Still Lives of Jeanne Dielman

Viktoria Paranyuk (Pace University)

Chantal Akerman’s films have long been drawing the attention of scholars, covering a range of topics: gender and avant-garde feminist cinema, the relationship between fiction and nonfiction, identity and memory, formal practice, and realism. Since her death in 2015, Akerman’s work has commanded a renewed interest as evidenced in written and videographic scholarship, retrospectives, and exhibitions. In a video interview recorded for the extensive solo show at Eye Filmmuseum in the summer of 2020, Akerman’s long-time creative partner and editor Claire Atherton described the spirit of their work together as “discovering while doing.” (Chantal Akerman: Passages). Similarly, the process of making an audiovisual essay often yields discoveries about a subject you thought you knew well. This is the case with Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which I recently rewatched. Made when the artist was 25, the film holds a special place in her oeuvre. Soon after its release in 1975, it had been taken up as a “feminist manifesto” and an exemplar of a “radical feminist aesthetic” (Rich 16). Although Akerman was famously averse to having her work pinned to any specific ideology, together with her early collaborators, chief among them cinematographer Babette Mangolte, she devised a cinematic language for communicating “experiences that had not yet been told” (Mangolte 358). The representation of a middle-aged housewife in Jeanne Dielman elevated women’s desires and everyday gestures that Akerman knew by heart from her mother and aunts. The film’s power and significance remain undiminished.

My audiovisual essay is composed of shots from Jeanne Dielman that don’t contain Jeanne’s body. Nearly 15 out of 201 minutes without Jeanne. This parametric approach rhymes with the film’s own formal rigor. I removed the frames with the heroine to see how her absence from our sight might affect the emotional and aesthetic impact of this at once devastating and tender film. Watching the rooms and objects on their own, in their complicity but also comforting tranquility, further distills the deadening routine of Jeanne’s existence. Their stillness and muteness yield a kind of visceral response that is no longer moderated by Jeanne’s bodily movements in Delphine Seyrig’s elegant translation. Each doorway, each view creates a domestic still life in which Jeanne can be perfectly placed, a part of the composition.

As I scanned the images of Jeanne Dielman in my editing program, I noticed details that had previously eluded me: the iridescent patches on the bedspread; the flutter of a hallway curtain after the closing of a bedroom door; a boy carrying a yellow plastic bag, uncertain for a brief moment as to which way to walk off-camera. Another woman, besides Jeanne, as carefully framed as the heroine in her domain, struck me this time: the proprietor of the grocery shop who finds refuge in the backroom with a cup of coffee. In Akerman’s early work, and in this film most famously, the spaces hold the characters as containers while also centering their own stubborn materiality and encouraging the spectator’s curiosity in everydayness. Alice Blackhurst has called the director’s films “luminously spacious,” at once referring to the often-frontal composition, extended takes, stationary camera, medium and long shots, and the viewing experience these formal practices generate (17). While Jeanne’s life is confined, our experience of the film is the opposite: Akerman’s handling of the cinematic space and time creates a lot of breathing room – a distance – for the viewer to engage on their own terms with the screened reality. 

These still lives do more than bear witness or serve as a setting for a private drama of a middle-class widow. Seeing these objects and interiors in isolation moved me. The video essay “Sound Unseen: The Acousmatic Jeanne Dielman” by Filmscalpel displays an affinity with my exploration of spaces and objects in “Still Lives.” Through the soundscape, Filmscalpel’s piece compels us to “ponder empty rooms and corridors,” suggesting that these motionless moments are not appendages but the heart of the movie” (“Sound Unseen”). But where Filmscalpel emphasizes Jeanne as a “ghost in her own domestic realm,” my video focuses on the materiality of the spaces and items wherein and shows that the surroundings, even the air in the apartment, anticipate and are enlivened by Jeanne’s existence. They are inseparable from her drama. Even the door of the café, where the heroine customarily has a coffee between her errands, seems imbued with frustration when she is off schedule and leaves her cup untouched. Jeanne’s presence/absence produces an uncanny effect, as when the lid of the Delft tureen on the dining table, in which she keeps the money from her gentlemen callers, moves as if on its own. The choreography of objects and activities in the kitchen, without Jeanne, makes domestic labor literally invisible. It also makes the other elisions in the film, especially the ones in the bedroom, more pointed – elisions that, as Ivone Margulies notes, “parallel Jeanne’s own concealments, adding to the effect of order that Jeanne tries to impose on her life” (75).

Observed by themselves, these spaces have both a calming quality and sinister tension, hinting at the possible undercurrent of violence the calm may conceal. Although absent in the frame, Jeanne is of course very much present through multiple gestures – the sound of her voice and clacking of her heels; the opening and shutting of doors; the switching on and off of lights, which sometimes catch her shadow; and the other activities that fill her time relentlessly.

The film’s formal sharpness is unabated, yet somewhat modulated by the accidents that intrude upon the order of Jeanne’s life as well as the film’s aesthetic: the child in a bright orange coat who peeks from behind a doorway, obviously not part of the shoot; the mic left in the frame, presumably unnoticed by the crew; the barely perceptible wobbliness of the fixed camera. I found this interaction of the fictional drama, the director’s uncompromising vision, and the material process of filmmaking exhilarating.  

I cheated in a handful of instances by leaving traces of Jeanne. You may notice a heel of her pump in the corner of a frame right before her figure exists fully, her movements behind a glass door in a shop, or her partial appearance on a descending escalator. Jeanne also may or may not be in a shot during the nightly outings with her son, which is simply too dark to know for certain. While I used most of the shots that don’t show Jeanne’s physical body, I didn’t capture a couple that are so brief as to be inconsequential.

There is the matter of the ending that I feel I should mention. Crucially, the last seven minutes of Akerman’s film are the heroine sitting in near darkness at the dining table, after killing her client. The soup tureen is to her left, the blue neon light from the street glints off from the china cabinet and flashes across the room. She has the final image. For Akerman, these closing minutes were “much more important and dramatic than the murder itself.” (Rich 21). Blackhurst sees this final shot as a coda “where both Jeanne and the spectator ‘come back to their senses.’” (17). The video, instead, ends with the murdered gentleman caller lying on Jeanne’s bed, as we watch the reflection of his foreshortened figure in the mirror – the line between the postcoital and dead body nearly, and terrifyingly, indistinguishable. The video offers no relief of a private moment of coming back to the senses. This is a still life whose illusion of tranquility and order we can’t elide.