Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels

I don't know what else to call it, so I'll call it "tyranny of the camera." While in conventional films, the camera constantly cowardly submits to the movement of the actors, this truly authoritarian camera finds its (static) place and then we only observe how the characters must submit to the space that had been defined for them by its framing (and the fact that this camera is truly uncompromising is beautifully evident in the occasionally decapitated heads of disobedient characters...). Traditional camera and editing surrender to the story's pleasing and seemingly natural narration, in which time ellipses serve to unrealistically cut out seemingly unimportant scenes. Akerman allows the camera to capture even the "boring" parts, and in that, she discovers more than all "Hollywood" stories combined (Akerman, unlike Truffaut, would not omit a traffic jam...). In this case, it penetrates deep into the stereotype of the lifestyle (see feminism), in which even the smallest deviation from the norm can become an explosion of suppressed frustration. (03/05/2014)

Even though I wanted to hate this movie because it is unbelievably long, I have to admit that it has its qualities. It makes you think. Like, why does it do all of this, why doesn't it talk, why doesn't it sing, why doesn't it listen to something while doing housework. All of this and much more justifies what it eventually does. Definitely an interesting and not nonsensical approach to the movie. (11/10/2015)

Every neorealist’s dream come true. Even though there is always something happening in this film (cooking, cleaning, setting the table, knitting), it lacks a dramatic plot in the usual sense of the word. It is neither action- nor goal-oriented, nor does it contain any external conflicts. It is more or less composed of scenes “between events”, which would have been cut from a standard narrative film. With hypnotic cyclicality, the same actions are repeated again and again. The concept of space and time is also subordinated to them. The shots are mostly as long as the duration of Jeanne’s activities. She sets the film’s rhythm. The enclosed space-time of the household is an extension of her personality, which, unlike the male protagonists, she does not try to overcome and destroy, but conversely embraces with masochistic humility. Though the interchangeability of the individual days reinforces our conviction that nothing will ultimately happen, when we grasp Jeanne Dielman from the opposite end, we can watch it a second time as a film in which pressure builds up for three hours and will have to be released in some way. It is necessary to understand the radical final gesture from the perspective of the second wave of feminism, which perceives the body as a weapon, identifying the personal with the political. In other words, we shouldn’t consider Jeanne’s action as mere evidence that she has been pulled out of the cyclically repetitive housework. The minimalistic style of frontally shot, symmetrically composed, long and static shots, empty monologues (which primarily have a rhythmic function, as they do not communicate much through their content) and mise-en-scène, in which the slightest change plays a role, does not serve to tell a story with spiritual reach, unlike the films of Bresson and Dreyer. Spiritual reach is exactly what is missing in Jeanne Dielman’s life. While she finds the daily routine stultifying, the film takes on a hypnotic quality thanks to its unchanging rhythm and shot compositions, whose balance reflects Jeanne’s obsessive need for order. We gradually begin to notice the colours, the lighting, the interplay of horizontal and vertical lines and the placement of objects in the shots. Every movement and every change of angle takes on meaning. The director thus does not have to draw our attention to changes through editing or dramatic music. Every disturbance of order becomes exciting in a space with similarly rigid rules and the most gripping scene in the film may be the one in which we wait to see whether the milk bottle whose stability has been disrupted will tip over and spill. Similarly fragile stability and the need to disrupt it are thematised on another level throughout the film, which is worth as much as several feminist essays. 90% (20/12/2015)

Courses on cooking, dining and preparing coffee with the sinful Ms. Jeanne. Formalistic minimalism with minor variations in the repetitive content. Jeanne Dielman is a procedural observation of a few days in the life of a woman who takes her son to work in the morning and has dinner with him and says a few things in the evening. In the time in between, she cooks, goes shopping, receives a male visitor for pay, showers and makes dinner... As a look into a private life, the film is so literal and focused on the acting that it is more voyeuristically satisfying than a documentary would be. Academic purity that embeds itself in one’s mind for the entire time spent intimately with a single character. (21/04/2023)