Jeanne Dielman

Chantal Akerman “placed her[self] at the centre of debates surrounding women’s cinema and feminist film-making” in 1975 with Jeanne Dielman, 23, qui du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles (Schmid 2010, p.1). The film was groundbreaking: it was three hours and twenty minutes long, documented a seemingly mundane day in the life of a Belgian housewife and posited the idea that the orderly, caring and methodical mother could also be a prostitute by day whilst her son was at school. The French newspaper Le Monde stated that Jeanne Dielman was “the first masterpiece in the feminine in the history of cinema” when the film was commercially released in 1976, and Akerman’s work has since come to define feminist film making (Ibid.).

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Akerman found her own, feminine identity behind the camera by taking notoriously mundane and lingering shots of the events on screen, such as a housewife peeling potatoes in Jeanne Dielman. Her cinema presented a hyper-realist account of the everyday. In doing so, Akerman turned her camera to narratives that “focused on underprivileged and underrepresented groups who [were] traditionally denied the right of place in mainstream cinema”, alerting the viewer to the emotional and psychological strains that mundanity and social isolation pose(d) to the housewife (Schmid 2010, p.6). 

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Indeed, in the film the “disturbingly banal” turns into the disturbing full stop when Jeanne, after having presumably experienced an “unwanted orgasm” with one of her clients, proceeds to fall into chaos and eventually murder her next client (Ibid, p.44). Without unpacking the worrying relationship that this unearths between Jeanne and her own sexuality, her meticulous daily routine, both sexual and domestic, is revealed to be an oppressive and entrapping regime that alienates her from experiences that she would otherwise share with the rest of society. 

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Just as Charlotte Perkins-Gilman explores in her novel The Yellow Wallpaper, domestic space becomes a place of female torment in which the housewife, in Akerman’s words, “occupi[es] time to avoid anguish, to keep moving so as not to think about the fundamental thing, which is being” (Ibid, p.44).

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By keeping the camera at the same distance from Jeanne as she is kept from her own thoughts, Akerman began to challenge mainstream, typically masculine cinematic techniques. Instead, she proposed a feminine language of cinema; by denying the viewer the scopophilic pleasures outlined in Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, such as the close-up or the POV shot, Akerman’s films induced a sense of estrangement that, for the auteur, was an integral part of the female condition.

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​However, Akerman has frequently asserted that “when people say there is a feminist film language, it is like saying there is only one way for women to express themselves… there should be as many different ways as there are women making films” (Schmid 2010, p.49). Rather than proposing a cinematic language of the other, Akerman proposed a cinematic language of another.

Bibliography