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Chantal Akerman was 25 years old when she made
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080
Bruxelles (1975), a 200 minute movie where (as
critics are so fond of saying) nothing happens, at
least nothing that we are used to seeing on screen.
Perhaps it takes the audacity of youth to create
something so unprecedented, ambitious, aggressively
defiant and demanding. After all, enfant artiste
terrible Orson Welles was the same age when he made
Citizen Kane. Jeanne Dielman is in
many ways Akerman's Kane, a shot across the
bow of the filmmaking world and the film that
continues to be hailed as her masterpiece.
Criterion's DVD release is an event, the American
home video debut of a film rarely seen in any form
in the U.S.
Middle-aged widow and single mother Jeanne Dielman
(Delphine Seyrig) lives a carefully structured life
with a clockwork routine. She wakes up before dawn,
sees her son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) off to school,
cleans every last dish in her tiny and spotless
kitchen, then continues on with the errands and
duties of her day. One of those duties just happens
to be servicing an afternoon client as a part-time
prostitute. Jeanne is all business when the bell
rings and she puts the pot on low simmer to welcome
her client for the day. It's creepily expressive
the way Akerman frames her head out of the shot
when she answers the door, matching Seyrig's
inexpressive formality with each man. Where Akerman
observes Jeanne performing her tasks – cooking,
cleaning, doing dishes, bathing – with unblinking
attention, her camera remains outside the bedroom
door. With a single, aggressively jarring cut, we
jump ahead to Jeanne leading her client out and
returning to the stove with the same dispassionate,
unhurried deliberation. Her timing is impeccable –
she removes the simmering dish from the burner and
puts it in a warmer for dinner – and every reminder
of her visitor is swept away by the time Sylvain
returns home for the equally ordered evening
routine.
This is the daily life of Jeanne Dielman and
Ackerman observes it in exacting detail, in long
takes and full frame compositions from an unmoving
and unblinking camera. Cinematographer Babette
Mangolte, who worked with the young director on
numerous films, brings Akerman's vision to the
screen with crisp, precise images that are at once
formally simple and bristling with tension. Against
the Spartan backdrop of her cramped apartment –
small, clean, austere, a living space stripped of
clutter or personal touches – her every gesture
takes on great significance. And as we become
attuned to that routine, Akerman starts to shake it
up.
Akerman traces her interest in filmmaking back to a
viewing of Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou
when she was fifteen years, while her philosophy
and style was greatly influenced by the East Coast
experimental filmmakers like Jonas Mekas and
Michael Snow, whose films she watched during a long
stay in New York City in the early seventies. You
can see their echoes in her exacting direction and
dedication to temporal integrity. But the film is
also a reflection of her life (she grew up
surrounded by women) and her frustration that such
lives were never shown on screen, as if they had no
value. After a career of self-financed shorts and
features, she applied for funds for a more
ambitious feature on the life of a housewife. As
she worked on her screenplay, she pared away
subplots and eliminated characters to focus on
Jeanne's life in her apartment. And to see her
vision through, she put together a predominantly
female crew, which was difficult in the
mid-seventies when women had yet to enter many
professions.
A chance meeting with Delphine Seyrig, star of such
revered films as Last Year at Marienbad,
Accident and The Discreet Charm of the
Bourgeousie, at a film festival gave the young
filmmaker the confidence to send her the script. On
the set, Akerman gave technically precise direction
to the Seyrig while the actress pushed Akerman for
Jeanne's psychological backstory. The tension
between the approaches – Seyrig looking for
motivation while Akerman was determined to push
emotion and explanation away in favor of
illustrative surface detail she knew from
experience ("I'd seen these actions all my life") –
blossomed into a remarkable creation and a
brilliant performance. Delphine Seyrig offers a
fully defined portrait of a woman who keeps her
emotions bottled up under a impenetrable mask of
perfectly applied make-up and impersonal
politeness. Her measured, confident performance
suggests the familiarity of routine turned
instinct, yet she communicates a world of character
through her carriage, her body language and the
rhythm of her movement, and she shows the cracks in
her façade with the subtlest of shifts. Some ninety
minutes into the film, Jeanne leaves the bedroom
almost imperceptibly disheveled, her perfect hair
out of place, her walk not as sure, and forgets to
return the lid to the tureen where she keeps the
household money. It's a major disruption in her
clockwork perfection and the first suggestion that
her orderly routine is about to dramatically
unravel.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080
Bruxelles is an epic portrait of a life that
has rarely been seen on screen – three days in the
routine of a homemaker in just under three and a
half hours. The rhythms of the routine, the
integrity of time within the long takes and
exactingly sculpted sequences, the slow unraveling
of the confidence and perfection of her timetable
is an essential part of the experience of the film.
This is the business of housewifery in exacting
detail, but it is also portrait of a woman who has
defined herself by her routine, carefully removing
any emotional connection to the world. Both
formally exacting and highly stylized, it's both a
bold redefinition of "realism" and a radical,
unprecedented approach to presenting the lives of
women on screen.
Criterion's two-disc edition features a wealth of
illuminating supplements. Delphine Seyrig champions
Akerman's vision when the two are interviewed on
French TV in 1976 (the director barely gets a word
in after an obligatory introduction). Akerman gets
her turn in a new 20-minute interview shot for the
DVD in April 2009, where she remembers the origins
of the film and reflects on working with Seyrig on
the set. "I was writing from instinct and having to
reach to explain why," she recalls. There's also a
new interview with cinematographer Babette Mangolte
discussing her collaborations with Akerman,
excerpts from the 1997 program Chantan Akerman
on Chantal Akerman with the director reflecting
on her career and philosophy, Akerman's 2007
interview with her mother Natalia Akerman, and the
1968 short Saute me ville, Akerman's debut
film.
But the most illuminating is Autour de Jeanne
Dielman, a priceless 69-minute documentary shot
on the set of the film on B&W videotape by actor
Sami Frey. It's riveting to watch the communication
between the 25-year-old Akerman and veteran star
Seyrig, the young artist going on instinct and
guts, the actress trying to find her way into the
character and into the film, each speaking a
different language. Seyrig is fully supportive of
the vision, but she demands to be directed in ways
she understand and asks: "How can I play her if I
don't know all her secrets?" For Akerman, there are
no secrets, which in some ways that is the secret
that Akerman has to reach to explain. Meanwhile,
she acts out, in exacting detail, her vision of the
character. As the two artists struggle to
communicate, the vision comes to life.
For more information about Jeanne Dielman, 23,
quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, visit The Criterion
Collection. To order Jeanne Dielman, 23,
quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, go to
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by Sean Axmaker
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