JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1975)
Director/Screenplay: Chantel Anne Akerman
4 YEARS EARLIER:
(David stares at his computer, talking to himself like he's recording his own voiceover and thinking it was normal behavior.)
(David stares at his computer, talking to himself like he's recording his own voiceover and thinking it was normal behavior.)
DAVID
Ah, there we go. My personal Top Ten List, in accordance for this edition of BFI's "Sight and Sound" poll, as well as some predictions for the results, and it's posted.
I really hope "Vertigo" doesn't win again; that really was a bummer. Over "Citizen Kane", what were they thinking?
(Annoyed sigh)
I hope at least "Psycho" does better this time. Well, you know what, whether "Citizen Kane" comes back or something else, I'm sure something great will win. That should be my next Canon of Film post. Whatever film wins the poll, or-, well, it will probably be something I've already written on, won't it? No matter, I'll do whatever the highest one is that I haven't posted yet, there we go. And I'm sure it's not gonna be a complete curveball. Maybe "Tokyo Story" or something else I haven't posted on yet, but would love to rewatch. That would be fun. So, now I get two blogposts out of this that I really don't have to think too much about. Even if they screw it up completely, it's gonna be at least be a film that's familiar to everyone. Every cinephile at least.
A FEW DAYS LATER
(David stares at computer intently confused.)
‘Jeanne Dielman’ Tops Sight & Sound’s 2022 Poll of the Best Films of All Time
I'm sorry, they picked what film?!
(Long confused pause)
"Jeanne Dielman..."? Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
PRESENT TIME
(Long deep sigh)
I guess you're now wondering, that if I had these clear succinct plans to cover "Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" right after it was named the greatest film of all-time by the BFI, the one list that even film people who hate lists actually take somewhat seriously, why am I only now writing this Canon of Film post? Um, see when "Vertigo" won in 2012, I didn't like the choice and was pretty vocal about it, but I wrote my post on "Vertigo" and joined in on the discussion of the list, and somewhat already kinda suspected that "Vertigo" would be the go-to alternative to "Citizen Kane", just based on the tone of the cinephile world. I was hoping I was reading it wrong, but sure enough, that happened and I had something pre-prepared long before then anyway. I was prepared for a lot of scenarios; I even brought up in that post that female directors, like Chantal Akerman were probably gonna do better than before on this version of the list, as per a lot of the trends in Hollywood and in general as 2022 was a peak time for promoting the introduction of female authors of all kinds into the literary canon, including film.
What I hadn't prepared for, like, at all, or even seen predicted, was that, "Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" would win the poll. And by that I mean,- I hadn't seen that movie.
I'd heard about it, I knew a little bit about Akerman,- but I never thought they'd go so outside my immediate knowledge base;- well, not my knowledge base, but that a film that I hadn't seen yet would top the list! I thought I had seen all the major films that I could reasonably believe would win this poll! I know this poll has been a lot less predictable, but Jesus, I felt like I fell out of a boat and missed the water.
And also I couldn't get to around watching it, for a couple years. I definitely jumped it up on my Netflix queue, although they weren't DVDs through the mail anymore so now that's just a long list of movies and TV shows that I haven't watched yet, but I already was way behind on the current films I was supposed to be watching and didn't want to make it just jump the entire queue right away. Plus, life got in the way as that's when my mom had gotten sick.... (I certainly thought a lot about her watching this film. My mother and my grandmother come to think of it.)
And also, this wasn't even an easy film to particularly get ahold of; my library didn't have a copy, it wasn't streaming on any site I owned a subscription to, and frankly I couldn't afford a new streaming service at the time, just to watch it. So, yeah, this blogpost got delayed and pushed aside; I really had no preparation for a film that I hadn't seen before, and a film by a filmmaker I really hadn't watched much of at all.
The only Akerman film I had seen was her last film "No Home Movie" which, unfortunately I saw a version that didn't have subtitles and my French isn't that good.... And that movie is-, well,- maybe I'll revisit that one later too now; not that I think that film belongs in this Canon now too, but,- well,- actually in hindsight, maybe it does. Eh, I'll explain why that film is significant later.
In the meantime, I didn't want to just push "Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" up over everything else that I was already way too late and delayed on watching, so this post had to certainly wait, until, through various manipulations of my cinematic viewing methodology, it eventually made it's way to the top of my watchlist, this three and a half hour slow-moving feminist masterpiece, with perhaps the most ungainly and arguably unnecessary title in the history of cinema, finally was able to come across my eyes. What could possibly be here in this infamous feature film that could, suddenly, almost fifty years after it's original release, suddenly make the whole cinematic critic community stand up and declare it the greatest film of all-time?
(Deep breath)
Yeah, about twenty minutes in, I completely understood why this film won the poll. I can see why it won, why it's so beloved now, and frankly why it did take so long for it to properly be placed in this highest of echelon, or even be in the conversation. In the 2012 poll, the film ranked in the mid-thirties, which is pretty high, but this is definitely a movie where it's absolute greatness sneaks up on you. It's simple in it's description, sure, it's a look at three days in the life of the titular Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig). What about her? Well, at first we don't learn that much, we see her set the stove for dinner. She takes off her houseshirt revealing a more elaborate outfit underneath, and answers the door, where her and a gentlemen, than go into her bedroom. A little while later when it's darker, they come out of the bedroom. He leaves, give her some money, that she puts away, and goes back to finishing dinner.
Okay, now imagine, how many ways you can take that sequence of events, and shoot them? There's hundreds; I think you can honestly take that idea alone, give that ideas to a bunch of diffrerent filmmakers, and end up with a bunch of different short films, like some kind of a reverse "The Five Obstructions" kind of thing. I think only Chantal Akerman would do it this way, with these extreme long takes, usually from tripod-high, always Ozu-like stoic in the camera's rigid positioning, and few, if any close-up cuts. Hardly any dialogue spoken out loud. Showing it like it's a routine. Except it's not just a routine, it's- basically Jeanne's life. Or rather, it's what her life has become. Or maybe what society has deemed that it's supposed to be.
There's not a lot about Jeanne Dielman that we know about that's necessarily distinctive. We know she was a Holocaust survivor, that she is cooking dinner for her teenage son, Sylvan (Jan Decorte) and there life is fairly quiet. She's a widow now, and mentioned that she married and had a kid because, that was what she felt she was supposed to do. At some point she puts on some music, only to bemoan that she doesn't care for the singer. In fact, the movie has no score at all, and the jarringness of that is also kinda stunning-, it's not like say, "The China Syndrome" where part of the trick is that you don't realize there's no score, it's clear from the beginning that there's little-to-no sound in Jeanne's life. The few sounds there are, the sudden dropping of a utensil on the kitchen floor, the screaching of a teapot, the sudden knock of the front door, they stick out as ferociously as somebody blaring heavy metal on a streetcorner. Even in what we can charitably call her "spare time", she often sits alone in silence, often for minutes at a time, and in this film, we sit with her.
She hardly even talks to the gentlemen callers she gets. She gets one a day. We don't know where she gets them or how or when she started doing tricks on the side,- we know she's saving some money, but exactly why is she doing it?
Well, I have theories within the story itself, but within the metaphorical context of the film, Jeanne is the most severe representation of womanhood, as put upon her, by the society at large, up to that point. Keep in mind, second-wave feminism is just starting to come in, and of course Akerman, a post-New Wave vigilante feminist, is definitely apart of it, but more importantly, the movement was about breaking out of the oppressive of society's roles forced upon women, and Jeanne is every one of those roles taken to the most repressive extreme.
This is probably a male thing as well; I think it's easy to look at the feminist movement in terms of allowing women to have a more involved and present role in the world, but the thing that that need comes from, is a forced oppression from a male-dominated society. Men, controlled the roles woman were given, and forced them into these roles. So, in that sense, watching Jeanne Dielman, as she goes about her days, is watching the result of that oppression, combined into all the roles forced into being a female. She's a homemaker, who cooks dinner and cleans for her family; she's a caretaker, making sure everything is perfect, for her son who's off during the day in college to explore the several possibilities of life choices that males are promised and guaranteed. She's even more shown in the role of "mother", when for a few moments during the day, a neighbor drops off her baby for her to watch over. We barely see the baby, although we hear it occasionally, and we don't see the mother, who only stands at the doorway, blocked by the door, occasionally talking, reflecting on her struggles as a single mom and being thankful for such neighbors as Jeanne to help her out. Mother to not only her son, but to others as well.
And then, of course, the other role for women deemed by society, prostitute. Until the very end, the only scenes we see in Jeanne's bedroom, usually just show a perfectly-made bed, with a towel calmly placed on top, until she wraps it around her arm and tosses it into the laundry basket in the bathroom. We do see more eventually, but mostly we see her doing the regular daily chores and activities. This is a movie about a prostitute, where the most famous scenes, involve our main protagonist, calmy struggling to peel potatos. Not just because that's all there is, it's because that's the moment that's far more important and relevant to Jeanne's day.
The movie antognistically approaches it's subject by singularly focusing on those details that, as Akerman would put it, other movies would otherwise skip, and by doing so, she gives them more importance. In other words, what's on the screen, are the moments that are, for-lack-of-a-better-term, holy, and what's off-the-screen, is insignificant, but they're not for Jeanne Dielman. At the beginning at least, they're significant to her, but they're also what's been deemed more important by the society that Jeanne's brought up in, it's what lead to her behaviors and the fragile fragidness of this routine that she goes through every day. It's not that she's peeling all those potatos, it's why she's peeling those potatos. Or, perhaps a better question to ponder; why is she so compelled, to peel those potatos?
Personally it makes me wonder about those, especially my mother, how they must've been feeling having to struggle to perform such tasks, and I know that's the feeling that Akerman had, because "Jeanne Dielman..." was inspired by her mother. This is where I get back to discussing "No Home Movie", 'cause if there's one definitive word to describe Akerman, as a person, that word would be, daughter. Her mother Nelly, was an Auschwitz survivor who saw her parents killed at the camp, and she insisted on Chantal seeking out a career instead of a man. Akerman did, eventually making her way to New York becoming one of the big voices of the feminist film movement, and a major figure in what we'd think of as the Post-French New Wave, although she herself didn't like placing herself with such labels as those. For instance, even though she was one of the first publicly out lesbian filmmakers, including filming herself in a lesbian sex scene in her previous film, "Je, Tu, Il, Elle", she never allowed her films to be screened through dedicated LGBT frameworks, and had similar thoughts with her work was considered from a Jewish filmmakers perspective. Or from a female perspective. And, even from a single female's perspective; she never married, although she did eventually have a long-term girlfriend later in life, but her primary relationship was with her mother. She usually ended up back at home and taking care of her mother, and "No Home Movie" was a documentary about the last few months of her mother's life and it spent most of it's runtime, just talking with her, usually in the kitchen, the room we most affiliate Jeanne Dielman.
After her mother's passing in 2014, she fell in a deep depression and hospitalization, before eventually returning home to Paris, where she committed suicide in 2015. It wasn't unforeseeable, she even made note in her memoir that she had suicidal tendencies before, but stressed that she wouldn't do it while her mother was alive. In some ways, this declaration of her and this film in particular's greatness is very haunting and bittersweet; it's always easier to praise someone's work after they've passed on, but I also think that the reason that this film finally won is that, the cinematic world at least has finally caught up with it.
Like everything else, cinematic critique and appreciation and of course, filmmaking itself, has always had a masculine bias. (That's just a fact, do not list exceptions, and argue that it was always equal.) I often complained about how narratives and stories that are more distinctly feminine in their approach and nature were heavily overlooked by such stewardships like the Academy. I've often complained that it was fascinating how Kathryn Bigelow was the first female Best Director Oscar winner since, in terms of motifs and most of her narrative stories, she was by far, the most masculine of female filmmakers. (Not a criticism, I love most of her films, just an observation) Since then, there's still a striking advantage for the males vs. females behind the camera in terms of, literally every metric you can think of, but since then, we've had several other female nominees and two other winners, Jane Campion for "The Power of the Dog" and Chloe Zhao for "Nomadland", and I wouldn't call either of those films, or those filmmakers and their approach to filmmaking masculine.They're female filmmakers with a distinctly female approach to filmmaking, and they've been brought in a post-2nd wave feminist world that was directly shaped by filmmakers like Akerman. She herself insisted on having an entire female cast behind-the-scenes for "Jeanne Dielman...". (although she has conceded that might've not been the best thing.)
Perhaps "Sight & Sound"'s shift in recent decades represents this as well. "Citizen Kane" winning for all those decades, is quite a bold, blustering, great film, but very male-centric and masculin in it's approach and point-of-view. "Vertigo" finally overthrowing in 2012 is more interesting when you think of how that film, is about the male's obsessions over females, the male gaze in cinematic terms, the male repression of females in feminist terms, but at least, it brings in the female at the center of the focus, even if it's from a distinctly masculine film and filmmaker itself, and perhaps it's the fact that it's literally about the male obsession with controlling women and the distressing and disturbing undertones that entails is why "Vertigo" being number one, has never remotedly sat well with me. In this light, "Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" is the perfect combative, long-oppressed, long-delayed first deadly stab at the taking down of that kind of patriarchal cinefilia. The film is nothing if not a quiet, calm, peaceful and sudden burst of anger that completely disrupts our previously well-controlled routine, so why shouldn't it be that for the cinephile world as well.
