Everything is Gonna Change Forever

On the turn of the century in 2003



Some highlights from my interview with Luca Guadagnino, the half-Algerian, raised in Ethiopia, Italian director of I Am Love:

MB: Do you see similarities between the cooking process and filmmaking?
LG: It's about collaborators, it's about tools, and it's about, most importantly, shaping a new form out of the natural ingredients.


LG: Oh, Jeanne Dielman, I love. I went to a film festival once and saw Jeanne Dielman at 9 o'clock in the morning. And I was hypnotized, mesmerized by this, for hours. Now that you are quoting it, I also used a lot of Jeanne Dielman for I Am Love. Of course, we don't have the gravitas and the austerity of Chantal Akerman. But the lesson, we tried to get the lesson of Chantal Akerman.




MB: The film starts as old-fashioned melodrama, and then transitions to something else, another kind of melodrama, maybe. It's the scene where she's driving to Sanremo, with her Vertigo hairdo, and it's very much from her point-of-view. And then suddenly, in this very short scene, the shape of her hair is echoed in the architecture and then the nature surrounding her. And then the film takes on this soft-focus style, with nature shots. What were your references for this part of the film?


This is what I saw: Vintage Playboy in Nature

LG: Many references. Mostly painterly references, photographic references. We looked a lot at the work of Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, great, great German photographers. Russian avant-gardists like Malevich or Pougny.

And this is what it came from: (Ruff, Ruff & Pougny)

On Actresses, Pt. II

Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
"The first masterpiece in the feminine in the history of the cinema", Le Monde, 1976

A pet peeve: Some reviews of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman that I've read in the last year have misread Jeanne as oppressed by her domestic routine instead of this as the only outlet she has to save her from oppression. It is her medium.

"The important thing is the style, the form. It shows everyone has conditioning. The attention I show to this woman's gestures is very positive. To show that doing the dishes can also be used for art, that is positive," said Akerman in a 1977 interview with Film Quarterly.

Actress Delphine Seyrig said to the same magazine, "In this role I experienced things I've been trying to get away from my whole life. What was most difficult for me was not to express any revolt or aggression. As I became Jeanne Dielman, I realized how easy it is to be a woman like that. Women are very malleable, they all play roles, not just actresses; they adept more easily than men do. I felt this experience has never been shown before. No man could have made this film; it is a totally feminine film."


Released in 1974, just a year before Jeanne Dielman, Céline and Julie Go Boating (or one half of it) was written largely by actresses Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier:

"During the filming, we got up early in the morning and told each other our dreams, which the film depended on... We wrote our lines each morning and evening... [and we always] knew what stance we had and why. Everything is doubled in this film, which also talks about the acting profession in its relation to the spectators, whom we often act aggressively toward without real malice," said Berto.

Labourier explained, "We were interested in creating characters that would emerge from our essential vocation as actresses. Very often we tend to forget that the profession of an actress is, above all, based on games, like children's games. So in Céline and Julie we started off with the notion of amusing ourselves by creating interchangeable characters in many different forms in the style of a game."

Maximalist

“I don’t think Jeanne Dielman is minimalist,” said Chantal Akerman. “I think it’s maximalist. It’s big!"


"And if I did the film now I don’t know that it would be called feminist."

“All those labels are a bit annoying,” she continued. “To name something is a way to possess it. I think it makes the film smaller. And O.K., maybe they are right, but they are never right enough.”

Phantom Forms

Carolee Schneeman's
Fuses

“Why not posit here that the fact that everything that is analyzable is sexual does not mean that everything that is sexual is accessible to analysis.” –Jacques Lacan

I’m entering dangerous territory, with a blog cheekily called The Nibbler, in moving from innuendo to dealing direct. But I can’t ignore this news item that has me absolutely perplexed and irate:

This article claims that, "Researchers at King’s College London claim there is no evidence for the existence of the G-spot – supposedly a cluster of internal nerve endings – beyond a woman’s imagination."
Is this really where we are in the progression of feminism? Something that some, but not all, women physically feel is declared as officially not existing, as being in their imaginations, because some men can’t find it? And this is to protect the women! From not feeling bad.

This is insanity. You know what else is insanity? When Doris Lessing recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature, some of the response to her literary career (my own included) was focused on one passage she had written, in her masterpiece The Golden Notebook, on vaginal orgasms:

"As time went on, he began to use mechanical means. (I look at the word mechanical — a man wouldn’t use it.) Paul began to rely on manipulating her externally, on giving Ella clitoral orgasms. Very exciting. Yet there was always a part of her that resented it. Because she felt that the fact he wanted to, was an expression of his instinctive desire not to commit himself to her. She felt that without knowing it or being conscious of it (though perhaps he was conscious of it) he was afraid of the emotion. A vaginal orgasm is emotion and nothing else, felt as emotion and expressed in sensations that are indistinguishable from emotion. The vaginal orgasm is a dissolving in a vague, dark generalized sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. There are several different sorts of clitoral orgasms, and they are more powerful (that is a male word) than the vaginal orgasm. There can be a thousand thrills, sensations, etc., but there is only one real female orgasm"

She calls it a "real orgasm” and that’s problematic, but it’s the best description of the difference between these two types that I know of. In fact, this 1962 description is one of the only literary descriptions of this differentiation that I know of; this is part of the insanity. [Simone de Beauvoir also wrote well on this, what she called “a complete orgasm”, an experience she didn’t have until she was 39, and not with Sartre. Soon afterwards she transitioned from being know as an existentialist philosopher, who had independence by living as a man could but was called La Grande Sartreuse, and instead came into her own fame as a feminist philosopher with the publication of The Second Sex.] The deeper insanity was that while some women wrote about this passage of Lessing’s as being uniquely accurate, other women attacked it, not for undermining the clitoral orgasm, but for even declaring that a vaginal orgasm exists! How could she? How quaint and fifties and pre-feminist of her, wrote some commentators. Masters and Johnson had already proven that the only orgasm is the clitoral orgasm; how lucky that it’s our most phallic familiar spot, and the easiest to not lose sight of.

Women have three kinds of orgasms. At least! Three distinct tones that can be played in succession or in harmony.

Why is so much of men's sexuality so foundational to our value systems, to such an extent that we don't even notice, yet still so much of women's sexuality is debatable and susceptible to trends? Or just ignored.

This is important; the roots of sexism are in the fear of the power and the unknown, and the unknowability, of sex.

This is also important because by not being aware of our own sensations fully, we are also not aware of our forms. Standard narratives that are a linear buildup towards a climax are based, quite obviously, on the structure of sex. But what is less established, for the very reasons stated above, is that this is a male experience that women are also sympathetic to but not limited to. What would a narrative form that allowed for the competing, overlapping, choral voices of a woman’s experience look like? What would a "vague sensation of only emotion" look like in filmic images? Or how could one film the above mentioned de Beauvoir breakthrough of “profound self-abandonment” in which she describes her body as "a hymn, a flame.” Experimental film goes there often, but narrative features--which are, again, often structured on a male experience of action and climax and resolution--rarely do.

Two of the most interesting examples I know of authentic female narratives in feature films are both about women struggling to assert their own identities within, or outside of, or transcendent of, male sexual experiences. In Bette Gordon’s Variety, her heroine finds her own voice through a voyeuristic and playful ownership of the stories she overhears in the porno theater where she sells tickets. In Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Jeanne’s “mysterious” and sudden shift occurs when, according to Akerman, she has an orgasm and it is intolerable to her.

The article that introduced this topic has me very concerned that what is complex about a woman's experience, and unfathomably but not unexplainably different from a man's, can be so easily invalidated. There are so few narrative feature film forms that are authentic to the experience of women. And when they are found, they might be declared, like the G-spot, as not existing officially.