Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Signifying the Non-Event
When interviewed, Chantal Akerman says that events in Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, start to unravel after the title character has an orgasm with the second client, who visits her within the film’s three-day time span. While we can read an orgasm into the encounter with the third client, whom she shortly after murders, the second one cannot possibly comprehend except as something that has taken place. There is no doubt that after this second client’s visit, the usually meticulous Jeanne becomes clumsy and forgetful, but we cannot have a categorical inkling of the reason why, because the client’s visit to her bedroom takes place entirely off-screen. In the sequence with the third client, we see her writhing on the bed, and we can read it as pleasure or pain (or their combination), as she seems to be having pleasure and yet pushing the man away. There is ambivalence in this scene with the third client. However, it isn’t elliptically eschewed — it is ambiguously presented. This ambiguity is then followed by what may seem the inexplicable — Jeanne stabs the man to death with a pair of scissors.
Sight and Sound's ten-yearly poll announcing the best film ever made in 2022, awarded top place to Jeanne Dielman. Commenting on the film, Paul Schrader reckoned they rigged it. “The first was that they vastly expanded the contributors. You’ve got people who are not actual film critics weighing in on a critical poll, and the voting list goes from 500 or 600 to 2,000. That’s a big change. The second is that they’ve counted each film as equal. And then you had the #MeToo movement, which meant that everyone thought there should be a female director on their list.” (Sight and Sound) Schrader treats Akerman’s film seriously but questions its sudden status. When Vertigo moved into the top slot, beating Citizen Kane, it had previously been in second place. Akerman’s film went from thirty-sixth to first. Schrader found this odd and thus explains it by seeing a huge influx of new critics and a movement that made feminist cinema and films directed by women newly significant. Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ remains a demanding text embedded in structuralist and psychoanalytic jargon, but it is one of the most referenced works in the humanities, and, as a deracinated phrase, the male gaze has entered the culture. Akerman’s film, more than most of its time, appeared to have found a way around that look, and had absorbed aspects of De Sica, Warhol and second-wave feminism to find both a form and content that could make the work accessibly inexplicable, or inexplicably accessible.
We will say more about Vittorio De Sica, Andy Warhol and second-wave feminism later, but let us return to the orgasm that unravels Jeanne’s domestic life. Akerman believes “…it’s having that orgasm that is the first acte manque. And then it's a series of actes manques after that because she is not strong enough to keep up those barriers between herself and her unconscious any more.” (Camera Obscura) An acte manque translates as an accident on purpose, with the conscious self seeing it as an accident that the unconscious self offers as deliberation. A Freudian slip is a common example, with the person saying one thing while meaning another, but the thing said isn’t so much an error as a revelation. Just as Freud sees dreams revealing our unconscious desires, so such a slip can also be enormously revealing. In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman presents her title character as a woman who doesn’t make mistakes. Everything she does is meticulous and habitual, and while many a film will respect a creature of habit's habits, a montage sequence will suffice to convey that these are things the characters do each day — or the film will follow in the opening sequence actions that we can clearly infer are regular. Anything from Notting Hill to As Good as It Gets informs us of these habits without devoting hours of film time to the habits themselves. An unsympathetic though informed critic might invoke Yvon Winters’ the fallacy of imitative form: that you replicate the feeling in the style — "to say that poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a sophistical justification for bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to "express" the loose and sprawling American continent.” (Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry) By analogy, a filmmaker who wants to show the boredom of a woman’s domestic life ought not to create in the viewer a boredom equal to it. It is the sort of position John Coleman took when it was first released, saying “the film's time-span covers a Tuesday (stew and potatoes), Wednesday (wiener schnitzel) and heady Thursday (meat loaf . . .) . . . Relatively speaking, the schnitzel was rather skimped, but I now know how to make a meat loaf. (New Statesman)
Yet this is where the acte manque meets the Warholian, or Bazinian notion of film time. In sixties works like Sleep and Eat, Warhol tested the viewer’s patience by insisting the film would offer what it says on the tin — apt for an artist whose most famous work is perhaps his Campbell’s Soup cans. He does show someone sleeping, and he does show someone eating — and for longer than we might wish. Eat is only 45 minutes long, but that is still lengthy when it comes to watching a character eat on screen, as it replicates something close to someone’s lunch hour. Equally, Sleep runs to over six hours, which is near to replicating a decent night’s kip. This is imitative form with a vengeance, and we might think of a comment by the writer and editor Dai Vaughan. “If at times he [the editor] begins to feel that editing is less a creative act than a mutilation visited upon some defenceless simulacrum of life, he is nevertheless forced by the logic of his craft to acknowledge the distinction between film and reality: that film is about something, where reality is not.” (For Documentary) Akerman may have been influenced by Warhol and others after seeing their work in New York, and could see how liberating nothing happening on screen could be. She saw “ a lot of films that were at Anthology Film Archives: Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, George Landow, some Hollis Frampton, too. And I discovered that you can make a film without narrative or point of view. It’s strange, it was really a relief in some ways….it was like a liberation. So I made that film Hotel Monterey. It’s not true that it’s totally not a narrative, because it has a sense of continuity, you know, it starts at the beginning on the main floor and finishes at the roof. It starts at night and finishes at dawn.” (Film Quarterly) Yet this entirely silent film that she made three years before Jeanne Dielman, offers an indifference to narrative demand that her three-hour thirty-minute feature doesn’t quite share. Akerman may have said after Jeanne Dielman’s release that “I only want to make narrative films” (Film Quarterly), but it’s as if the resistance to narrative development lingers in the film, all the better to flirt with boredom while simultaneously tantalising the viewer with narrative possibility. Warhol’s purpose was to reduce film to a degree zero that would banish narration and connotation: that the events on screen wouldn’t go anywhere, and wouldn’t invite interpretive meaning either. The man who sleeps isn’t going to discover after twenty minutes of snoozing that someone is breaking into his home, and his sleep isn’t a metaphor for anything either. “When you just look out of a window, that’s just enjoyable” Warhol claims “it takes up time.” (‘Andy Warhol and Boredom’) If, for Warhol, looking at what is happening on the street below can be interesting, then why not film events of no greater magnitude?
In this sense, Jeanne Dielman is far removed from Warhol: Akerman wants narrative and connotation — she wants us to infer what has taken place on day two in the bedroom, and wants us to see this orgasm as of some interpretive significance. “With the second client, something’s happening, and you understand from the beginning and from what she says that she had never had pleasure, and you can understand what can happen with a man . . . it was an orgasm, for me, even though I don’t show it, that provokes all the little things that happen afterwards.” Akerman insists this isn’t especially psychoanalytic: “It’s not a Freudian explanation—because everybody told me, you know, that when you have one, you want to have another one. But for me, in her situation, the fact to not have an orgasm was her last strength, you know, the last space of freedom, that she didn’t let . . . you know, the last space of freedom [was] to not have that orgasm. And because she had it, because she was too weak to not have it . . . Everything was falling apart afterwards.” (Film Quarterly)
If we accept Akerman’s take on the film, one that can only be provisional since we won’t find the explanation in the work but only in Akerman’s words about it, then we see that from one perspective what may be viewed as a prison can, from another, be viewed as the exploration of self-control. Rather than simply seeing the film as about a woman and domestic drudgery, there is no reason why we can’t view it as a work exploring what it means to be a creature of habit. If we have noted numerous films indicate the consistency of a character’s deeds before the start of a narrative, and that these habits will be interrupted, all the better to show that someone needs to change their life, Akerman’s work can be seen to reverse this, and partly why it is so important that it shows in detail her routines. In Notting Hill and As Good as it Gets, all we need to know is that these are people stuck in their ways, and the plot is there to unglue the characters from their daily customs. Akerman’s comment about the orgasm and Jeanne’s wariness of them proposes we shouldn’t see Jeanne as a frigid housewife caught in domesticity, even if Patricia Sequeira Brás, for example, has a point when she says, “Jeanne’s world is reduced to domestic tasks, and the exact and contrived manner in which she performs them functions only to underline the banality of her existence.” (Parse) The banality of her existence, however, has a value, and part of the point behind Akerman making the film was to show this important work that has been almost entirely absent from the screen. As she says, “I give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily gestures of a woman. They are the lowest in the hierarchy of film images. A kiss or a car crash come higher, and I don’t think that’s an accident. It’s because these are women’s gestures that they count for so little.” (Film Quarterly)
This allows us to return to Andre Bazin and some comments he makes while writing on Vittorio de Sica’s Umberto D. Bazin makes much of the maid’s awakening in the film and says, the “unit even in a classical film would be ‘the maid’s getting out of bed’; two or three brief shots would suffice to show this. De Sica replaces this narrative unit with a series of ‘smaller’ events: she wakes up; she crosses the hall; she drowns the ants; and so on.” (What is Cinema?, Vol II) Bazin’s remarks can seem quite similar to Akerman’s, but this isn’t plagiarism on the Belgian director’s part, and not only because she is a filmmaker practising what she preaches, while Bazin was a brilliant critic and theorist, seeing hints of a possible future aesthetic in works of Neo-realism. It is also that Bazin’s comments are pre-Warholian, and Akerman’s come after experiencing the American experimental cinema of the sixties. Jeanne Dielman expands time through a similar content question, as in Umberto D, but does so with the formal properties of Warhol etc.’s work of the following decade. This doesn’t mean all we are saying is that Jeanne Dielman combines two cinematic movements and arrives at a fresh film, though that shouldn’t be underestimated. It is also that she sees the potential limitations evident in both when it comes to domesticity and time. In Umberto D. the film attends to the domestic as we see the maid making coffee in what would have been, in the 50s, a laboriously specific way. But compared to Warhol’s work in Eat and Sleep, it can seem that these small events are still too hastily offered. How to pass through the prism of the Warholian and arrive at the dramatically significant? In Umberto D., the film retains drama as we notice tears appearing on the maid’s face when she touches her now pregnant stomach. The domestic chores she does are contained by the revelation about how she feels about this pregnancy. The film doesn’t ask us to read very much into the gestures themselves, because the gestures and the drama remain distinguishable. It is as if Akerman’s question was how to put the gesture inside the deed, how to make us see Jeanne’s crisis without seeing it as extraneous to the action? In Umberto D., the maid could have been doing any number of other things or nothing in particular for us to understand the crisis she is going through — it is evident in the tears she shows, and in the touching of her stomach. In Jeanne Dielman, it must become evident through the domestic activities themselves, justifying Akerman’s need to concentrate on the chores and the necessity of the film’s running time.
If we can see the importance of neo-realism and the American avant-garde in the film, then perhaps no less important is the modernist idea of temporal expansion. In an essay on quickness, Italo Calvino says of a fairy tale he describes: “everything mentioned has a necessary function of the plot. The very first characteristic of a folktale is economy of expression. The most outlandish adventures are recounted with an eye fixed on the bare essentials.” (Six Memos for the Next Millennium) Modernism would often work in reverse: expanding time in the context of a narrative event. Obvious examples include Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, but we can see that the 19th-century novel was also full of details that a classic tragedy would have eschewed, offering the specifics of clothing, a person’s profession, and a given journey from A to B. Once you open up the space that goes beyond what would seem to be narrative necessity, then who is to say what you leave out and what you put in?
This becomes potentially an especially pressing question for cinema, full as it is of the extraneous detail even the most attentive of 19th-century novels, or the most exasperatingly specific 20th-century work, would offer. It is partly Warhol’s pointless point: that film is indiscriminate in what it films: you turn the camera on, and it shows all the information in a given room. The filmmaker can, of course, limit this by framing and focal length, but its capacity for choice can seem small next to the writer, because while the writer (in this sense, like the painter) starts with blankness, the filmmaker starts with fullness. It is why Vaughan can say of one work he was assembling in the editing suite: that “it was an acutely boring experience: not because there was nothing happening on the screen (there is never nothing happening); but because the camera was failing at these moments to reveal anything interesting about it.” (For Documentary) Vaughan’s point that there is never nothing happening on the screen differentiates it from a canvas that is blank, or a page that is free of words, and a good example of this is in the film that he goes on to mention, Warhol’s Empire. Watching the film post-9/11, we might be struck by the eeriness of a plane that appears to be flying close to the skyscraper. When Warhol made the film, the Twin Towers had still to be built, and even the notion of terrorism in the modern sense wasn’t quite present. “Of course, terrorism, including Palestinian terrorism, predated 1967, but the war changed its scope, scale, and very nature. Before the war, Palestinian terrorists struck at targets in Israel, often in cooperation with neighboring states. After the war, the Palestinians used terrorism to internationalize the conflict, hijacking and destroying airplanes, holding diplomats hostage, and even attacking Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics.” (Brookings) The PLO emboldened the IRA, The Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades and terrorism continued and was expanded under Al-Qaeda, ISIS and other Islamist groups in the 2000s. Few watching this moment in 1965 would have seen the plane as a harbinger of tragedy; many watching after 2001 would be unlikely to see anything else.
What does this tell us about the image? That there is no such thing as the empty screen, as there is the empty canvas and the empty page. Even Coleman all but admits this when saying that he was now able to make a meatloaf. Yet Akerman also acknowledges that Warhol’s frames were too empty for her — she wanted narrative possibilities within the exploration of what can seem like a gaze as fixed as Warhol’s. Jeannie Dielman is around 220 shots, at about a minute long on average, and the film works within a fixed frame. But while Empire runs to almost four times the length of Akerman’s film, and can be described as little more than the empire state building which turns its lights on at a certain point, and a few other details including that plane, we can say that Jeanne Dielman is about a housewife who has lost her husband, has a late teenage son at school, works from home as a prostitute and who, after an orgasm, kills one of her clients. We still wouldn’t be close to exhausting the plot. What we might wish to say, though, is that the film works from the degree zero of Warhol, over the porous narratives of neo-realism. In other words, neorealism gave space to minor events within a strong narrative, while Warhol gave temporal significance to the non-event. A film really could be about nothing because it was always going to show something. When an artist offered close to the painterly equivalent, it became a sueable offence. In 2021, the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Denmark gave artist Jens Haaning 532,549 Danish kroner (roughly $76,000), instructing him to make an artwork literally featuring real cash with the money they gave him. ‘’Instead, he turned in two blank canvases. Now, a court has ruled that he has to give the money back.” (Smithsonian)
An empty canvas was an empty canvas – Warhol’s ‘empty’ images still contained things. Yet on a filmic continuum, Warhol is closer to the empty frame, while De Sica is much closer to the full one. The irony in Warhol’s work is that the image is so lacking in content that the viewer might not even choose to seek out what it contains, partly because what it contains is more of the same thing. It is something (a man sleeping), but the variety is too limited to leave the viewer thinking they may have missed a detail because they weren’t concentrating hard enough. There are things to see within the frame (as there wouldn’t be within Haaning’s), but not enough to engage most people in questions about what is going on in it. Akerman’s purpose is to work close to the degree zero image, but then contain it with two things: one, the images that work low off the cinematic scale and that are usually excised from most films, and also to get us not just to read these images but also muse over how many we have failed to read when we understandably don’t see the murder coming.
From a certain perspective, Jeanne Dielman can be seen as a revenge narrative, and there were plenty in the 70s showing women abused by men and getting even, or others getting even for them — Last House on the Left, I Spit on Your Grave, Lady Snowblood and Lipstick. None of the films expected the viewer to reassess the information thus far offered and to understand the inexplicable nature of the deed. Whether the viewer agreed that vengeance was the way to go, nobody would have been in any doubt that this was a plausible outcome given the preceding events. But in Jeanne Dielman? If the outcome happens to be the same, can the premise be so clearly stated? It is one thing to be multiply raped in I Spit on Your Grave, and taking out the perpetrators; it is something else again to have an orgasm two days in a row with different men, both of whom have paid you, and then kill the second man. Akerman asks us to see the deed as inexplicable yet explainable — an action that makes no obvious sense but whose sense asks us obliquely to muse over what moments might have led to the action. It forces us to both observe and speculate: to watch the film closely for signs that things aren’t quite right, and wonder over which of these domestic moments can pass for very nuanced versions of foreshadowing, details that would be made explicit in another film.
Some might find comparisons with mainly exploitation cinema insulting to a work that is now regarded as the greatest film ever made. Yet our purpose isn’t to downgrade Akerman’s film; it is to understand an aspect of its odd impact and Akerman’s insistence that she made a piece of narrative cinema. To situate the film somewhere between Warhol and the rather less well-known Meir Zarchi (the director of I Spit on Your Grave) allows us to comprehend what Akerman is resisting and what she is invoking. She is resisting images that tell the story, but she is invoking a story the images tell. However, while in a traditional narrative set up, the images invoke the story in advance, offering us details that create curiosity in the telling as a causal chain develops (rape, sorrow, anger and revenge), and uses images that create a clear hierarchy that is linked to this development, in Jeanne Dielman, the images lack this escalating force. This makes all images simultaneously pregnant with meaning and devoid of narrative thrust. If the viewer remains closer to the expectant than the observant, those images will be empty; if the viewer is closer to the observant than the expectant, they have a fullness most narratively-oriented images lack. This appears to be the tension Akerman seeks, well aware that the film image is never empty as the canvas or the page happens to be. In experimental film, this contradiction can become central to the aesthetic: that the image lacks narrative content but at the same time isn’t empty, and a certain species of frustration can come out of the contrast between the feeling that nothing is there and the evident fact that something is — even if apparently no more than a building or a person sleeping. It is true that some filmmakers have pushed further than Warhol into the emptiness of the image, but often this is to invoke the properties of the medium rather than the potential nothingness of it, with Tony Conrad’s The Flicker a good example.
It is out of this not blank but empty image that Jeanne Dielman can be understood, and that out of this empty image a story, however belated and however oblique, can be entertained. It would be too obvious and all but useless to say that Akerman wants empty images to reflect the emptiness of Jeanne’s life — that would return us to Winter’s fallacy of imitative form. It would also be contrary to examining Jeanne’s life were the film to offer it in a more exciting manner than it happens to be led. The film wants to detail the life, not reflect the boredom — an important distinction that makes the film as long as it is and as ripe for retrospective enquiry. The viewer may not know (has no reason to know) that Jeanne had an orgasm during the second client’s visit, but we will know that after this encounter that quite a few things start to go wrong. She burns dinner, has to go out again to pick up potatoes, finds her seat in the cafe taken by someone else and so on. When she then goes on to murder her next client after she has an orgasm, it may not seem unreasonable to assume that she had one the previous day also, and this is what led to her losing her equilibrium. Sure, someone could insist there are two problems with such a claim — the first is that, because whatever happened in the room was offscreen, we are speculating with almost no evidence of the moment, and that some events that break into her habits are contingent, like her visit to the cafe. Someone else might say that is the point — that Akerman leaves the cause for Jeanne’s confusion offscreen, but she is undeniably confused after this moment and not before it. They could also say that because of the various events that take place after this moment, her day is no longer as regulated, and so she turns up at the cafe later than usual. It wouldn’t then be contingent, but a consequence of her muddled state.
What matters here is not the specifics of this for our purposes, but that the film allows for such a response. A film that remains in the abstract experimental sphere will not invite such speculation and observation, and a film that exists too completely in the narrative realm won’t either for inverse reasons — that its narrative is too categorical. By seeing cinema as an empty medium, Akerman fills it to the brim with non-hierarchical images and then ends her film with very hierarchical images indeed. When Akerman says a kiss or a car crash is higher, so also is an orgasm a woman hasn’t previously experienced in her life and, too, a murder. Yet these ‘high’ images are prefaced with thousands of neutral ones, many of them inflected slightly in the wake of the second client’s visit as we begin to realise things are going wrong. In the rape revenge film, what goes wrong goes wrong quickly, and much of the film thereafter shows the wronged getting justice. We aren’t in any doubt why the women are doing what they are doing, but Jeanne Dielman insists on this puzzlement. However, this bemusement allows for a greater political awareness that helps make sense of what might seem the obvious: that Akerman’s film is viewed, of course, as a feminist masterpiece. This won’t rest on her murderousness, even if she shares this with all those women avenging their abuse in the rape-revenge thrillers, and partly why any number of films with strong women with strong motives aren’t feminist masterpieces, even if they coincided with third wave feminism of the nineties — films including (the superior) Thelma and Louise, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Alien 3. These are symptomatically weak works that, like the rape-revenge films, may show women with agency in their lives much greater than Jeanne evidences, but that have little value as critique, partly because they don’t at all entertain Akerman’s formal questions over an image’s hierarchy. They are pressed into plot rather than decompressed into dispersive signs of oppression.
Rarely talked about but consistent with Akerman’s project, is Marleen Gorris’s Dutch film A Question of Silence, which shows three women murdering a man in a boutique, and the court case explores what might have led the women to do so, as we see the women in various contexts that might lead to frustration and contempt. The female defence lawyer announces that the women are sane and were motivated by comprehending a gender reality. When the judge proposes that surely the women could just as easily have killed a woman, the women in the court burst into collective laughter. Gorris’s film however doesn’t pass through the American avant-garde, doesn’t assume the empty image that Akerman’s aesthetic demands as we must notice in the Belgian director’s work numerous details that in most films remain, if you like, inattentive images. It is the paradoxical advantage of the empty image: that if modified with even a smidgen of narrative content, it can become alive far more perceptually than those the plot presses into purpose. There isn’t much in common between Wim Wenders and Alfred Hitchcock, yet they both knew from their diametrically opposed positions that narrative ‘emptiness’ could become significant. Wenders once set up a shot aware that a train was going to come by soon, “except the two minutes later someone ran into the shot from the right, jumped over the tracks just a couple of yards in front of the camera, and ran out of the left edge of the frame. The moment he disappeared, even more surprising, the train thundered into the picture, also from the right.” Wenders notes that this tiny action signalled the beginning of a ‘story’. “What is wrong with the man? Is he being followed? Does he want to kill himself? Why is he in such a hurry. Etc.” (The Logic of Images) Hitchcock more famously proposed: “The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it…In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!” (Mubi)
Wenders worked consistently from the empty images he assumed, and Hitchcock took advantage of emptiness all the better to generate suspense. However, they are both aware that film can have at its root this emptiness that we have made clear isn’t the same as blankness. When Akerman says, ‘’the film was the result of my research, on form in the USA and on storytelling in Europe” (Film Quarterly), she sums up well the balance the work displays. The risk for cinema is that it falls into the slump of its ontological status as a passive recording device, or anxiously resists such inactivity with hyper-narrative. Yet because the film image is never without meaning, this gives the filmmaker numerous possibilities to find it within the almost infinite pool that film can draw from. By focusing on plot, most images become subordinate, slaves to the master of narrative. But what Akerman understands, like Wenders, is that by removing the necessity of plot, you can free up other images that at any moment may become paramount. After so ostensibly inexplicable an action as Jeanne’s murderous deed, we don’t anticipate what will happen next (her escape; her prison sentence), nor have we witnessed what has very clearly motivated it (as we find in the rape-revenge films). Instead, by putting together apparently empty images with an inexplicable action, the film activates its image reservoir and insists that we read the film narratively. If the revenge film asks us to anticipate with relish a heinous act, Akerman asks what might happen if she reverses the structure and turns the awfulness of rape into the pleasure of an orgasm, yet sees the orgasm as a certain type of violation, and that can be understood in such a way because of all that we have seen preceding it.
After all, Akerman insists that “I don’t consider that to have an orgasm is always the best thing. It’s not like [WR] Reich: fucking, have an orgasm, and that’s it.” (Film Quarterly) For Reich, orgasms matter: “to start with Freud's original formula: the neurosis is a product of an unsuccessful repression; accordingly, the first condition for its cure consists of the removal of the sexual repression and the freeing of the repressed sexual demands.” (Sex-Pol) Introducing Reich’s collection of essays from which the above quote comes, Bertell Ollman says, “Marx claimed that from the sexual relationship 'one can…judge man’s whole level of development…the relationship of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being.” Ollman adds, “the women’s liberation movement has provided ample evidence to show that in our society this relationship is one of inequality, one in which the woman is used as an object.” (Sex-Pol) Reich combined Marx and Freud and believed that we can’t quite have one without the other, but Akerman wonders whether, from a certain perspective, an orgasm is the last thing Jeanne needs in her life, given how she has structured it and why everything falls apart afterwards.
Yet if things fall apart for Jeanne, they start coming together for the viewer, as the dead time the film accumulates in its first half becomes the symptoms of chaos in the second, with many of the same actions repeated but without the equivalent effectiveness and control. Then, by the end of the film, we wonder what generated that loss of balance and may believe it rests on an orgasm that we do see, and muse over that earlier moment omitted (the second client in the bedroom) and link the two events. Yet in this linkage, we will be in the realm of speculation, which can be the height of cinematic naivety or its opposite, depending on the film and the nature of that speculation. To muse over how many children a romantic comedy couple will end up having is the idlest of speculation if it isn’t provoked by something in the film. However, if we accept that Akerman’s film focuses on the emptiness of images that we then fill in ourselves, based on the diegetic content provided, then all sorts of speculation have their uses. Indeed, it is what Akerman herself insists upon when saying that we have to understand Jeanne has never had pleasure before, because of what Jeanne says. This would rest presumably on her marrying a man she and others didn’t find attractive, either, no matter the money he started to make, which made him more appealing to people. Nothing suggests the attraction increased for Jeanne.
Ivone Margulies reckoned “the film upped the ante on neorealism’s mandate of ‘social attention.’ Akerman’s real-time, matter-of-fact presentation of a woman’s everyday seemed to mock the timidity of the neorealist demand for “a ninety-minute film showing the life of a man to whom nothing happens.” Margulies adds, “in postwar film and video, banal kitchen scenes (in Umberto D., 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Semiotics of the Kitchen) are signs of an inclusive realism, a new politicized energy. Akerman’s ‘images between images,’ those scenes neglected in conventional representation, gave this impulse a strong feminist accent.” (Criterion) “The scholarship on Jeanne Dielman holds its own aura as part of the launch and momentum of ‘cinefeminism' in the mid-1970s”, Patricia White says, “…and revisiting it in the context of teaching is as rewarding for me as rewatching the film.” (Cinefiles) There may be little to add to much of what has been said over the years about Jeanne Dielman, but we can conclude the film may have proved an important work in feminist film, and was no less significant as a way out of a potential impasse. When Akerman says she saw the films of Mekas, Snow and others in New York, she insisted it opened her mind to many things: “the relationship between film and your body, time as the most important thing in film, time and energy. Seeing their films gave me the courage to try something else.” (Film Quarterly) Before going to New York, she thought Bergman and Fellini were the greatest of filmmakers, but, after her time Stateside, she could see what was missing, and in some ways, this is what Jeanne Dielman adds. It balances the formal tension with the psychological demands evident in Fellini and Bergman. But without sacrificing one for the other. There may be far more formal properties to Fellini and Bergman than Akerman claims, yet their relationship with time could be seen as more theatrical or novelistic. Experimental film allowed her to see ‘pure cinema’ without feeling obligated to continue in the style of Hotel Monterey, which is closer to that purity as it films the hotel of the title with no characterisation and, of course, not even sound. Yet Je tu il Elle can seem a little close to the Bergmanesque, even if it was made after Hotel Monterey. “I made Je tu il elle in 1974, but it’s based on a story I had written in ’68 or ’69, something like that. And it’s very personal. It is not autobiographical, because it is very structured; but it has some elements that I really experienced when I was younger— because, you know, I had written it in ’68…” (Film Quarterly)
Jeanne Dielman is as healthy a marriage of the American avant garde and a European sensibility as any — a film that asks us to look at its form all the while offering space to speculate over its content. It rescued Akerman from a potential creative impasse, allowed her to marry different aesthetic movements to find her own sensibility, and has no doubt proved an important work for many female filmmakers, of which there are ever-increasing numbers, and who are capable of ever-increasing box-office returns. “The yearly Celluloid Ceiling report by San Diego State University found that women accounted for 16% of directors working on the 100 highest-grossing films in 2020, up from 12% in 2019 and only 4% in 2018.” (Guardian) Joanna Hogg, Laura Wandel, Lynn Ramsay and Laura Poitras all put the film in their top ten. Making box-office hits was never quite Akerman’s concern (no matter a romantic work with William Hurt and Juliet Binoche called A Couch in New York), but she would surely be very happy that her influence has become enormous, and surely still not yet exhausted.
© Tony McKibbin