4 - Literal Durations and Cinematic Parallelism

Summary

The kitchen scene mentioned at the beginning of the first chapter is one of many examples that characterise the stylistic arrangements of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – a Belgian-French film released in 1975. In the film, the viewer witnesses three days in the life of a lonely widowed housewife named Jeanne Dielman. With a running time that exceeds three hours, the film emphasises Jeanne's daily tasks, how she takes care of her apartment, where she lives with her teenage son, Sylvain, and how she makes a living by prostitution. From its early shots, the film proceeds by introducing the order that Jeanne imposes on her life and apartment and continues by developing and then rupturing this order, which concludes when Jeanne murders her client on the third day.

Jeanne Dielman is one of the most notable fiction films to demonstrate how bodies in cinema are in surplus of readability. While dominant forms of cinema conservatively rely on either a denial of this surplus as their condition of possibility or an often commercially motivated exploitation of aural and visual excesses, Jeanne Dielman opens up a different path by drawing on this unmotivated bodily presence to render explicit the impossibility of a total conversion of the filmed body – the latter as what might be associated with meanings and functions, but these associations are provisional and uncertain. Showing how Akerman couples the inhumanity of the automatic recording of the camera with aesthetic intent, my analysis in this chapter diverges from some of the existing psychoanalytical frameworks adopted to interpret the film. Despite their socio-political and epistemological significance, these interpretations are often inadequate in accounting for the surplus of bodily presence that Jeanne Dielman is predominantly concerned with. Whereas the film embraces too much bodily presence rather than shying away from it, interpretive attempts, mainly due to their apprehensive preoccupation with meaning, interiority and subjectivity, inevitably extinguish the anxiety that this surplus provokes and gloss over the unique mode of address that Jeanne Dielman calls forth and the responses that it encourages.