Jeanne Dielman, 23 Rue de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (no 47)

by Allan Fish

(Belgium/France 1975 201m) DVD1/2 (Belgium only)

Aka. Jeanne Dielman

Those darn potatoes

p  Corinne Jénat, Evelyne Paul  d/w  Chantal Akerman  ph  Babette Mangolte  ed  Patricia Canino  art  Philippe Graff

Delphine Seyrig (Jeanne Dielman), Jan Decorte, (Sylvain Dielman) Henri Storck (1^st caller), Yves Bical (3^rd caller), Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (2^nd caller), Chantal Akerman (neighbour – voice),

This list of mini-essays is supposed to cover the history of the moving image; large screen, small screen, wide screen and standard screen; silent, talkie, English language and foreign language.  Of all the works put forward, few can be seen as more problematic than Chantal Akerman’s seminal feminist work of the seventies.  There is no other work listed within – at least no work made after 1915 – that is actually a non-moving picture.  In short, the camera never moves, and remains static for its full three hour plus duration.  More than that, even the action itself could be seen as tending towards inertia.  Yet that in itself is precisely the point.

            The story, such as it is, takes place over 48 hours – from Tuesday to Thursday – and concerns the minutiae in the life of a widowed housewife, the eponymous Jeanne Dielman.  She lives only with her youthful and somewhat intellectually challenged son, Sylvain, and supports their existence by receiving gentleman callers in the afternoons.  The film shows this, but also the drab drudgery of her daily life.

            It’s the long takes and stationery camera that marks it out as most revolutionary, every sequence shot in real time, so that everyday tasks take everyday periods of time to complete; peeling potatoes, knitting, cooking, having a bath, washing up, polishing shoes, reading, etc.  There are times when it feels as if we’re not watching a movie at all.  This world couldn’t be further from the erotic flavour of the daytime prostitutes seen in Godard’s sixties opuses Vivre sa Vie and Deux Ou Trois Choses que je sais d’elle, for here the actual sex is reduced to just another banal task in a truly demoralising routine.  Many of these long, protracted takes lead seemingly nowhere in particular, but in some ways perfectly capture the psyche of the female protagonist.  Do they explain the violent – yet so casual that you’d miss it if you looked away – climax, where she murders a client by stabbing him with scissors?  Not entirely, but it does add to the enigma. 

            When asked to sum up the aura of the film, some critics have talked about it being the ultimate fly on the wall movie, and yet they seem to be missing the point entirely.  One almost has the feeling that there are cameras hidden away inside gadgets within the Dielman home, making one feel we are not so much watching a film as observing a surveillance operation.  The question then becomes, is Jeanne, like Truman Burbank two decades later, aware she is being watched?  Seemingly not, and yet there’s a deliberate nature to proceedings even then.  One could almost come to believe that the final act was not impulsive at all, but rather an act of premeditated murder, which in itself blurs the line between what’s staged and what isn’t.  It’s maddening, truly maddening, and yet it stimulates and intoxicates you.

            The rigid camera takes the cineaste back in time some sixty years and more to the time when the camera really did stand still, when silent films didn’t move but were rather a series of related tableaux.  However, those old films did at least give the illusion of movement, while Akerman insists on dwelling on the lack of it here.  One could read it as the way her life has ground to a halt, one could read it any number of ways, but in the end it and she remains an enigma.  How appropriate then that Jeanne is played by that supreme enigma of the European art house cinema, Delphine Seyrig.  As on various occasions in the past, hers is not a performance, it’s an existence, a being, and as quiet, subdued and monotonous as it may be, it’s 100% real.