The Automata of Jeanne Dielman

Ackerman asserts that Jeanne Dielman is a feminist film for two important reasons. The first being that It is a woman’s viewpoint on the discourse of women’s’ looks because we do not know exactly what an “unalienated feminine language” would look like Jeanne Dielman helps us figure this out. It is in the permissive way and framing of the film that helps us see this more precisely. We allow Jeanne the language of women’s work in full view without editing. Akerman is quoted as saying “It was the only way to shoot that film-to avoid cutting the woman into a hundred pieces… ...To look carefully and to be respectful”. These actions are almost always the lowest in the hierarchy of film images and Akerman theorizes that it is because women’s gestures count for so little. The film was shot in an all-female environment with the director, main actor, camera person and crew being all women. The other reason in Akerman’s mind is that unlike most women, Akerman has autonomy over her own feelings and not just what she says but how she shows such feelings on film.

On filming, Akerman states that it was not a neutral look but that she lets Jeanne Dielman live her life in the middle of the frame without being voyeuristic. We are not witnessing the day-to-day goings on through a peep hole or between venetian blinds. Akerman notes that the use of such a low angle is because that is the stature and POV that she inhabits in her life and is quoted as stating that “That’s not how I see the world.” And to alter this would be to manipulate the footage. The son is not the camera, the son is her son and if the son looks at the mother it should show the son looking at his mother versus his POV of his mother which may distort the expressive nature of how the viewer internalizes the input.

In her first film Akerman laments that she was using duration for a mood instead of as a presence. In the environment of Jeanne Dielman, Akerman states that her apartment was a place of protection where Jeanne would not feel alienated and the fact that her orgasm occurred their points to a weakening of will or autonomy of Jeanne which stems from a broken ritual which first imposed becomes a way of life which of course, is all unconscious.

Dramatic sequences in this film are equivalent with the mundane but perhaps can be categorized as dramatic on their own standing. When Jeanne bangs the glass on the table, and we witness the milk almost spilling it is equivalent to the murder which happens near end of the film. In fact, the murder is NOT the ending of this film and for very real purposes imposed by the director. There are in fact seven minutes which follow the murder scene in which Dielman’s presence is just as strong if not stronger. Akerman says part of her reasoning for this is to avoid sentimentality as well as boredom. She states that when a film begins and ends with the same thing that it’s really boring, also in terms of hierarchical images you can match images that supposedly could be construed as “very low” with images that are “very high”.

Akerman is not just a feminist filmmaker however, she states that men are also robbed of a unedited “man’s rhythm” and instead we see the rhythm of capitalism or fascism however Akerman can speak only from her own perspective and disowns any notion of speaking for the general or theoretical way. She concludes that this might be because men and women experience sexual pleasure in different ways then men do.

A Matter of Time: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Jeanne Dielman was made in 1975 when director Akerman was only 25 years of age. Akerman was born in Belgium in 1950 to Jewish parents who escaped Nazism in Poland. Classified as autodidact, Akerman left film school and instead raised money for her feature film Saute ma ville by working on the Antwerp stock exchange selling diamonds in 1971 – 1972 in New York City. Often cited as having been influenced by the Anthology Film Archives, minimalist dance, Any Warhol’s long-duration film, Jonas Mekas’s diary films and others such as Michael Snow’s La region centrale who experimented with random camera movements over a humanless landscape. Akerman is quoted as saying that it “opened [my] mind to the relationship between film and your body, time as the most important thing in film.

Jeanne Dielman is a movie about stasis and containment, time and domestic anxiety. It helps viewers experience the materiality of cinema, its literal duration and gives concrete meaning to women’s work. As we experience Jeanne’s compulsive behavior through routine, we become lulled by the familiar rhythms and complicit with Jeanne’s desire for order. In fact, the film constitutes a radical experiment with being undramaticand thus paradoxically shows us the absolute necessity of the drama. The film shows us “images between images” which are often removed in post editing process or hardly ever filmed at all. These images are heavily laden with a strong feminist accent and are a lesson in structural economy showing us the full visibility given to daily tasks exactly as it is and shown on equal footing with more sensational “obscene” actions such as murder or prostitution. However, we only really get glimpses of Jeanne’s life. The other characters are shown at bare bones minimalism. The john’s bodies are all truncated and the act is only alluded to until the ending. Aunt Fernande only appears in the form of a letter. The neighbor is heard by the door.

Women’s work was not just explored in this film but has heavily stylistically influenced Akerman in earlier films such as Saute ma ville which was released in 1968 and shows 18-year-old Akerman herself performing various tasks in a tight kitchen space.

In 1972 Akerman began her long collaboration with Babette Mangolte in New York. Together they made La chambre, Hôtel Monterey, Hanging out Yonkers, and my favorite piece: News from Home. In La chambreAkerman uses a 360-degree pan around a small studio meeting equivalence of images with a chair, a bed, eating an apple and rocking under covers. In Hotel Monterey Akerman learned that shot duration changes the equation between drama and descriptive detail. These narrative films can be relatable to viewers who have also experienced Bresson’s flat models and Karl Theodor Dreyer’s nonpsychological austerity. Akerman’s characters speak in recitative monologues punctuated by long silences.

The color palate is Flemish and the linearity of story through the consecutive three days points to European art cinema however mildly disjunctive. Through Jeanne Dielman’s time bomb aesthetic the viewer becomes aware of his/her own body through restlessness and interest. This oscillation between the two extremes helps us understand Jeanne’s need for control exemplified through her rigid schedule and obsession which masks an anxiety disorder that fears and dreads autonomy and sexual repression undertones. Here, Dielman teeters between prescribed female roles. One being the domestic and the sexual and the mother and the whore. This engages with problems engulfed in feminism, alienation, labor, and woman’s dormant violence. The film also albeit briefly alludes to her son’s Oedipal complex and attempts to control and be served by her and demands to be the only man in his mother’s life. But it is through the space in which Dielman lives that this story is conveyed to us through delicate attention to detail. It is only here in a protective enclosure that we learn this tale of displaced sexuality. Akerman shrugs off the direct equation of Jeanne’s quotidian chores as a “woman’s representation under patriarchy” explaining that women’s work is loving work witnessed from her own childhood.

Halfway into the film we begin to see the displaced anxiety begin to show. Jeanne places the money in her tureen but forgets to close the lid, Jeanne’s disheveled hair after her appointment with the John or the pot of burned potatoes. While almost all shots are frontal frames it is with two distinct beat changes that we see alternating viewpoints, however we still do not have the “reversal” shot. It is with the burned potatoes that a hilarious choreography of domestic terror unfolds as we witness Dielman struggle with just what to do with the burned potatoes. No musical scores highlight these domestic terror situations, the dropping of the fork, the slamming of the milk, the falling of the button are all autonomous on their own and need no music to heighten the mood. It is Jeanne’s unconscious desire to suppress this automation that creates the drama that we witness unfolding. This is exemplified by the coffee scene in which no amount of fixing can make the coffee taste good, and the irreversible entropy of time is witnessed in the Hourglass curvature of the coffee maker.

Jeanne Dielman was fully in tune with the oeuvre of the time in European women’s movement. In an edited article by Simone de Beauvoir Les temps modernes we learn about “Peeling Potatoes”. In Belgium prostitution is legal and the working rights of prostitutes were the subject of much lively debate. It is here that we see the cooking but the hiding of the sex. An impressive alternative to much modern cinema and well-intentioned conventional political documentaries and features. The avant-garde cinema is also vindicated to the pure experiments with duration and series by defamiliarizing the “everyday”.

Equivalence of Events

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a work about balance coming from the film’s structural precision. It is minimal but hyper realistic. Jeanne Dielman has obsessive compulsive disorder, and this takes effect through a series of “overly ritualized presentation of household routines.” She is a mother, housewife and prostitute. The camera’s location in the setting of this film remains largely unchanged except for two scenes in which there are beat changes. Chantal Akerman uses literal time and a fixed frontal frame to showcase actions which are not normally shown in films such as cooking, eating, washing dishes, making beds, taking baths etc. in its entirety. These actions do not stop when Jeanne Dielman leaves the frontal frame. This gives the film its first lesson which is that the camera will face the area of an action’s start, even when this action moves off-frame. Jeanne’s trajectory inside the house is imperative to the film as it moves from literal narrative to fictional representations. Jeanne Dielman’s movements are so precise it is that any disruption in her routine is also shown by a concurrent rupture in the editing pattern. She is almost always framed by the three walls of each room (except for the outside scenes and in the hallway) but this helps us to localize her even when she is off frame. The stylization of the frontal film narrative is similar to a Renaissance perspective through its uses of symmetry and low height of the camera. The twisting of the narrative is amplified through the conventional Hollywood narrative through hyperbolized perspective, linear chronology, ellipsis and naturalistic conventions of having a single actor perform single characters. Akerman defines homogenous texture and can be termed “Aesthetics of homogeneity”. In fact, we always know what point of view we are looking at and the angle is intentionally not voyeuristic. Akerman’s extended naturalistic shots modify classic film narrative with its regulated alternation of shots and experimental film narrative where the concept of time could also be a substitute for the image. The extended sequences make the spectator endure boredom. This creates a form of abstractive blindness which clarifies why the viewer may misremember the complex and detailed map of Jeanne’s life and daily routine. The complicity between spectator and character depends on an interplay between attention and inattention. This fixity makes us reflect on the sort of attention it commands of its viewers. The minutia of action even when Jeanne leaves the frame shows us that our attention is utterly focused on the human presence. Jeanne Dielman is a film in economy of excess and lack through the camera’s extended gaze we see an enhanced version of defamiliarization, and objects and spaces begin for form an effect of presence in themselves. These images stimulate our awareness of the texture of domestic objects.

Formal Description is a limitation because it cuts short of any possibility of seeing one says Robbe-Grillet. Formal description provides striking analogies with Akerman’s effects of literal representation as both approaches engage with a blockage of symbolic meaning with an oscillation between recognizing the familiar and being estranged from it. Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist says, “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known… to make the stone stony.” This means that he proposes the replacement of the name of objects by a concrete description. Art is characterized by such evasion with is an attempt to counter a process of perception that has become automatic. This is the compass by which Akerman’s work steers. Akerman’s use of real time is a reflexive strategy. Literal renditions create a roughened texture but more importantly it makes things “strange” through enhanced cinematic materiality and the thematic of automatism and obsessive compulsion.

Repeats of routines are cut short and leaves it up to us remember the full actions. For example, the clients Jeanne receives are almost always cut short but literally and also in height of the camera. The low camera height actually truncates their bodies in such an extreme way that we their full upper contour only when they follow Jeanne toward the bedroom door. This is a refusal to give those men a centrality in Jeanne’s daily life. The passage of time is shown only though the implied difference in the light setting within the shot that was done simply by turning off the light source by the camera operator behind the frame, but Jeanne has a compulsion for turning off lights whenever she leaves any room even if only momentarily. This is an abruptly performed task brought on by Jeanne’s frugality and obsessiveness, but we become instinctually acclimatized to the changes in light.

The matter-of-fact way that Dielman decided to treat Jeanne’s cooking, chores and prostitution is of a homogeneous texture and an equivalence of events. Together her cleaning can also be seen as a metaphor for hiding however there is always a possibility for major rupture in Jeanne’s routine through the automaton nature of objects surrounding her i.e., the doors, hallways, men, etc. When Jeanne closes a door after a client, her hair is tousled, and we see that her potatoes have been burned. While even though this is minimized it is disrupting the order and this is the first time that the camera is facing a different way. The camera stands by the oven facing the door. This prompts Jeanne into one of cinema’s greatest choreographies of displaced anxiety over what to do with the burned potatoes. This bisects the film into two halves. 95 minutes in the film starts to display each action as potentially faulty. Jeanne becomes hesitant and this is shown by ab obsessive need to check what time it is, and we notice that she has begun to perform her tasks earlier leaving us to gather that she has lost her habitual precision and focus. Despite this, the camera maintains the center except for the other scene when she goes into the kitchen for scissors to open a present. This makes the viewer aware that there might be passion that exists under Jeanne’s calm expression. Retrospectively we notice that her silence might be reflecting an “anguish of silence.” The irreversibility of entropy is shown in numerous ways for example by the waking up before the alarm clock, the inability to save the coffee and remaking it through the hourglass like apparatus. These small disasters are an introduction into Jeanne’s signs of anxiety through an action of “disaster mode” like the falling of a fork, the baby howling etc. all shown through a medium long shot. Even know we know what to expect this episodic narrative gives us surprises and gives us attention to silence, blankness and minor events. Jeanne Dielman constitutes a radical experiment with being undramatic and paradoxically, with drama’s absolute necessity.

Jeanne Dieleman’s murder scene is crucial in more ways that one because it clarifies what a hyperrealist narrative might by. It is a murder scene that displayed the highest degree of fictive-ness, so it sets off the fictional element latent within the literalness of domestic scenes. Dialogues are blatantly focused on the absence of the father and husband of Jeanne. Sylvain has an oedipal scenario in which he saves his mother from the “fiery sword” of his father but also this is done in such a minute way that we almost miss it. It is exposed simply to dispose of it. A shared trait between melodrama and Jeanne Dielman is the hint of a specifically gendered psychological pressure that is left unexpressed in Akerman’s radically nonphysiologically representations. Melodrama then becomes an indirect indictment of social pressures. At its most distant, Jeanne Dielman can be considered a domestic melodrama, but it disallows a realist reading of this. The climax is a reference to a double standard through the showing of the murder. It is a sense of a doubly layered narrative. It is also the first time we are allowed to enter the bedroom. The “non spectacular” orgasm is shown from a higher angle but still from a medium long shot. The mirror takes up the entire picture frame minus the bottom. The continuity of movement from getting dressed to the murder makes this scene remarkable. The potentially reversible design of tragedy, and the irreversible temporality of real time. The murder and the orgasm are dramatically downplayed and the obscenity withing the film system founded the leap from presentation to representation. Even though there may not be an exact and identifiable cause for the murder of Jeanne’s client the threat of randomness or an interruption which is not immediately regulated and defined withing cycles of repetition and ritual looms over the film from the outset” as Judith Mayne suggests. In Jeanne Dielman there is sometimes one chair by the table but other times there are two without any explanation of the change and it leaves the viewers to wonder if that blatantly disruptive detail should pass unnoticed. This is the “threat of randomness”. For a person with Obsessive compulsive disorder there is a recurring intolerance for ambiguity and a proclivity for symmetry, punctuality, meticulousness, frailty and a fear to admit will and autonomy of themselves and the objects and people around them. Desire is presented das an external demand that is shaped by rules, order and obligations to try to control the subject’s sense of autonomy. Compulsive behavior is supposed to fend off autonomy. A displaced autonomy is referenced by Freud in “The Uncanny” and it is the reverberations of desire for and fear of state as it is displaced onto the external world. The main condition for the emergence of uncanniness is a hesitation between two states: dichotomy of animate and inanimate and this is related to the fear of death. Jentch says that figures of automation are those instances of “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive or conversely whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate,”. The perverse autonomy of the inanimate objects in Jeanne dielman should mainly be seen as a figuration of the uncanny. Jeanne herself seems to live at the lowest level of self-definition or autonomy. The reading of this film is reductive to the extent that it takes the eruption of “repressed pleasure” as the main event of the film. The murder scene has two possible readings as a negation either of Jeanne’s desire or of the law. In either case it stands as “the one singular act of unbridled affirmation, of violent refusal.” Akerman repeatedly made statements on the equality of traditional dramatic scenes and images. The light flickering on Jeanne mysteriously crosses her face and she views the flickering as wearied emotion. Seyrig’s performance sabotages a reductionist reading of the orgasm and murder scene as the repressed event of the film as “purposelessness of purpose”. Akerman is not only answering to a political, feminist demand for closer but a transfiguration of the blatant – not only of reality but of narrative through the unending series of “and, and, and” and propels the film as pure accumulation. “Automaton” refers to a mechanical effect, a movement performed “as if by some motive power, but which in fact is monotonous, routine and without intelligence”. The Greek use “automaton” as an “adjective which applied to a person, meant acting of one’s own will, of oneself.”.