“When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.” — Chantal Akerman

It’s her birthday today.

The news of the death of pioneering Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman in 2015 came as a shock. She was young. 65 years old. Even worse, it was reported as a potential suicide. Either way, it was heartbreaking to lose her.

The impact of Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was such that it almost feels like its consequent fall – like not included on round-ups of great 20th century films, etc. – it’s like people couldn’t deal with the overhauling-revolution in film that Jeanne Dielman represented. It’s almost a call to arms. AND she was only 24 years old when she directed it. As much of a girl-genius as Orson Welles was a boy-genius, and yet we celebrate the boy-geniuses and ignore the girl-geniuses. Ever since, though, Akerman was busy, making films, making work, stirring shit up, giving great interviews.

Here she is in 1975 talking about Jeanne Dielman. Many film-makers have to work decades before they make a film as confident as this one (although there really IS no other film like this one. It stands alone.)

In the film Delphine Seyrig plays the widowed Jeanne, who lives in a flat with her son, filling her day with housewifely tasks (shown in excruciating real time: cleaning the sink, making veal cutlets, peeling potatoes, etc.), and from 5 to 5:30 every day she “entertains” men in her bedroom. It’s a compartmentalized part of her day, a part that seemingly does not touch all of the other parts. The film is considered (not surprisingly) a feminist classic (although Akerman didn’t like being referred to as a “feminist” film-maker – see quote in the title). The majority of the action is banal and may try your patience. Dennis Lim wrote a short essay about the film in the book Defining Events in Movies and his words capture what Ackerman was up to with her style of storytelling:

Covering 48 hours over three days, the film immerses itself in the ritualized minutiae of Jeanne’s household chores. These mundane events are captured with a static camera, often in real time. The viewer is compelled to experience the full monotony of each task …

Akerman so firmly establishes Jeanne’s routine that when the tiniest cracks start to emerge – overcooked potatoes, a dropped spoon – they play like major events.

YES. I wrote about seeing Jeanne Dielman in a crowded theatre and how exhilarating it was.

The film’s portrayal of deadening ritualistic housework is a critique of the concept of “woman’s work.” Alongside that is Jeanne’s matter-of-fact prostitution, also seen as “woman’s work” since time immemorial. What else could women do if they weren’t all tangled up in so-called women’s work? This topic has been covered in many films. But Jeanne Dielman breaks that mold, shatters it, forces us to endure the “homemaker” stuff, endlessly: each day the same, so that we watch the routine, we understand how it should go, we see how meticulous she is … and then, slowly, also mundanely, the routine unravels. How can a spoon dropped on the floor open up a crack revealing an abyss? Watch how Akerman does it. With no dialogue. Sometimes it is not the story that provides fascination or interest. It is the APPROACH, the HOW of it, that breaks new ground, and that’s the case with Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. There are moments of extreme boredom. But then the film’s insistent and ruthless commitment to its own rhythm pulls you along with it. You can’t stop watching because something is going on. And that “something” is not visible, but you can feel it.

We see her through what she does. When things go awry, no matter how small, we know she doesn’t have much time left. The routine will be shattered for good.

Chantal Akerman has made many more films since that masterpiece in 1975. Some I have seen, more I have not. While she spoke eloquently about how Godard inspired her to get into film-making (she and the rest of her generation, amirite?), she was that very rare thing in cinema, or in any art: an artist with a truly unique vision. An original.

She financed her first film by herself, and also played the lead. It is a 12-minute short called Saute ma ville, and it’s on Youtube. Out of the gate, Akerman was confident, bold, personal, and – most importantly – she believed in the validity of her own perspective, her own voice and vision. She was only 18 years old.

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a terrific essay about Akerman entitled “Chantal Akerman: The Integrity of Exile and the Everyday.” Rosenbaum writes:

This desire for normalcy accounts for much of the difficulty of assimilating Akerman’s work to any political program, feminist or otherwise. As an account of domestic oppression and repression, Jeanne Dielman largely escapes these strictures, and Akerman herself has admitted that this film can be regarded as feminist. But she also once refused to allow je tu il elle to be shown in a gay and lesbian film festival and, more generally, has often denied that she considers herself a feminist filmmaker, despite the efforts of certain feminist film critics to claim her as one.

On one hand, her films are extremely varied. Some are in 16 millimetre and some are in 35; some are narrative and some are nonnarrative; the running times range from about 11 minutes to 201 and the genres range from autobiography to personal psychodrama to domestic drama to romantic comedy to musical to documentary – a span that still fails to include a silent, not-exactly-documentary study of a run-down New York hotel (Hotel Monterey, 1972), a vast collection of miniplots covering a single night in a city (Toute une nuit, 1982), and a feature-length string of Jewish jokes recited by immigrants in a vacant lot in Brooklyn at night (Food, Family and Philosophy aka Histoires d’Amérique, 1989), among other oddities.

On the other hand, paradoxically, there are few important contemporary filmmakers whose range is as ruthlessly narrow as Akerman’s, formally and emotionally. Most of her films, regardless of genre, come across as melancholy, narcissistic meditations charged with feelings of loneliness and anxiety; and nearly all of them have the same hard-edged painterly presence and monumentality, the same precise sense of framing, locations and empty space.

More generally, if I had to try to summarise the cinema of Chantal Akerman, thematically and formally, in a single phrase, ‘the discomfort of bodies in rooms’ would probably be my first choice. And ‘the discomfort of bodies inside shots’ might be the second.

From Richard Brody at The New Yorker. The following bit about Jeanne Dielman is so important to keep in mind, especially when you think about how often women’s accomplishments are sidelined, ignored, diminished.

Akerman was younger than Orson Welles was when he made “Citizen Kane,” younger than Jean-Luc Godard was when he made “Breathless.” The three films deserve to be mentioned together. “Jeanne Dielman” is as influential and as important for generations of young filmmakers as Welles’s and Godard’s first films have been.

When she died, someone on Twitter (I can’t remember who) said something along the lines of, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if Jeanne Dielman was eventually recognized as the greatest film of all time?”

It could happen. Give it time.

UPDATE: I wrote this post in 2020. A mere two years later, it happened. Sight & Sound held their critics’ poll, and Jeanne Dielman was voted the greatest film of all time, knocking Vertigo out of its primary spot (which, only recently, had knocked Citizen Kane out of the prized #1 shot.) Now. I am not a list person. And the problem with lists is that it brought out the usual suspects, and it makes the assumption that Jeanne Dielman is “better than” Vertigo or whatever, which … I just am bored by that kind of comparison. It’s pointless. What I WILL say, though, is Jeanne Dielman deserves FAR more attention than it has gotten, as a ground-breaking pioneering sui generis work of art – a masterpiece – and it deserves to be “in the conversation”. As I wrote wayyyy back in 2020:

If you see any extensive list of Great Films of the 20th Century and Jeanne Dielman isn’t on it, or Great Directors of the 20th Century and Chantal Akerman isn’t on it, toss the list, it’s no good.

^^ I stand by that.

 
 
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