(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The Belgian film director/video artist Chantal Akerman#s (1950–2015) films Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels (1975) was surprisingly named the world's best film in 2022 by the renowned Sight and Sound.
Akerman was 25 in 1975, when the film was produced. The film's Jeanne Dielman, played by actress Delphine Seyrig – also seen in Alain Resnais' impenetrable masterpiece Last year in Marienbad (1961) – lives at 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels, Akerman's hometown – which gave the film its title.
She makes the bed for the next appointment, with the silent men punctually calling.
The Widow Jeanne Dielman lives in a petit bourgeois apartment, where she 'looks after' her 15–16 year old son, who goes to school. She prepares meals with pietistic precision, and with shopping trips to the dreary outskirts of the big city, has a cup of coffee in a quiet café, alone, pretty, well-groomed, and extremely precise in all her doings and deeds. She carries out her daily tasks as rituals over loneliness. The clatter of her shoes is consistently audible, she walks from the kitchen to the living room and back, through the hallway, clack clack clack – from the closed kitchen window you can hear distant traffic. To make ends meet, Jeanne Dielman prostitutes herself, and there too she is spasmodically distanced, in this chilly contract with another stranger. She makes her bed for the next appointment, with the silent men who punctually ring the doorbell. The ringing doorbell rings through the apartment and freezes the moment. The film takes place over the course of three days in her life. The film's duration is 3 hours and 22 minutes, where not a second is wasted. Jeanne Dielman lives her life like clockwork. A minimalist melodrama.
Akermans character i Jeanne Dielman It seems as if she exists in a neurotic vacuum. When seemingly insignificant factors in the petty-bourgeois machinery do not function as they usually do, it is as if a crack in a glacier widens and has fatal consequences.
A sculpture of time
In the winter of 2024/25, films, video works and installations by Chantal Akerman could be seen at the Jau de Paume art center in Paris (art center for modern and postmodern Photography and media). Works such as Woman Sitting after Killing (2001) A Voice in the Desert (2002) From the East: Bordering on Fiction (1995) and Selfportrait/Autobiography: A Work in Progress (1998). The documentary made a particular impression Tell me (1980), which Akerman did for French television. Here she interviews kvinner who survived the Shoah – over a cup of coffee in their own homes, these grandmothers share with insistent hospitality what remains of memories and repressions of the Holocaust.
Fixed camera settings with a 50mm lens are largely Akerman's consistent, sober stylistic approach.
Akerman's idiom is authorens, which means practically simple and affordable film productions, where the director has full artistic control over and ownership of the process from script to edited film. Fixed camera settings with a 50 mm lens are largely her consistent, sober stylistic approach. Akerman is the epitome of the term slow cinema. She sets a 'frame' that requires great concentration from the audience. The effect is almost hypnotic for those who manage to absorb this duration. Hotel Monterey (1972) I saw at the Danish Film School in 1984, and I got an experience of what a single camera position can evoke in terms of unknown emotions – and a hyper exercise in concentration. And seen in the context of ordinary cognitive perception – in a conventional narratology, which consists of action and suspense, in recurring variants, of the same classical understanding of the world – Akerman’s film consciousness-expanding. When a camera shot – of, say, a deserted, dark hotel corridor – lasts more than 10–15 seconds, something happens. Perceptual habits are pushed aside. The optics define an absolute presence. Akerman says that the audience should not experience, but experience, the two–three hours that the films can last.
Film is, as is well known, a sculpture of time. No other art form can maneuver in time like film art. It is the montage, the editing, that takes care of it. Had Andrej Tarkovsky (with the book Sculpting in Time, 1985) seen Akerman's films? Probably.
Time is an illusion of duration. We perceive time as having a definite direction, a measured condition in a space, a conceptual reality where we speak of past, present and future. Life consists of waiting for Beckett's Godot. We wait for the departure at Gardermoen, to arrive safely – and arrivals soon become new departures, etc. We wait for reality to arrive, with its sober or spectacular presence. It is only exceptionally that we are present in something we could call “arrival”. It is probably only in death that we are 100 percent “arrival”, in this illusory, hasty civilization of ours.
It is not known, only expected.
Akermans video installationis at Jau de Paume consists of monitors that are placed three by three next to each other, and in rows. A voice in the Desert, which was first shown on Documenta 2002, is perhaps the best-known of her video installations. It was filmed at the border corridor between the US and Mexico – where refugees pass to enter Arizona. In footage from Akerman's desolate travels in Eastern Europe, we see people standing in line, through icy mornings, frosty smoke coming out of their mouths, at barren train stations, open bus terminals, waiting, for a departure, late at night, early in the morning, one does not know, one just waits. Throughout her travels in Eastern Europe, she is clearly fascinated by these 'accumulations' of people, as a kind of form of timelessness. Everyone waits, patiently, silently, prepared – really for nothing. The waiting is like a kind of primordial state. The waiting is only replaced by another waiting, a new queue, a new meeting, another departure, which implies a probable arrival.
The Captive is a melodrama about jealousy.
Jeanne Dielman also lives in this film in a kind of waiting. The clock ticks in the soulless living room. Her paws are peeled, she eats with a measured duty, it seems, and almost senselessly. A human machine controls her everyday life with a paradoxical manic absence. She does not live, but only acts, in mechanical presence. It is as if she is nobody. She comes into existence by the film's title, a fictional character of a woman who is imperceptibly and slowly driven towards paradoxical redemption.
One of the installations mentioned above, Woman Sitting after Killing (2001), consists of 7 monitors that all synchronously show the seven-minute final scene in Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels. A camera setting: Jeanne at the living room table with a cup of coffee, as redeemed, present, finally present, or lost forever?
To be caught
Christine Smallwood points out in the book The Captive at Akerman har uttalt: «You will never know what is happening in her mind and in her heart. I don’t know either. It’s the secret of Delphine Seyrig.»
Smallwood points to the orgasm, the petite death, the little death, the 'involuntary' orgasm Jeanne Dielman gets almost against her will, and which puts her out of herself, knocks her off her perch.
Aren't we on the trail of something here? Yes, we are on the trail of lost time. Australian writer Christine Smallwood's little book The Captive addresses Akerman's adoption of Marcel Proust's On the trail of lost time, specifically volumes 9-10 in the Norwegian edition I have.
In capitalist terminology, time is money, or as they say: Time flies.
The Captive (2000) is a melodrama about jealousy. About being trapped by obsessions, about non-existent relationships the loved one may or may not have, but which have a consuming existence in the jealous partner's imagination.
The Captive, to be trapped, enchanted, bewitched, blinded, lost, the rich and in love young man in large rooms and corridors of bourgeois apartments is tense and as if outside of everything, in egocentric desperation.
En frame is a frame, which provides a motif. You frame something, that is, the director defines – or places 'time' – within a narrative context. Framed can mean imprisoned, or arrest, captivity. And one is caught by jealousy, or by good or bad fantasies and ideas about the way the world works. Proust's memories and search for the past, "lost time", seem more real than the concrete presence in a here and now. This is a correspondence to Akerman's own philosophy.
Akerman's cinematic philosophy is the concept of time as a form, where time seems to stand still. And as Ludwig Wittgenstein writes somewhere: "A picture held us captive" (quoted in Smallwood). Several famous directors have wanted to film Proust. Harold Pinter wrote a script for Joseph Losey, but it never came to fruition, Godard also wanted to try, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Louis Malle, Luchino Visconti. Volker Schlöndorff did Swann in love (1984)
Akerman takes an idiosyncratic approach to doors – also a framework for transport in/out – which she uses in a consistent cinematic approach, and these corridors in hotels and apartments (she is interested in the corridor outside Marcel Proust's bedroom, not the bedroom where he wrote), parking lots, side streets, in an optical meditation on time, as it is constructed and assembled through the art of cinema, the montage, in the connection – or interweaving, of frames, which creates new and different micro-contexts for the viewer. And which makes us think in new ways.
Unproductive time?
Our relationship to time is a misunderstanding. Physicists say time is a dimension of its own. We say we are missing out on something, wasting time on this or that, we don't have time for this or that, we need to be able to take our time, etc. For Akerman, time as a category is an unproductive quantity, writes Smallwood.
Distance and limitation are the basic stylistic premises.
In capitalist terminology, time is money, or as they say: Time flies. Time as it passes and passes and never arrives in our existence, should be filled with capitalist productivity; we should act as producers and consumers. Consumption is productivity. Akerman opens a cinematic space without any requirement for productivity. Nothing more than that the audience can experience just being there, in the fictional space, on the screen, and what it can meditatively or creatively trigger in the individual.
49 movies
Distance and limitation are the stylistic premises of Akerman's films. She created a unique poetic cinematic universe and in an almost optimally simple optics, as, for example, the Japanese film director Yasujirō Ozu also did with his classic minimalist melodramas. Jørgen Half is also a relative of Akerman's film philosophy and practice.
Film is about thinking with the eyes. This is confirmed in Akerman's film, and further emphasized in the relevant video installations that were shown during the major celebration of Akerman's art in Paris this winter.
Akerman's nomadic life was marked by depression and a lack of belonging. Smallwood writes: "When she wasn't in bed, Akerman directed forty-nine films…." She died at the age of 65 in 2015. No Home Movie (2015) is a documentary about her mother Natalia Akerman's old age. It was her last film. Today, directors such as Gus Van Sant, Sally Potter and Michael , neke influenced by Akerman's oeuvre.
All Pictures From The Exhibition In Paris.
Courtesy: Chantal Ackerman.
