Delphine Seyrig in “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” credit: cranesareflying1.blogspot.com
Three women, unbeknownst to each other, were interested in making the same kind of film, a film that expressed a singularly feminine/feminist viewpoint, deliberately avoiding, and aspiring past, the kind of visual, structural and thematic choices to which filmmaking men were disposed. Chantal Ackerman was a Belgian filmmaker who had come to NYC, originally, to see Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) – it was rarely screened in Europe. Her 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Belgium, 1975), was shot by Babette Mangolte, a French cinematographer who split time between NYC and France (she met Akerman in NYC). Performing the role of the title character was our Delphine, who met Akerman at a smaller French film festival, and occupies every frame of this rigorous but revelatory film. Akerman’s first feature-length film, Je Tu Il Elle (Belgium, 1974), is 86 minutes long. Her second, Jeanne Dielman, is 3 hours and 21 minutes. There’s little if any disagreement that it’s one of the landmark works of art in the 20th century, yet it didn’t get a domestic U.S. screening until 1983, in New York.
The film is a chronicle of three days in the life of a widowed single mother (Delphine), living with her high-school-aged son Sylvain (Jan Decorte). There aren’t any details concerning the death of her husband, other than it happened six years ago. She and Sylvain seem to have a modest but sufficient source of income, although one of the first episodes of our first day, shortly after Sylvain has left for school, is her answering the door for a man who will pay her for providing sex. (This is likely what they’re living on.) She takes his coat and scarf, hangs them up, returns them when they’re done, and receives her payment when he leaves. She puts the money in a ceramic pot on the dining room table, opens the bedroom window for fresh air, and returns to the kitchen, where she drains potatoes for dinner. Back in the bedroom, she closes the bedroom window, smooths out the bedspread (which she had protected with a towel) and takes a long and thorough bath, cleaning the tub vigorously when she’s done. Afterwards, she sets the dining room table and puts the final touches on dinner just before Sylvain arrives home from school.
Although most of these things take up around 15 minutes of screen time, she’s extraordinarily methodical and meticulous. She tends to wear a housecoat in the kitchen, strikes the matches to light the range burners with oddly elegant grace, washes her hands often, and, when moving between rooms, turns lights on as she enters, off as she leaves. There’s a tablecloth and placemats set for dinner, and the cloth napkins have rings. She and Sylvain eat in relative silence, but tonight there’s a letter from Aunt Fernande in Canada. She and her husband recently moved there, and the bigger distances are daunting: “The women here all drive, but I’m afraid I’ll never learn.” After eating, Sylvain works on memorizing poetry by Baudelaire with Mom, then does other homework on his own. She turns on the evening radio (FürElise) and knits a sweater for him. There’s a store sign flashing outside through their window, incessantly, and, before retiring, they take a walk outside around the block. On returning, they move some furniture, unfold the living room hide-a-bed for Sylvain and put on their bedclothes. Sylvain asks her about meeting her husband, his father, George. She wanted security and a child, and suggests that love, looks and sex are secondary considerations. “If I were a woman,” he states, “I wouldn’t be able to sleep with someone I didn’t love,”. “You don’t know,” she says, “you’re not a woman.”
Jan Decorte and Delphine Seyrig in “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” credit: cranesareflying1.blogspot.com
“On the first day of shooting, Chantal told Delphine, “I want you to walk into the kitchen, go to the sink, turn on the water, wash your hands for five seconds, turn off the water, dry your hands on the towel for three seconds, put the towel down and walk out of the room.” Delphine asked her, “What am I thinking while I do this?” Chantal shrugged, “Think anything you want.” “Am I thinking about my son?” “Sure, why not, think about your son.”
Seyrig was not unfamiliar with the avant-garde; she’d made “Pull My Daisy” with Robert Frank, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and she now gently explained to the little girl from Brussels, “Listen, you can’t make movies that way. You can’t just tell actors to do things without motivation.” Chantal, 24 years old, a lower middle-class nobody whose father owned a clothing store, blithely told the star of Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, “Just do it. It’ll be fine. You’ll see.” A couple of days later, when Seyrig watched the dailies, she said, “You’re right. It works.”
Delphine Seyrig in “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” credit: cranesareflying1.blogspot.com
Many other chores are dealt with on the second day, in the same ordered and scheduled way. She wakes up and puts on her robe. Without waking him, she grabs Sylvain’s dirty clothes and shoes from the living room, leaves laundered clothes for his day, and shines his shoes in the kitchen while making coffee: she boils water, puts grounds in a filter over the pot, pours the water, dumps the filter when it’s finished, pours a cup for him and puts the rest in a thermos. After feeding Sylvain a bit of toast, she dresses for the day, gives him some allowance and sees him to the door off to school. Putting on her housecoat, she does all of last night’s dishes, strips and remakes her bed (with the towel for later) and runs her own errands: making a deposit at their tiny bank, taking Sylvain’s other pair of shoes to the shoe repairman (a telling bit of thrift), and stopping at two or three local shops for groceries. Once home, she sorts the groceries, logs the receipts in a notebook and starts to prepare dinner, but there’s a knock at the door. No worries, though; her neighbor is dropping off her baby to be watched while she’s out. The baby is apparently content while we watch her prepare breaded veal in real time.
A note on the visual scheme; anytime she’s doing anything in the house, the camera is straight-on to the room she’s in, stationary; the camera frame matches the shape of the room, parallel to the back wall. Known as an “aquarium shot,” it’s a surprisingly austere viewpoint, but ideal for observing tasks and activities one might think are too commonplace to document on film; surely you can edit away a lot of this in a montage sequence. But the results of this slow accumulation of details, and falling into her rhythms with them over time, are genuinely worth waiting for.
Mom returns to pick up her baby, and chats away about her indecision at the meat counter and ending up with too much veal – how she’s not that hungry anymore since she quit smoking, but the kids need meat with their meals. Too bad they can’t just do school lunches…
Mom leaves: Jeanne has a small lunch, touches up her make-up and goes out to buy more knitting wool for the sweater. (Although at no point in the film is her name ever used, spoken or even written on anything.) Then she stops at a small café for a coffee. Returning home, she prepares potatoes in the same manner as the previous day and leaves them to boil on the stove while answering the door for today’s male client.
Returning to the kitchen after their transaction, she stops, goes back to the bathroom and turns off the light she’s forgotten (from her bath and tub-cleaning). In the kitchen, she lifts the lid on the potatoes and realizes they’re overcooked. She doesn’t quite know what to do about it, and eventually drains them and tosses them in the trash. But there aren’t any more, so it’s a trip to the store. Returning, she must peel the potatoes again, and isn’t at the door to meet Sylvain when he gets home. Soup is on time, but they wait at the table, patiently, for the rest to finish cooking. After dinner, Sylvain points out she forgot to turn on the radio. They agree not to take their walk, since dinner was late, but then they go anyway. Turning in for the night, Sylvain confesses that everything he knows about sex was learned from his friend Jan (clearly not his parents, six years ago or at present), and he was repulsed by the idea that his parents did that. He faked nightmares, calling for her, to lure her away from that terrible thing Dad would do to her.
Delphine Seyrig in “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” credit: cranesareflying1.blogspot.com
“It was only on the first day of the shoot that we realized the length of certain shots. At that time, ninety minutes was the norm for a film to be commercial, but Chantal did not want to excerpt things or do ellipses on the gesture. This was fundamental to the aesthetic of feminism. You don’t do what men do. It’s not an action picture. It’s a picture that is about giving nobility to something that has never been represented: somebody cooking, somebody waiting. The consequences of the utopia that we were working from implied that the film was going to be the way it was. And that’s absolutely what was verbalized to Delphine. And she was totally for it. She was very sophisticated in terms of aesthetics — she was in Pull My Daisy; she lived in New York in the experimental film and art scene. And by the early Seventies she worked only with women directors. She was very much a feminist.”
Delphine Seyrig in “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” credit: cranesareflying1.blogspot.com
Akerman’s formalism keeps us at a remove, but Delphine Seyrig’s diligence and detail commands our attention. We see a woman who’s done everything that’s expected of her, has become everything she’s wanted to be – a good wife, a good mother and a good person. Her whole persona is learned behavior in a world that doesn’t give value to what she’s demonstrably learned. When little things start going wrong, they seem exponentially disruptive, even as she maintains composure. Jeanne’s inevitable disintegration doesn’t announce itself with shrieking and crying and lashing out. When it happens, it’s just as ordered and efficient and deliberate as most of the other things in her life. In some ways she’s relieved that another seemingly necessary task has been completed. The Freudians among us will pinpoint the particular moment of Jeanne’s catharsis, but Akerman’s step-by-step, unhurried narrative makes its own compelling case for long-term traumatic stress, and Seyrig is actress enough to make either or both perfectly plausible.
This is one of my favorite movies, and certainly one of my favorite acting performances. The narrative works at a very atypical speed and style, and not everyone will have patience for it. But those who stick with it, falling into Jeanne’s rhythms, will discover a very unique cinematic storytelling experience.
Delphine Seyrig in “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” credit: thecine-files.com
Periscope In The Bathtub 
Pingback: The Delphine Seyrig Project – India Song | Periscope In The Bathtub