Chantal Akerman, 1975
Hmmm, this is a kind of...well, significant movie I guess you'd say and I'm feeling a little crazy lately so thigs could get weird.
First off, something you should know about me going into this one. I have, as I mentioned, been reading Infinite Jest, a major premise of which is that our national obsession with entertainment (particularly in filmic form) is decidededly Not. Good. For. Us.
Now despite (or more likely, because of) my personal obsessions and affinities, I feel that there is some profound truth behind this assertion. And while this affirms developments in certain areas of my life, I am faced with a certain feeling of panic that the (right now) central and ruling passion of my life is basically a fool's paradise that will only lead me into the arms of rapidly cycling, repetitious misery. (Adding not insignificantly to my fretfulness is the fact that the community of film scholars is treated not exactly derisively but with more than a touch of ridicule in the book.)
On my more equivocal days I can comfort myself with the notions that certain films have know been very decidedly ensconced as art, and I've sort of made it my job to discern the thematics and stylistic elements that elevate certain films beyond the level of mere entertainment. On the other hand, there's this sort of paradox developing in me as a viewer where my sensibilities are becoming more demanding and refined but at the same time a very stubborn insistence that a film must be interesting to watch has developed within me. And then I realized that the experience I had been seeking -- the one I finally experienced watching Limelight -- was one of being thoroughly captivated, moved and... well, entertained. And because I don't have an incredibly strong sense of self and am highly suggestible, I thought "Oh shit, is my whole life in some serious trouble here?"
Which is about when denial and the old defense mechanism kicked in: Film can be moralistic and edifying! I shall show you, Wallace! I know what I'll do! I'll watch Jeanne Dielman! And that's how I went into this film, thinking of it as the most boring and punitive movie I could imagine, and hoping that fact alone would lead to some sort of morally or spiritual experience.
I'm not entirely cognizant of the circumstances of this film's genesis. But I think it's important to note that in the same year that this film came out, Laura Mulvey's seminal essay Visual Pleasure In Narrative Cinema was published. While known as a sort of founding text for feminist film theory, it was also pioneering in its use of psychoanalytic theory in film analysis. Basically: in film the subject is always male, the object always female. Film is dominated by the male gaze, a woman's value determined by what Mulvey calls her "to-be-looked-at-ness." The basic notion is that classic cinema is inherently oppressive to women and that a radical feminist avant-garde filmmaking was called for.
So the question is: if Hollywood cinema is inherently oppressive, what does a liberated cinema look like? And while I haven't seen a lot of these movies, my general understanding is that as Mulvey and others attempted to answer this question, the answer seemed to be "something pretty boring," forwarding a frequent notion that women have to choose between what's pleasurable and what's good for them, and idea that I think we still to a certain extent combat to this day.
While the chronology doesn't quite jibe, it's hard not to look at Jeanne Dielman, a three-and-a-half sparse look at the routines of a housewife and sometime prostitute, as a response to Mulvey's world view. So the question: Is it boring?
Personally, I drifted in and out of engagement. Like Andrei Rublev, the sparseness of visual content and activity can draw you into an almost transcendental rhythm. However if you can stay in that place for the whole 3+ hour running time, you're more of a voyeuristic ninja than I.
Moreover, Akerman here lends you into a false sense of security. Watching this movie is kind of like what looking into my window over the course of this past week (from any one of the handful of office bulidings from which you would have the opportunity to do this. On Monday I had a shade pulled all the way down that wouldn't go back up, so you were only getting a band of light. Early Tuesday morning the maintenance guys came to winterize the windows, and they took the broken shade down. So I am totally shadeless until the new, unbroken shade gets put up. Now this was not a matter of great concern to me, since I tend toward the self-conscious side even when I'm just around myself. This tendency is compounded by the fact that over the winter I got put on a series of medications that basically short-circuited the whole concept of fullness in my brain and I put on some weight. So after months of trying to rectify this situation with no real progress, all of a sudden things started happening quite rapidly and I started becoming, well un-self-conscious. And in the words of ABC "me I go from one extreme to another" so around 2:30 Friday afternoon I realized I was...er, being un-self-conscious smack in front of my unshaded window and furthermore had been doing so for about 20 minutes smack-dab in the middle of business hours.
Which is not just to say that you get to see Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) naked. (You do get to do that, and fairly early in the film. I have to say that this particular nude scene surprised me in an ostensibly feminist film. Not that it struck me as exploitative or anything, and it's true that the character gets established as rather anal-retentive in her personal routines, but do real women really scrub their breasts for that long? I thought only men washed your breasts that attentively when you were showering with one of them? Seyrig does have rather lovely breasts, a distinct upgrade from most French actresses, so thin that they look great in clothes but don't amount to much out of them. And you see, I'm always going to notice that sort of thing, which is part of why I find pleasure/edification dichotomy so problematic for me.) My such asidetrack there! What I meant to say was that intimacy gets revealed on many different levels here, and just when you get lulled into a sense of acceptance that not much is going to happen, things slowly but decidedly start to shift.
So I was having a conversation with a slightly younger woman during which she said, to be blunt, "I think I like penis too much to be a feminist." Those of you who know me at all may have guessed that I get a little forceful on this issue. "No, no!" I cried. I tend to have a voice-modulation problem when I get excited, and this was in full effect here. We were on the sidewalk and I was gesticulating wildly. "Common misconception!" What I mean is that right now the feminist perspective comes very much from a place of personal choice, and it's interesting taking that perspective and applying it to a document from an earlier period of the movement, when the focus was on taking down oppression and breaking barriers. As a woman watching the film, you feel like you're watching some kind of meta-commentary on feminine experience, where everyone feels so insecure in her position and the choices that she most examine other women's lives for signs and affirmations. Watching all the little rituals and movements of Jeanne's life, it seems vitally important to determine whether this women is content in her life. (All external signs seem to point to a negatory on that one; she's forced into prostitution but doesn't like sex, never wanted to be married, and follows an anally-retentive household schedule.) One doesn't know whether to gauge Jeanne's own experience by what we feel watching her. There are moments of tedium, true, but also moments where the details of domestic life prove unexpectedly warm and comforting. I was shocked to feel fulfilled and comforted at moments; perhaps I wouldn't have found the same kind of satisfaction in a film that sought more baldly to divert me. As the film unfolds, it fleshes out one of those truths so obvious that it often needs to be illustrated; being a woman, regardless of the choices you make, isn't any one thing but a variety of moods and experiences.
Stylistically, one could say that the film takes a feminist approach in that it attempts to circumvent traditional modes of female representation. I don't think any close-ups are used; not just of Jeanne but of anybody. Full body shots are privileged, as are long takes and long shots that emphasize entire or multiple actions. The woman asserts control and mastery over the frame rather than being objectified by it. Apparently Seyrig had to tone her mannerisms down quite a bit to deliver the understated kind of performance that Akerman wanted, so I was surprised to find her quite mannered in places, particularly when eating; I don't know if we're meant to interpret it as Jeanne clinging to bourgeois proprieties. I will say that between the long takes and the underplayed acting, anyone wanting to be a critic should be required to see this film, because it obliges you to look very keenly for nuances. The moment where Jeanne crosses her legs while standing up and drinking a cup of coffee struck me as simultaneously undecipherable and fraught with meaning.
If you don't want to be spoiled, stop reading now. I had a feeling of a certain primness (perhaps echoing Jeanne's own personality) that seemed to belie the straightforward documentary style of the film. If the wilm purported to show us the reality of a woman's life, wasn't it displaying a certain reticence? Why not show her on the toilet? Or show us something of this transactional sex she's having? Well you know how I said things eventually start to happen? Well, we see some sex eventually, and oh my God did it make me long for about forty more minutes of potato peeling. I can't tell if it's the most objectively awful sex ever portrayed on screen or if it was only personally harrowing for me because it closely evoked the most abysmal sex I've ever had the misfortune to have. The dude just seems to be lying there, a tactic I've never understood, and just watching it made me feel all cringe-y and claustrophobic. Perhaps reliving my own personal nightmares, I assumed Jeanne was frantically trying to escape; it did occur to me that I could be witnessing an orgasm, and Wikipedia confirms that this is indeed what happens. While personally mystifying, this development sort of works in nicely to the whole pleasure/pain fulfillment/boredom dichotomies running through the film, and makes her response both more real and more mysterious.
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