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."
