JEANNE DIELMAN BURNS POTATOES: ON THE PRICE OF MOTHER’S COOKING
Food is lots of things — and the things it is remembered for most are truly special. These are the moments that make a life worth living: food is celebration, it is memory, it is identity . But — food is also sustenance, as everyday and banal as using the toilet. It is as real as facts of life get. In popular culture, however, it is mainly in its capacity of exceptionality that food shows up — especially in visual media such as film, where often elaborate and visually stunning dishes function not only as a storytelling tool, but also as visual interest. Think of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, or Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman. Robert Altman’s 1977 film 3 women, which gave our platform its name, is an example of a film in which food functions much the same as it does in most people’s lives: It is by no means a “food film”, but food plays a role — in conversation, as a structuring element, as part of a famous dinner party. While its food might not be appealing to modern audiences, it is meant as a way to elevate the everyday, as opposed to being what makes the everyday so unremarkable. But, perhaps, all that makes sense: We spend most of our time living unremarkable lives, so why would we want to watch someone else live one on our screens?
That thought must not have fazed Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman when she set out to make the film that, to everyone’s surprise, was voted the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s decennial poll last year. Upon its release in 1975, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles shocked audiences with its three hours and twenty minutes playtime and almost complete lack of plot — but it also became an instant classic. A film’s long playtime can usually be blamed on the director’s unwillingness to, as the saying goes, kill their darlings, often under the false presumption that what interests them so, must also interest a cinema audience long after the popcorn finished and bladders surrendered. In the case of Jeanne Dielman, however, the film’s extreme length is more or less its point — if anything, the film’s main obsession is time. In that respect, the film shares its DNA with German author Christa Wolf’s mammoth project and book One Day a Year, for which she documented in painstaking detail the events of every September 27 — a randomly chosen day — as they occurred, between the years 1960 and 2011 (when the entry was little more than some scribbled notes from a deathbed). In her introduction to the collection of the first forty years, Wolf wonders: “How does life come to be? Is life identical with time in its unavoidable but mysterious passage? Is life made up of countless, microscopic pieces of time?” Of course, as Wolf also acknowledges: “in the end, life is more than the sum of its moments''. In all our lives, even just from the perspective of time passing, food takes up a sizable chunk, although the gravity of its role varies from person to person, from life to life.
Jeanne Dielman played by Delphine Seyrig
via Criterion Collection YouTube
For the heroine of Akerman’s film, Jeanne Dielman, as a widowed housewife and mother to teenage son Sylvain, food takes up an enormous part of her day. Jeanne shops for food, puts away groceries, washes vegetables, peels and boils potatoes, makes the table, returns dishes to the kitchen and washes up, and all the while, the camera lingers on the action like a fly on the wall, giving the audience completely still, uncut footage of patient observation. Other characters, of which there are few, move in and out of frame: Her son goes to school, where the “microscopic pieces of time” that make up his life are off-camera, while we watch Jeanne move around her apartment, opening and closing each door she passes through, allowing us to look through the lens and see her life in microscopic detail.
It is precisely these details most filmmakers would deem uninteresting and unable to move a plot forward that make up the bulk of the film. What would interest most other filmmakers is irrelevant to Akerman, as she does not allow us to distract ourselves from the claustrophobic aspects of Jeanne’s existence: The neighbour, who is one of Jeanne’s only conversation partners, is heard through the door but never seen, Jeanne’s encounters with men for paid sex are shown only during their arrival and departure. Jeanne resorting to paid sex to sustain for herself and her son the life they had before her husband’s passing seems to also be a metaphor for the “prostitution” that a life in service of the family is. Even so, she is literally both Mother and Whore. Men, traditionally, want the mother at home and watch the whore on the silver screen. This expectation is subverted: instead of seeing sex acted out, we watch Jeanne peel potatoes, while the sex happens off-screen. Crucially, Akerman cast Delphine Seyrig, a famous, beautiful and glamorous actor, to play Jeanne: As she pointed out in a 2009 interview, “if we saw someone making beds and doing dishes whom we normally see do those things, we wouldn’t really see that person, just like men are blind to their wives doing dishes. So Delphine was perfect, because it suddenly became visible.”
It is in the film’s absolute patience with Jeanne’s existence as a caregiver that it shows its appreciation for this type of labour: unpaid, unappreciated and usually unseen. The still camera has another effect: It allows the audience to see Jeanne working, cooking, without ever focusing in on the product of her labour. Cinema, whenever it deals with food, often fetishises it, so as to evoke all sensory experiences and heightened emotional impact it can be charged with. Jeanne’s food is bereft of emotion. Just like Jeanne is in some ways a shell of a person, cut off from her dreams and aspirations and lacking all forms of personal expression, her food also becomes a mere acting out of tradition, a repetition of tiny, microscopic pieces of time that made up other people’s lives, too. In a world of high-paced, high-res, polished social media content, celebrity chefs and fine dining, watching someone earnestly, honestly, mixing and shaping a meatloaf on a kitchen table for almost four minutes, wearing a silly little apron, is fascinating. And, yet, it is also painful to watch a woman so readily sacrificing herself for her role as Mother.
Jeanne Dielman is food cinema in which the food is hard to find, because the food is somewhat beside the point. The way Jeanne cooks is the way someone who is going through the motions cooks. She does not love it and she does not hate it, it is merely a fact of life. Here lies an important distinction between Jeanne and Christa Wolf’s self-portrait in One Day a Year: Jeanne has long ago stopped asking what makes a life worth living. Focussing on the tasks at hand is precisely what allows her to never ask that question; the tasks pass by as though on a production line, needing to be dealt with. Each day, of which we see three, is more or less identical to the last, and without noticing it, we become so attuned to the rhythm and choreography of the acts that when, by the end of the second day, small mistakes start to slip in, we become worried. Never before were burned potatoes made to seem so ominous.
Jeanne forgets to put the lid on the terrine in which she keeps the cash from the men she receives each afternoon; Jeanne forgets to turn off the light; Jeanne walks into a room and forgets why. Worst of all, Jeanne wakes up early, giving her an hour of spare time with which she absolutely does not know what to do. The questions suppressed by routine start to float to the top: Jeanne’s life begins to unravel. This unravelling, hardly noticeable at first but increasingly distressing, leads to a climax that gives the film its first and only traditional plot point almost three and a half hours into its playtime: after reaching orgasm during the first shown intercourse of the film, Jeanne loses it and stabs her beau with a pair of scissors.
If it seems like this semblance of action would be a relief to the audience, it is not. No relief is needed, because for those who have sat through this brave, weird, sad, beautiful thing of a movie up until this point, the climax is hardly the most interesting thing about it. Three and a half hours are a long time to sit and watch a film, yet, in the scheme of things, it is a short amount of time to feel a profound change occurring. After watching Jeanne Dielman, one can never overlook housework again, or peel a potato without thinking of Jeanne. Meaning is never an intrinsic property, meaning is given to things. It is a strange world in which the things that literally keep us alive — food, care, shelter — are valued so little that the people who provide it are taken for granted. Akerman gives housework back the meaning it so deeply deserves, and shows what can happen to a life sacrificed to the care of others and the forgetting of the self. Which brings to mind the motto Christa Wolf prefixed her 1968 masterpiece The Quest for Christa T. with: “This coming-to-oneself — what is it?
Text: Yannic Moeken
Copy edit: Charlotte Faltas
Creative Direction: Yannic Moeken, Junshen Wu, Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenthain
Photography: Junshen Wu
Sources:
Christa Wolf: One Day a Year. 1960-2000. Michigan, 2007.
Mayukh Sen: Survival Food.
Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman
