame, again with her head down (scraping at her cigarette packet), before raising it, sustaining a sense that she is performing for Stephen’s gaze. The character of Fabienne Tabbard in Truffaut’s Baisers volés follows very much in the mould of Francesca and combines shapes that we find in both films. Again, our first glimpse of her establishes how Seyrig will embody the role. We see Fabienne through Antoine’s

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 65

08/06/2021 13:44

66

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Baisers volés (1968)

(Jean-Pierre Léaud) astonished gaze, with her legs elegantly entwined as she attempts to try on a shoe. The curves made by her legs continue up her body in the form of a white feather boa that encircles her from neck to waist. It is as if, then, her whole body is twisted in on itself. Fabienne is shown to us through Antoine’s eyes, and we must credit Truffaut’s script for imagining a character strong enough to insist: ‘I am not an apparition, I am a woman.’ Similarly, Losey’s disjointed editing of the scene between Francesca and Stephen in Accident destroys any possibility of a naturalistic reading of the tryst between them. Yet Seyrig adds to Truffaut’s and Losey’s visions through her performances of both Francesca and Fabienne by creating shapes that imply control and confidence in their bodies, taking back some of the power from Stephen and overpowering the sexually juvenile Antoine.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 66

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

67

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

The striking poses in Marienbad and Accident and the boa in Baisers volés lead to an even more exaggerated performance of femininity in Daughters of Darkness, in which Seyrig plays a countess vampire. Perhaps it is because of the intense atmosphere that Kümel creates, or his penchant for close-ups; in any case, Seyrig’s performance relies more on her face – her eyes that flutter dramatically, or her mouth that parts suggestively – than we have seen in her previous incarnations. These films also cement Seyrig’s penchant for drawing inspiration from silent cinema actresses such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Louise Brooks.107 Seyrig has used these actresses to explain how she moves in the cinematic frame; thanks to them, she has said, she learnt ‘how gestures should always be carried out to their end point’.108 Surveying several of Seyrig’s most iconic performances of desirable characters lends insight into her method. Turning back to Jeanne Dielman now, we should note how in those previous roles Seyrig’s gestures and movements responded to the spaces that surrounded her – the mansion in Marienbad, a flat and restaurant in Accident, a shoe shop and her apartment in Baisers volés, and a grand hotel in Daughters of Darkness. In each of these contexts she arranged herself carefully, and moved around in a way that drew attention to her body by, respectively, draping herself across doorways, staging an entrance, or perching elegantly or lethargically

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 67

08/06/2021 13:44

68

BFI FILM CLASSICS

on furniture in Truffaut’s and Kümel’s films. Seyrig brings this minute attention to the mise en scène that surrounds her to the character of Jeanne Dielman. However, in order for Akerman’s vision of Jeanne as a non-seductive presence to succeed, Seyrig will have to find new shapes for her body, ones that continue to draw our attention, yet which take away none of her subjecthood. Throughout Jeanne Dielman Jeanne is placed in the centre of the frame; we do not cross a space unless she crosses it, we do not enter a space unless she enters it. The close attention to gesture and to the movement of the body in space have the potential of taking us away from the narrative progression, to a world of movement, space and bodies. Measured against these four performances of seduction, when playing Jeanne, Seyrig firmly avoids creating these pleasurable and inviting shapes with her body; instead, her abiding posture is that of standing with her feet together. We see this stance in the very opening scene when we catch Jeanne mid-action, as she turns away from the stove to grab a pinch of salt. But having done so, she then stands, feet together, facing the stove. She bends to turn on the gas. The door bell rings and ‘without hesitation’, as Akerman writes in

Seyrig avoids creating pleasurable shapes with her body

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 68

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

69

the script, Jeanne undoes her housecoat while remaining, still, facing the stove. We find the same posture repeated when she greets her gentlemen callers, washes her hands in the morning and when she stands at her kitchen table making meals. When contextualised next to Seyrig’s other performances, her craft becomes more visible. Once again, then, we will see her moving in response to the spaces and objects around her and adjusting her body shapes accordingly. Most strikingly, while as ‘A’, Francesca, Fabienne and the Countess, Seyrig’s gestures were able to flow, extended by her costumes and graceful poses, as Jeanne, her movements – largely standing, walking, bending – are strictly regimented, and her gestures are designed with as much economy as possible. This template is perfected on the first day, so that we notice its gradual derangement on days two and three. Thus, returning to the opening scene, we should notice that one action leads to another with a confidence and flow that is able to suggest a well-honed routine. Seyrig may have followed Akerman’s script, which carefully details every action, but even so she would have had to rehearse and repeat these actions again and again.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 69

08/06/2021 13:44

70

BFI FILM CLASSICS

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 70

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 71

71

08/06/2021 13:44

72

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Seyrig’s task in Jeanne Dielman is made much easier thanks to Akerman’s highly explicit script, which is written rather like a novel.109 In order to gauge what Seyrig ‘adds’ to Akerman’s writing, we can compare the opening scene. The script reads as follows: Jeanne is in the kitchen. She pours a little salt onto the potatoes which are mostly covered with water, with no hesitation as to the quantity needed. She puts the lid on the saucepan and lights the gas. At the sound of the doorbell she takes off her apron showing no surprise. She quickly washes her hands which she barely dries and puts out the light. She leaves the kitchen closing the door behind her.110

From the way in which Seyrig is able to reach forward across the cooktop and grab both the saucepan lid and the matches at the same time, to the skill with which she removes her housecoat without dislodging her cardigan beneath, Seyrig’s absolute command of how Jeanne would move in her environment and her skilful interaction with costume and props are evident. Just as she makes us feel the luxuriousness of Fabienne’s boa, by wrapping it along the length of her body in Baisers volés, so the stiffness of Jeanne’s blue cardigan is conveyed in the way Seyrig is repeatedly tugging it across her chest. Once the doorbell rings, the way in which Seyrig takes off the housecoat suggests Jeanne’s care of her clothes and acute attention to detail. She unhurriedly undoes the three buttons and then slips it off in two stages, opening it, before carefully rolling it back off her shoulders with a flourish. These actions are repeated precisely on day two, and she completes the move by pulling out one arm and then the other, transferring her gaze from straight ahead to her left arm as she pulls it out and folds the housecoat before hanging it up. Through

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 72

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

73

Seyrig’s meticulous movements we recognise habitual ways of doing things that become familiar, such that we come to know Jeanne in a way akin to how we know our closest companions. The moment when Seyrig transfers her gaze from one arm to the other bears discussion. On day three Jeanne’s afternoon routine is unsettled by the arrival of the parcel from her sister so that we don’t see Seyrig remove the housecoat a third time. However, there are a number of other actions that we do see in their perfected and their disrupted forms, and it is frequently the nature of Seyrig’s gaze that cues us in to the fact something is not quite right. On day two we see Jeanne polish Sylvain’s shoes and this is repeated on day three after the initial disruption of routine. In general terms these actions appear the same: Jeanne puts the shoes on a chair and polishes them one by one. But if we attend to how Seyrig moves her hands and head, then subtle distinctions alert us to how Jeanne is losing her precision on day three. On day two Seyrig’s gaze meticulously follows her hands as they rub the polish on the shoes, such that we have the sense that she is totally absorbed in the task. The pressure that she exerts on the cloth and then the brush seems precise and carefully measured and her whole body appears to be involved in the task. On day three, her gaze as she rubs is less attentive. She moves her head around and visibly sighs a large sigh – her shoulders rising as she does so. When Seyrig brushes the shoes her strokes are too long and loose, as if her body is not fully involved. We can sense the imprecision and it is no surprise when she loses her grasp on the brush and drops it on the floor. Dissecting Seyrig’s performance in the opening scene where she takes off her housecoat shows her carrying gesture to its end, but instead of the very feminised, sensual gestures of her 1960s films – interacting with costume, holding her hand to her shoulder, wrapping the boa around her body or bending gracefully at the knee – in Jeanne Dielman, Seyrig’s gestures are typically interactions with objects in order to accomplish her daily tasks. By slightly altering both the repetition of gestures and the way she moves in the space of

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 73

08/06/2021 13:44

74

BFI FILM CLASSICS

On day two Seyrig’s brushstrokes are accurate and focused

her apartment, her performance contributes to the revelation of the undoing of Jeanne that begins on the second day. Comparing the way in which Seyrig performs Jeanne’s tasks across the three days adds to our understanding of what she brings to the role. In the analyses of how she pulls off her housecoat and polishes the shoes, two further strategies are revealed: how Seyrig deals with the problem of facial expression and how her whole body is alert, including her breathing. In Autour de Jeanne Dielman we witness Seyrig rehearsing the making of the meat loaf. Discussing the expression she should have on her face, she says to Akerman: ‘But I’m going to look serious. You know that when I look really serious, I get into trouble.’ In the four films discussed Seyrig is most frequently smiling in a pleasing manner, so she may have been thinking of

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 74

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

75

On day three Seyrig’s brushstrokes are broad and sloppy

Resnais’ Muriel when referring to looking really serious. Playing a troubled gambler whose stepson has been in the Algerian war, Seyrig adopts a hurried, distracted manner counterpointing her previous role for Resnais in Marienbad. In Jeanne Dielman, Seyrig’s face remains remarkably impassive through the majority of the film; as a consequence, those moments when it is animated by an expression become significant exceptions. The first moment of expression occurs as the visitor (Henri Storck) leaves on day one. As discussed in Chapter 2, when he smiles at her she smiles back. Shortly after this, while preparing the soup the sound of Sylvain opening the front door provokes a smile of recognition from Seyrig before she swiftly goes back to managing the plates. A half-smile remains throughout the first evening as she eats and sits

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 75

08/06/2021 13:44

76

BFI FILM CLASSICS

A contented expression crosses Seyrig’s face when she hears Sylvain come home

with Sylvain, lending a mood of contentment to the scene. Akin with the restrained shapes Seyrig commands her body to assume, her facial expressions are also minute, and the effect on the scenes concerned is to moderate their energy, reinforcing Jeanne’s restraint. Hence, when her visitor smiles at her Seyrig’s reaction is visible yet muted; when Sylvain arrives home her mouth betrays a reaction, but her body continues with its tasks; and as she sits with Sylvain in the evening she is attentive to the music on the radio but cannot get lost in the daily newspaper. Turning to the observation that in her performance of Jeanne, Seyrig’s whole body is alert, including her breathing, this raises the need for a discussion of the dialogue in the film. Seyrig’s voice is typically a key weapon in her armament: first, because of her way of enunciating; second, because of the breathiness which is due to frailty. In 1954, following long performances in the play La Misanthrope, she had to rest after nodules developed on her vocal chords. In combination, these elements produced a musicality of tone that became a key characteristic of her performances. One

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 76

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

77

Seyrig hums and a slight smile escapes

reviewer enthuses ‘her voice with its musical timbre, her voice with its beautiful sad notes is song like’, while for Marguerite Duras, for whom sound was so important, it’s as if Seyrig has just eaten some fruit and has a wet mouth.111 Prior to Jeanne Dielman directors made much use of Seyrig’s distinctive voice. In Baisers volés Antoine Doinel declares that Fabienne’s voice is enchanting; while in Accident, before we see Francesca we hear her voice on the telephone. It is as if Stephen is trying to decide whether he will go ahead with his dalliance, and the voice apparently has it. Then once we are in Francesca’s apartment, the voices of Stephen and Francesca are disembodied, a trait repeated by Duras in India Song. In Jeanne Dielman, meanwhile, Seyrig’s character is largely silent, with her celebrated voice apparently playing less of a part in her performance. Given Seyrig’s vocal challenges, when instructed to read the letter from Jeanne’s sister at pace, copying Akerman’s instructions, Seyrig would have been struggling for breath. Coming to the question of breath, it is this, rather than voice, that Seyrig appears to bring from her other

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 77

08/06/2021 13:44

78

BFI FILM CLASSICS

performances, suggesting that Jeanne is not as silent as we might think. In the script Akerman refers to the interactions that make up Jeanne’s routine as ‘the rhythm’ that Jeanne imposes on the film;112 therefore, noting those moments when we are aware of Seyrig’s breathing lends insight into the internal rhythm she gives to the character. In her previous films we are acutely aware of those moments when Seyrig breathes, either because of how it affects the phrasing of her dialogue or because it is actually visible. In both Accident and Baisers volés Seyrig’s phrasing is highlighted. For example, the first line we hear in the former is ‘I was [pause for big breath] in the bath when you phoned.’ Similarly peculiar phrasing occurs in Fabienne’s famous speech to Antoine Doinel. Prowling around his bedroom as the seemingly terrified Antoine peers over the bedcovers, Seyrig An almost invisible sigh as Seyrig pauses just as Sylvain comes home on day two

A more visible sigh. Seyrig slightly raises one shoulder to her ear as she turns the pages of her newspaper

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 78

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

79

The familiar gesture of Seyrig lifting her shoulders as she takes a deep breath

breathily proposes to him that his idealisation is misplaced and that their connection must be in the real world rather than in the world of novels. Breathiness here lends suspense to her speech and ensures she is fully in command of the action. In Jeanne Dielman we are made aware of Seyrig’s breath at key moments: in the scene in which Jeanne brushes her hair, at the end of which she gives a large sigh; on day two as she peels potatoes; on day three as she polishes Sylvain’s shoes; and, most memorably, in the final scene after the murder, as she sits at the table. These expirations, when Seyrig’s shoulders move up and down and we can see her letting out breath, produce disturbances in the otherwise smooth equilibrium of Jeanne’s daily existence. They also realise the phenomenological rhythm without psychology that Akerman was aiming for in her rehearsals with Seyrig. The collaboration between Akerman and Seyrig is crucial for Jeanne Dielman’s success as a convincing character and an overlooked housewife who would touch (and divide) feminist hearts. As argued in Chapter 2, along with Mangolte and other members of the crew, Seyrig was one of Akerman’s main supporters.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 79

08/06/2021 13:44

80

BFI FILM CLASSICS

If Mangolte joined Akerman in attempting to find the most productive way in which to work together as women, then for Seyrig Jeanne Dielman was decisive in helping her to see how the script and elements of film style – direction, cinematography, editing – were all equally important in creating a female character that felt true to her as a woman. Once we examine Seyrig’s techniques in significant films leading up to Jeanne Dielman (L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Accident, Baisers volés and Daughters of Darkness), so her expertise at stylised performances of femininity becomes apparent. Adding to these performances her off-screen public and on-video feminist activism, her allegiance to Akerman’s project appears completely natural. The fact, then, that mainstream reviewers appear continually surprised at the casting of Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman tells us much about the limited versions of femininity that are promoted and accepted. For in order to acknowledge that there is a continuity between the four characters of the woman in Marienbad, Francesca, Fabienne and the Countess and Jeanne Dielman, one has to see beyond what they represent for the men in the stories and home in on Seyrig’s performance.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 80

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

81

5 Slow Looking For many years, across the 1980s and 90s, Jeanne Dielman became more or less a phantom film that was difficult to see in cinemas, circulating only via a poor VHS copy outside of them and securing a reputation for Akerman that haunted the rest of her career, such that at one point she stated rather soulfully: ‘I asked myself how to do better, and I don’t know if I have.’113 Despite its domineering effect, it was Akerman herself who brought about the film’s reassessment by new audiences. In 2001, when invited by the 49th Venice Biennale to make an installation that reflected a collaboration between film and the visual arts, she exhibited the final 7 minutes of Jeanne Dielman on seven television-sized monitors. With several years to go before Jeanne Dielman would be released on glorious remastered DVD and Delphine Seyrig, its luminous star, dead (in 1990), Woman Sitting After Killing truly resurrected a ghost.114 Akerman’s use of the final minutes of Jeanne Dielman for her installation is intriguing. In this video visitors to the Venice Art Biennale who don’t know the film from which it was taken may try to figure out the nature of the killing in the title – what kind of killing? Is this woman the killer? In the absence of the accumulative structure of the 1975 film, Woman Sitting becomes a still, flat image deprived of a memory, a history and a context. We can imagine further endings transposed to this decontextualised space: ‘Ferry leaving for Staten Island’ (the last few minutes of News from Home); ‘Woman listening to messages after travelling’ (Les Rendez-vous d’Anna). In each case Akerman’s films end with moments of aperture, where Jeanne, Akerman (via her camera) or Anna respectively seem to have come to the end of something, yet are given time out to wait, watch or rest, as are we.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 81

08/06/2021 13:44

82

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Woman Sitting After Killing (2001). Seven monitors video installation, colour, sound. Made out of the last sequence of the film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Running time: 5 mins 38 – in loop; Direction: Chantal Akerman; Editing and spatialisation: Claire Atherton (courtesy Chantal Akerman Foundation/Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris, London. Photo: Chantal Akerman Foundation)

It is hard to comprehend Akerman’s decision to extract and decontextualise the final 7 minutes of Jeanne Dielman’s 201 minutes for Woman Sitting After Killing. In doing so, don’t we give in to the post-video drive to fragment the whole of a film, by fast-forwarding? Surely the whole of the film – that is, the whole experience of nearly three and a half hours – is the point of Jeanne Dielman? Certainly, the film was made to be watched without interruption, with the accumulation of time spent with Jeanne leading to our understanding of her. Yet it seems that twenty-five years later Akerman was ready to cut it up for new audiences in the art world. The existence of Woman Sitting leads us to a paradox in the style established by Jeanne Dielman that has become increasingly apparent since the 1990s. On the one hand, as I argued earlier in this book, Jeanne Dielman requires the locked-in, can’t leave viewing

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 82

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

83

conditions of the movie theatre because we have to feel the time passing and struggle while we are doing so, but also because we have to learn to give up our anthropocentricity and confront the space around Jeanne. Once we do, then we are exposed to the research that director of photography Mangolte and Akerman undertook together in New York, which culminated in Akerman’s realisation that duration can be used as presence, not mood.115 On the other hand, Jeanne Dielman’s slow, attentive pace sits awkwardly in the movie theatre situation. As early as 1979 Angela Martin observed, ‘Akerman’s films require, if not a different viewing situation, at least a different viewing attitude’; while Laura Mulvey, also in 1979, wrote: ‘Chantal Akerman’s work demands an adjustment to pace, a discovery of a different tension than that normally associated with the cinema.’116 To make sense of these oscillating views that Jeanne Dielman is both made-for-the-movie-theatre and exceeds its temporality, we can follow the lead of Woman Sitting and take a detour via the visual arts. Any mention of slowness after 2010 conjures up what has been called ‘slow cinema’ – that is, auteurs who share an art cinema loosening of causation and a liking for the long take rather than the swift cut.117 However, two decades before the recognition of slow cinema, Akerman’s different sense of tension and multiple temporal layers have been the ill-acknowledged inspiration for a generation of visual artists who began making gallery films in the 1990s. Her predominant style of static tableau framing and minimal editing found its way into the visual arts at the same time that she herself had also found new art world audiences with her own installations. One strong example of a practice inspired by Akerman’s distinctive pace has been the work of Tacita Dean, who, in Disappearance at Sea (1996), Gellért (1998), Banewl (1999) and Fernsehturm (2001), created a variety of short and long gallery films with an Akermanesque, static frontal style. Following Dean, the long-held single shot has been central to the practice of artists such as Mark Lewis, Anri Sala, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij,

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 83

08/06/2021 13:44

84

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Rosalind Nashashibi, Sharon Lockhart, David Claerbout and Sam Taylor-Johnson. In different ways these artists are all interested in exploring stillness in the moving image. Why has Akerman’s emphasis on the slowness of the long take – for her an oscillation between the ‘frame’ in which we lose ourselves and the ‘space’ that we confront – found such a prolific place in gallery films? First, such an emphasis indexes the legacy of Snow and others, as an earlier generation who were reflecting on film’s place in the visual arts; in other words, there is a circling back to an earlier enquiry. However, a possible second reason makes the difference between these two generations clear. Whereas the generation of the 1960s and 70s whose work Akerman encountered at Anthology Film Archives were exploring the time and space of moving images from non-narrative points of view, for the 1990s generation slowness and stillness are less introverted and about the apparatus, and more extroverted and about the world. The work of Dean, like the work of Akerman, asks us to take our time looking at minor, micro, molecular details in the world – shadows dancing, leaves moving, the sun setting – that change subtly over the duration of the long-held single shot. Akerman’s practice therefore associates two sets of artists/film-makers who make use of long takes, those from the 1960s/70s and those from the 1990s onwards.118 If Akerman herself learnt from the first set of artists that framing and holding space can create suspense as strongly as a Hitchcockian plot, then the second set have in turn learnt from Akerman that long takes, when turned on people in/and the world, acquire ethical dimensions; in other words, they involve a kind of slow looking. The ethical dimensions of Akerman’s slow looking concern the people who become her subjects and what her duty and responsibility is to them once they appear in her frames. In the interview featured on the Criterion Collection’s Jeanne Dielman DVD, Akerman states that experimental films undoubtedly changed her life; when she returned to Paris in order to make narrative films, ‘I felt like a traitor,

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 84

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

85

Filming of Hanging Out Yonkers (1973). From left: Epp Kotkas, Mangolte, Akerman (© Jane Stein)

when I wrote Jeanne Dielman I thought “this is total betrayal”’.119 Akerman does not explain why the film is a betrayal, but we can infer that what she felt she betrayed were the non-narrative and unscripted rules of the films she witnessed in New York. Arguably, though, and returning to the binary between apparatus and world, it is less narrative specifically and more human life in general on which Akerman was unable to turn her back. This claim as to Akerman’s fascination for human life in general adds another dimension to the origin story for Jeanne Dielman pieced together in Chapter 2. Recognising the nature of Akerman’s fascination helps explain why the filming of Hanging Out Yonkers was so memorable for her and Mangolte, even though the project was never completed. At the heart of the project were marginalised youth in a drug prevention and treatment programme whom the two women were able to take their time to talk to and film. More importantly, we can use this fascination as another way of explaining the apparent detour or retreat that Jeanne Dielman represents from

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 85

08/06/2021 13:44

86

BFI FILM CLASSICS

the creative, liberational trajectory that precedes it, deriving from Saute ma ville, the script of the daughter who poisons her parents, L’Enfant aimé ou je joue à être une femme mariée and the Elle vogue vers l’Amérique script. As a reminder, this liberational trajectory entailed the rejection of the domestic space, married life and the heterosexual script; in other words, it is Akerman’s own trajectory. However, when Akerman decides ‘in a flash’ to rewrite the script for Jeanne Dielman, she pushes these familiar experiences aside in favour of those lived by women around her whose lives have not made it onto the screen. As Akerman puts it, ‘with a woman doing the washing up I almost spoke of humanity’.120 Recognising the trajectory of slow looking that detoured through the visual arts in the 1990s reinforces the argument, from Angela Martin, Laura Mulvey and many others, that Jeanne Dielman challenges the conditions of movie viewing on multiple fronts: in its extended 201-minute duration, its uninflected style and its focus on a housewife and mother. The film’s slow – unjudgmental, patient, open – looking turns into an ethical act when it is directed at subjects who have typically received no visibility on screen; or, more accurately, subjects whom film history has recorded as being uninteresting to watch. Bringing this book to a close, I would argue that Akerman’s decisions both to frame an unliberated housewife, rather than figures who are demanding, refusing and insisting on resistance, and to do so through a kind of slow looking are what potentially make the film a contrary classic. For those who have taken up Akerman’s invitation to spend time with Jeanne, with her space, her time, her rituals and gestures filmed with the loving patience expressed by Akerman’s urge to look carefully and to be respectful, they will find their expectations of cinema are changed. Because more than any other film before or since, Jeanne Dielman reminds us that we give our time to a film; and in making us look both with acute attention and for longer, it asks us to feel time slipping away, for ourselves as much as for its protagonist.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 86

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

87

Notes 1 Akerman enrolled in INSAS, the Belgian film school, in 1967 but she stayed for only two or three months. An early bio preserved at the Cinémathèque royale in Brussels (now renamed CINEMATEK) lists a role as production assistant to three features by Yvan Lagrange – Naissance, La Famille and La Leçon de choses – in 1971. Therefore, we should see her as self-taught and benefiting from collaborations with INSAS students René Fruchter (camera) and Geneviève Luciani (editing) on Saute ma ville (1968), friend Samy Szlingerbaum as co-director on Le 15/8 (1975), cinematographer Babette Mangolte on La Chambre (1972) and Hotel Monterey (1973), and Luciani again on Je tu il elle (1974). 2 The publicised length of the film changes. The 2007 Cinéart DVD has it as 193 minutes, while the 2009 Criterion DVD has it as 201 minutes. This confusion around its true duration is sustained in reviews of the film when it was first released. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that: ‘The film’s running time has been listed variously as 195, 210 and 225 minutes: it appears that half an hour was edited out, apparently by the director, between its showings at Cannes last May and its single screening in Edinburgh.’ Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Edinburgh Encounters: Four Recent Avant-Garde Films’, Sight and Sound 45, no. 1 (1975/6): 18–23, 22. A correction is published by the Monthly Film Bulletin stating that the ‘running time is 201 minutes and not as stated’. Monthly Film Bulletin 46, no. 540 (1979):

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 87

219. Rosenbaum reveals that Akerman herself got the length wrong when converting the footage into minutes. 3 Louis Marcorelles, ‘Comment dire chef-d’oeuvre au féminin?’, Le Monde, 22 January 1976, p. 15 (emphasis added). 4 Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1999). A number of women directors have been included in the BFI Film Classics series in the last decade. See John David Rhodes, Meshes of the Afternoon (2011); Annette Kuhn, Ratcatcher (2008); and Amelie Hastie, The Bigamist (2009). 5 ‘On ne fait pas de “l’art” avec une femme qui fait la vaiselle’ (‘one does not make “art” with a woman who does the washing up’). This quote is repeated in a number of interviews with Akerman. Here I’ve taken it from the press release for the film put out by Progrès Films, found at the Cinémathèque royale in Brussels. Akerman can also be heard restating this during an episode of the programme Clap, broadcast on 17 January 1976, following the release in France of the film; Akerman appears on the programme with Delphine Seyrig. Available online: . Accessed 31 January 2021. 6 Akerman and Progrès Films. ‘Nous penetrons un peu par effraction dans la quotidienneté d’une femme, dans ce qui ne se montre pas, ce qui se tait.’ 7 Jacques Aumont, ‘The Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the Gaze’, in Dudley Andrew (ed.), The Image in Dispute – Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography

08/06/2021 13:44

88

BFI FILM CLASSICS

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), pp. 231–58, 245. 8 Jane Giles, The Crying Game (London: BFI, 1997), p. 10. 9 In a video on the Criterion Collection DVD Akerman tells of the first screening of Jeanne Dielman at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975 during which she could see and hear the chairs flipping up as people left. Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman, interview conducted in Paris, April 2009, Criterion Collection. See also the review in Variety, which is relatively positive but finishes with the following: ‘Nearly full house here treated pic rudely – laughing, hollering at central character’s orderliness and, in significant numbers, walking out.’ Herb, ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’, Variety, 24 August 1983, pp. 20, 22. 10 Janet Bergstrom, ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman’, Camera Obscura 1, no. 2 (1977): 114–18, 115–16. See, for example, the following review: M.G., ‘Jeanne Dielman: Femme-esclave’, Le Soir [Brussels], 13 May 1976. 11 See, for example, Bergstrom, ‘Jeanne Dielman’; Jenny Chamarette, ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’, Senses of Cinema no. 67 (July 2013); Catherine Fowler, ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’, in Ernest Mathijs (ed.), The Cinema of the Low Countries (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), pp. 131–40; Marsha Kinder, ‘Reflections on “Jeanne Dielman”’, Film Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1977): 2–8; Raymond De Luca, ‘The Still Life(s) of Chantal Akerman:

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 88

Akerman’s Moving Images and Dutch 17th-Century Painting’, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies 44 (May 2020): 1–16; Jane Simon, ‘Documenting the Domestic: Chantal Akerman’s Experimental Autobiography as Archive’, Australian Feminist Studies 32, no. 91/2 (2017): 150–70. 12 The documentary was included in the 2007 Cinéart DVD package. A 9-minute shorter version was included on the 2009 Criterion DVD of a remastered version of the film. 13 Such as News from Home (1976), D’Est (1993), Là-bas/Down There (2006). 14 Biography found at the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique. 15 Danièle Dubroux, Thérèse Giraud and Louis Skorecki, ‘Entretien avec Chantal Akerman’, Cahiers du cinéma 278 (1977): 34–42, 40. Akerman talks about writing a little, especially Je tu il elle, which was destined to be part of a longer novel. She also mentions it in Nicole Brenez, ‘The Pajama Interview’, Lola 2 (June 2012). 16 Brenez, ‘Pajama Interview’. 17 While most of these titles are unenlightening about what they may contain, this final title conjures a number of films in which Akerman spends time in bed, from La Chambre (1972) and Je tu il elle (1974) to Portrait d’un paresseuse/Sloth (1986). 18 Institut national supérieur des arts du spectacle et des techniques de diffusion. Philip Moseley, Split Screen: Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 99.

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

19 Dubroux et al., ‘Entretien avec Chantal Akerman’, p. 40 20 Gary Indiana, ‘Getting Ready for The Golden Eighties: A Conversation with Chantal Akerman’, Artforum 21, no. 10 (1983): 55–61, 57. 21 B. Ruby Rich, ‘Chantal Akerman Interview, Chicago: 1976/2016’, Film Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2016): 16–24, 17; Marie-Claude Treillou, ‘La Vie, il faut la mettre en scène: Interview with Chantal Akerman’, Cinéma 76, no. 206 (1976): 89–93, 89. 22 Frédéric Sojcher, La Kermesse héroïque du cinéma belge 1965–1988: Le miroir déformant des identités culturelles (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), p. 107. 23 Jacques de Decker, ‘Je voudrais que mes films ne plaisent plus seulement aux critiques et aux cinephiles’, Le Soir [Brussels], 10 January 1987; Jean-Michel Vlaeminckx, ‘Henry Ingberg rend hommage à Dimitri Balachoff’, Cinérgie 101 (2006). Available online: . Accessed 17 March 2021. 24 See Nicole Pinsivy, ‘Chantal Akerman: Ik hou niet van theoriën’, Skoop 12, no. 3 (1976): 27–8, 27; credits can also be found on Je tu il elle, suggesting de Kuyper’s involvement. 25 Dan Yakir, ‘Interview with André Delvaux’, Sight and Sound 46, no. 2 (1977): 90–3, 90. 26 The Film Council and Selection Commission were established in 1968, according to Moseley, Split Screen, p. 104. 27 Dubroux et al., ‘Entretien avec Chantal Akerman’, p. 40.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 89

89

28 Eric de Kuyper and Annie van den Oever, ‘Temps mort: Speaking about Chantal Akerman (1950–2015)’, NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 4, no. 2 (2015). Available online: . Accessed 31 January 2021. 29 See Pinsivy, ‘Chantal Akerman’; Treillou, ‘Interview with Chantal Akerman’. 30 ‘I made my second film when I was twenty-one, which I made with a complete crew of men. That did not go well. When I asked for a medium shot, I got a closeup. At that time I did not yet establish a relationship between the fact that they were men and I was a woman.’ Toon Van Severen, ‘Vrouwen maken een film: Mama, kijk. Zonder mannen/Women Make a Movie: Mommy, Look. Without Men’, KNACK 12 (1975): 68–71, 71 (author’s translation). 31 This detail is included in her bio and has been confirmed by her producer, Marilyn Watelet. The features were: Naissance, La Famille and La Leçon de choses. 32 ‘Je crois que c’est une particularité du système belge: on peut remettre des projects très précis, mais faire toute autre chose! cela, c’est permis.’ Sojcher, La Kermesse héroïque du cinéma belge, p. 174. Sojcher is citing from Jacqueline Aubenas (ed.), Chantal Akerman (Brussels: Ateliers des Arts, 1981). 33 While Akerman has never alluded to being influenced by any Belgian films, her film-making shared concerns with Storck’s work in their attention to the day-to-day details of people’s

08/06/2021 13:44

90

BFI FILM CLASSICS

lives as well as in the structure of the films. Equally, Toute une nuit (1982) and Nuit et jour/Night and Day (1991) seem to follow André Delvaux’s depiction of the ‘magical realism’ of city spaces, largely captured at night and owing much to painter Paul Delvaux. For more lengthy discussions of Akerman’s films in relation to Belgian cinema, see Catherine Fowler, ‘All Night Long: The Ambivalent Text of Belgianicity’, in Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (ed.), Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman (Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 1999), pp. 77–93, and Fowler, ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’. 34 Only a few years later French filmmaker Nelly Kaplan was lamenting that while there were plenty of female editors, she had never found a female camera person in France. Kay Harris, ‘Interview with Nelly Kaplan’, Women and Film 1, no. 2 (1972): 33–6, 36. 35 Babette Mangolte, ‘Artist’s Statement’, in Babette Mangolte: Selected Writings 1998–2015 (Berlin and Vienna: Sternberg Press/Kunsthalle Wien, 2015), pp. 271–3, 272. 36 Ibid., p. 46. 37 Chantal Akerman and Claudine Paquot, Chantal Akerman: Autoportrait en cinéaste (Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou/Éditions Cahiers du cinéma, 2004), p. 23. 38 Babette Mangolte, unpublished interview with the author. Paris, 23 June 2019. 39 ‘Why did she have to ruin the film by making the woman a prostitute and introduce a murder at the end; why did

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 90

she commercialize it?’ Jonas Mekas, ‘Movie Journal’, Soho Weekly News, 18 November 1976, p. 36. However, only three weeks later Mekas wrote about the film again in his column, closing with ‘I am now praising Chantal Akerman for her unique achievement.’ Jonas Mekas, ‘Movie Journal’, Soho Weekly News, 9 December 1976, p. 36. 40 Melissa Anderson, ‘Her Brilliant Decade – An Interview with Chantal Akerman. Available online: . Accessed 31 January 2021. 41 Mangolte, unpublished interview with the author. 42 Indiana, ‘Getting Ready for The Golden Eighties’, p. 57. 43 Janet Bergstrom, ‘With Chantal in New York in the 1970s: An Interview with Babette Mangolte’, Camera Obscura 34, no. 1 (2019): 31–57, 47; Elisabeth Lebovici, ‘No Idolatry and Losing Everything that Made You a Slave: Chantal Akerman’, Mousse Magazine 31 (November–December, 2011). 44 Mangolte, unpublished interview with the author. See also Indiana, ‘Getting Ready for The Golden Eighties’, p. 59, in which Akerman is quoted as saying, ‘I’m not interested in working collectively in the sense that word is usually used. In collaboration, yes. At the time of Jeanne Dielman … there were many things against women in movies, so I wanted to show that you could make a movie with only women.’ It is also worth noting that despite the perennial claim that Jeanne Dielman was made by an all-women team, men

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

were not banned from the production and did fulfil some creative roles: for example, Philippe Graff (art director); Jean-Pol Ferbus (assistant art director); Alain Marchal (sound editor); Jean-Paul Loublier (sound mixer). 45 Akerman on Jeanne Dielman, interview, Criterion Collection. 46 Dubroux et al., ‘Entretien avec Chantal Akerman’, p. 40. 47 Angela Martin, ‘Chantal Akerman’s Films: A Dossier’, Feminist Review 3, no. 1 (1979): 24–47, 29. 48 ‘Et puis un soir, dans mon lit, en trois minutes, toute l’histoire, sa construction, et même énormément de détails se sont imposés à moi. J’ai jeté quelques notes sur un papier, et puis j’ai écrit le scenario complète en trois séminaires, d’où le découpage a découlé tout naturellement.’ De Decker, ‘Je voudrais que mes films ne plaisent plus seulement aux critiques et aux cinephiles’. 49 Akerman has said that besides the fact that it was a good way of getting funding, another reason she assembled women to collaborate with on Jeanne Dielman was because it was a professional film, and women didn’t get many opportunities to work at that level. Van Severen, ‘Vrouwen maken een film’, p. 71. 50 Babette Mangolte, interview with the author, 1 November 2020. 51 Additionally, in 1974 Seyrig had filmed Dites-le avec des fleurs/Say it with Flowers (Pierre Grimblat) and Le Cri du coeur/The Cry of the Heart (Claude Lallemand), followed immediately after Jeanne Dielman by Le Jardin qui bascule/

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 91

91

The Garden that Tilts (Guy Gilles). This flurry of activity explains how she came to have six films in the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. 52 Van Severen, ‘Vrouwen maken een film’, p. 68. 53 Lebovici, ‘No Idolatry and Losing Everything that Made You a Slave’. 54 For engagement with Akerman’s writing, see Marion Schmid, ‘Chantal Akerman: Filmmaker, Video Artist, Writer’, in Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson (eds), Chantal Akerman: Afterlives (Cambridge: Legenda, 2019), pp. 150–63. 55 Dubroux et al., ‘Entretien avec Chantal Akerman’, pp. 34–42, 38. 56 B. Ruby Rich, ‘In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism’, in Steven Peter (ed.), Jump Cut: Hollywood, Politics and Counter-Cinema (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1978), pp. 209–30, 212. 57 The second release of Autour de Jeanne Dielman by Criterion cuts out 9 minutes at the end of the documentary, thereby eliding those scenes of filming in the studio and the argument. 58 Akerman and Paquot, Chantal Akerman, p. 89. 59 Indiana, ‘Getting Ready for The Golden Eighties’, p. 55. 60 Akerman on Jeanne Dielman, interview, Criterion Collection. 61 See the MLF’s publication Le Torchon brûle (‘the burning dishcloth’). 62 Charlotte Brunsdon, The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 63 While it has often been suggested that Akerman’s film was based on remembrances of her mother, in an interview included with the Criterion

08/06/2021 13:44

92

BFI FILM CLASSICS

DVD of Jeanne Dielman, between Akerman and her mother, her mother corrects this view. Reminiscing about the making of the film, her mother maintains that Chantal could not have remembered her cooking and cleaning, as she was a working woman. Instead, she points out that Chantal would have spent time with her mother and her father’s sisters (Chantal’s aunts), who did cook, clean and stay at home. 64 Akerman on Jeanne Dielman, interview, Criterion Collection. 65 23 Quai Du Commerce 1080/1000 Bruxelles, exhibition brochure, ARGOS (2020). 66 Akerman’s career is often presented in interviews as saving her from not simply a domestic life but also a heterosexual life. In an interview with Melissa Anderson she recounts how, after the disappointment with L’Enfant aimé, she considered that marriage and children could be all that she was good for and developed an agreement with Samy Szlingerbaum that the two of them would marry. But then she went to New York and began to make films and this saved her from that fate. Anderson, ‘Her Brilliant Decade’. 67 Kinder, ‘Reflections on “Jeanne Dielman”’, p. 2. 68 Brunsdon writes ‘So in the classroom, the gendered and class status of soap opera was repeatedly affirmed, but in violently contrasting ways: anticipation, frustration, repudiation, and nostalgia’. Brunsdon, The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera, p. 11. 69 Lisa Greenwald, Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 92

Women’s Liberation Movement (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), p. 93. 70 For insight into Akerman’s difficulties when trying to finance her adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel, see the short TV film A Family Business (1984). 71 ‘I am a feminist, but I don’t want to make specifically feminist films I want to make a film in which I have a good relationship with myself.’ Van Severen, ‘Vrouwen maken een film’, p. 71. 72 This mobilisation brought about a number of feminist collectives as well as the formation of Les Cahiers du GRIF by Françoise Collin and Jacqueline Aubenas; Aubenas would later organise an important seminar on Chantal’s work in 1981. See Aubenas (ed.), Chantal Akerman. 73 Françoise Collin et al., ‘Éditorial’, Les Cahiers du GRIF 1 (1973): 3–4, 3. 74 Chantal Akerman, ‘Les Rendez-vous d’Anna’, Les Cahiers du GRIF 23/24 (1978): 146. 75 Greenwald, Daughters of 1968, pp. 98–9. The MLF was created by Antoinette Fouque, Monique Wittig and Josiane Chanel in 1970. Fouque soon left the MLF to form Psych et Po. 76 Pinsivy, ‘Chantal Akerman’, p. 27. 77 Greenwald, Daughters of 1968, p. 176. 78 An insightful review of Jeanne Dielman in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir appears to understand completely the radicality of the film in relation to feminism. It begins, ‘A feminist film? No, a film about a woman like thousands of others.’ Later, commenting on the long takes of housework, the reviewer writes,

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

‘… to be forced to observe, in minute detail, these tasks for long minutes, that reveals … the universe of feminine slavery’ (emphasis in original; author’s translation). M.G., ‘Jeanne Dielman’. 79 Greenwald, Daughters of 1968, p. 102; Jacques Siclier, ‘Un film hyperréaliste sur l’occupation du temps’, Le Monde, 22 January 1976, p. 15. 80 De Decker, ‘Je voudrais que mes films ne plaisent plus seulement aux critiques et aux cinephiles’. As per my discussion in Chapter 2, Akerman wrote the script after discovering that she could apply for subsidies from the Ministère de la Culture française de Belgique. The script was accepted by the committee but then rejected by the minister. 81 The child’s extreme reaction to learning of her parents’ sex life can be recalled in Jeanne Dielman, when Sylvain recounts to Jeanne how he wanted to prevent his father stabbing her with his ‘weapon’. 82 It is unclear quite what Akerman disliked about the film. For a valuable and detailed description and review, see Adam Roberts, ‘In Defence of Akerman’s L’Enfant Aimé’, ICA Bulletin, 27 November 2013. Available online: . Accessed 31 January 2021. 83 Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts, Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook (London: A Nos Amours, 2019), pp. 41–2. 84 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin, 2010). 85 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 471.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 93

93

86 Of the style of filming, Akerman has said, ‘I wanted to do the long shots. In fact, there was no rhythm inside the shot, because cinema is not life; you don’t have to transcribe life, you have to stage it.’ Treillou, ‘Interview with Chantal Akerman’, p. 89. 87 Greenwald, Daughters of 1968, p. 102. 88 These plot details are taken from an account of the script given in the following essay: Hadelin Trinon, ‘Les Deux Scénarios de Jeanne Dielman’, in Aubenas (ed.), Chantal Akerman, pp. 75–8. 89 As quoted in Hogg and Roberts, Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook, p. 162. Originally from an interview conducted by Franck Nouchi, Paris, January 2006, which can be found online at: and . Accessed 31 January 2021. 90 For example, Sylvain asks Jeanne how she met his father; on day two a cobbler asks her how her son is doing and she says she’d be lost without him; on day three Jeanne reveals details about how her sister visited her from Canada when Sylvain was smaller to a shopkeeper when searching for a button. 91 Prior to which she played minor roles in two Sherlock Holmes episodes made for television. 92 See Mireille Brangé, Delphine Seyrig: Une vie (Paris: Éditions Nouveau Monde, 2018), p. 148, and Autour de Jeanne Dielman. 93 Critic L.H. remarks that Delphine Seyrig is unbelievable as a Belgian

08/06/2021 13:44

94

BFI FILM CLASSICS

housewife. L.H., ‘Mme Bovary à sa fenêtre’, Le Soir [Brussels], 13 May 1976. 94 Françoise Varenne, ‘Delphine Seyrig, pleins feux sur une anti-star’, Le Figaro, 16 May 1975. 95 Brangé, Delphine Seyrig, pp. 288–9. 96 See Actuel 2, RTF, Channel 2, broadcast on 13 June 1972. Accessed 31 January 2021. 97 Author’s translation. Available online: . Accessed 31 January 2021. 98 Émile Breton, Femmes d’images (Paris: Éditions Massidor, 1984), pp. 149–51, 151. 99 The sustained friendship between Seyrig and Akerman following Jeanne Dielman led to two very important relationships with Ioana Weider’s daughters, Sonia Weider-Atherton, Akerman’s long-term partner, and Claire Atherton, Akerman’s long-term editor from 1984 onwards. Akerman and Paquot, Chantal Akerman, p. 130. 100 As examples of these three trajectories, see Inês (1974), Maso et Miso vont en bateau (1975) and Sois belle et tais-toi (1981). 101 Akerman on Jeanne Dielman, interview, Criterion Collection. 102 Examples of Seyrig’s reputation for extraordinariness include: ‘Dielman is played by Delphine Seyrig, who is a more than competent actress but who, since Last Year at Marienbad (1961), has been one of the most exquisite women on the screen.’ Stanley Kauffmann,

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 94

‘An Apartment in Brussels’, New Republic, 4 April 1983, pp. 20–2, 22. 103 Quote from Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 15 January 1976. However, Seyrig herself ruptured the image of the placatable object of desire through her involvement in significant feminist fights in the public sphere. 104 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Springer, 1989), pp. 14–26. 105 Brangé, Delphine Seyrig, p. 147 106 Exceptions to this pattern are the US productions The Jackal (1973) and The Black Windmill (1974), in which although Seyrig does play confident characters, both are undermined by the thriller narratives, and end up dead. 107 Brangé, Delphine Seyrig, p. 161. 108 This quote is taken from Delphine Seyrig’s preface to Freddy Buache, Le Cinéma français des années 60 (Paris: Hatier-5 Continents/Bibliothèque du cinéma, 1988), p. 6. 109 I am grateful to the Chantal Akerman Foundation for providing me with a copy of the script. 110 ‘Jeanne est dans sa cuisine. Elle verse un peu de sel dans les pommes de terre largement recouvertes d’eau, sans montrer aucune hésitation quant à la quantité. Elle couvre la casserole et allume le gaz. Elle enlève alors son tablier au coup de sonnette qui ne semble pas la surprendre. Elle passe encore ses mains rapidement sous l’eau qu’elle sèche à peine à l’essuie de cuisine et éteint la lumière. Elle quitte la cuisine en referment la porte derrière elle.’

08/06/2021 13:44

J E A N N E D I E L M A N, 2 3 , Q U A I D U C O M M E R C E , 1 0 8 0 B R U X E L L E S

111 These references respectively from: Brangé, Delphine Seyrig, p. 111; Le Figaro, 4 December 1964; Marguerite Duras, ‘Delphine Seyrig, inconnue célèbre’, originally published in Vogue (1969) and republished in Outside (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981), pp. 203–8, 207. 112 Jeanne Dielman script. Chantal Akerman Foundation. 113 Akerman on Jeanne Dielman, interview, Criterion Collection. 114 Woman Sitting was not Akerman’s first installation; prior to this she had made D’Est: Au bord de la fiction/ Bordering on Fiction: D’Est in 1995 (first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 21 January–30 April) and Self-Portrait/Autobiography: A Work in Progress (Sean Kelly Gallery, New York/ Frith Street Gallery, London) in 1998, both of which also recycled her past work. However, these others and De l’autre côté/From the Other Side that would follow in 2003 can be distinguished from Woman Sitting for the way they are set out in more than one room. 115 ‘It [L’Enfant aimé ou je joue à être une femme mariée] was a very bad film because I didn’t understand something. I was using duration for a mood, not as a presence.’ Chantal Akerman, ‘Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman: Excerpts from an Interview with Camera Obscura, November 1976’, Camera Obscura 1, no. 2 (1977): 119–21, 120.

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 95

95

116 Martin, ‘Chantal Akerman’s Films’, p. 35; Laura Mulvey, ‘Guest Appearances: Interview with Chantal Akerman’, Time Out 3 (1979): 19. 117 Michel Ciment, ‘The State of Cinema’, 46th San Francisco International Film Festival (2003); Jonathan Romney, ‘In Search of Lost Time’, Sight & Sound 20, no. 3 (2010): 43–4. 118 Michael Walsh has suggested that Akerman’s work fits a ‘second durational cinema’ that follows that of Warhol and Snow. Michael Walsh, ‘The First Durational Cinema and the Real of Time’, in Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds), Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 59–70, 69. 119 Akerman on Jeanne Dielman, interview, Criterion Collection. 120 Treillou, ‘Interview with Chantal Akerman’, p. 92.

08/06/2021 13:44

96

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Credits Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles Belgium & France 1975 A Film Written and Directed by Chantal Anne Akerman Director of Photography Babette Mangolte Film Editor Patricia Canino Art Director Philippe Graff Production Companies Paradise Films (Brussels) and Unité Trois (Paris) present Made with the assistance of Ministère de la Culture française de Belgique Production Managers [Co-producers for Paradise Films] Evelyne Paul Corinne Jenart Assistant Directors Marilyn Watelet Serge Brodsky Marianne De Muylder Script Supervisor Danae Maroulacou [Maroulakou] Camera Operator Bénédicte Delesalle Assisted by Nicole Geoffroy Electricians Guy Hiernaux [Hiernau] Renelde Dupont [Art Director] Assisted by Jean-Pol Ferbus

9781839022821_txt_app.indd 96

Make-up Artist Éliane Marcus Delphine Seyrig’s Hairstyling and Make-up by Éliane Marcus Jan Decorte’s Hairstyling by Charles Olivier Assistant Film Editors Catherine Huhardeaux Martine Chicot Sound Recordists Bénie Deswarte Françoise Van Thienen Sound Mixer Jean-Paul Loublier Sound Editor Alain Marchal Sound Effects Jacky Dufour Sound Studio Avia Films Titles Studio Gamma Laboratory L.T.C. With Thanks to Sabena uncredited Producer (Paradise Films) Chantal Akerman Producers (Unité Trois) Alain Dahan Paul Vecchiali Liliane de Kermadec Guy Cavagnac Costumes Philippe Graff CAST Delphine Seyrig Jeanne Dielman

Jan Decorte Sylvain Dielman, Jeanne’s son Henri Storck client #1 Jacques Doniol-Valcroze client #2 Yves Bical client #3 uncredited Chantal Akerman voice of neighbour Production Details Filmed February–March 1975 for five weeks on location in Brussels (Belgium). Budget reported as $120,000. An early title was Elle vogue vers l’Amérique. Release Details First shown at the Cannes Film Festival on 14 May 1975 French theatrical distributor: Olympic Distribution (released on 21 January 1976). Rated: all. French visa number: 45424. French theatrical re-release distributor: Carlotta Films (released on 25 April 2007). Belgian theatrical release: Progrès Films (released mid-May 1976). Running time: 201 mins / 35mm / [1.66:1] / in colour / sound: mono World sales: Artco-Films (Geneva, Switzerland) Credits compiled by Julian Grainger

08/06/2021 13:44