"In Jeanne Dierman, when we see Delphine Seliger sitting in a chair for a few minutes, we don't think about a distant or recent past, but suddenly wonder if she's well arranged Live your life to the fullest so that you don't let troubles come in. Is it just her troubles? No. No, not just that." - Chantal Ackerman
This is Chantelle Al Ackerman's 1975 feature film. At this time, Chantal Ackerman was only 25 years old, which was not in line with the film's mature and restrained temperament. The 25-year-old Ackerman was already old. Just like the girl Margaret Duras described in the first person in her autobiographical novel "The Lover", Duras was in her seventies when she wrote "The Lover", and the 25-year-old Ackerman used her knowledge of The extraordinary insight and understanding of life, as well as the practical experience and feelings of her 18-year-old alone in Brussels, have seen through the cruel truth of women's lives, and the truth is that she tries to capture in all her films. The appearance of this film made the 25-year-old Ackerman attract the attention of the world art film industry and the feminist camp in one fell swoop. Ackerman focused on the daily life of a housewife in Brussels for three days. The film took us three and a half hours. No matter in terms of plot content, structure or viewing experience, this volume seems It is very long, as long as the orderly and mediocre daily life of the heroine Jeanne Dillman, and it is also like the "long" psychological time of the heroine when peeling a potato or receiving a client.
More than 90 percent of the film's scenes are stabilized one after the other in Jeanne Dierman's tight apartment, as Ackerman already hints at in the film's title: 23 Rue de Bruxelles No. 1080, the limitation of this address is very important, and the character Jeanne Dillman described by Ackerman belongs to this space: she moves between the kitchen, living room, hallway, bedroom, bathroom, while the street, cafe, Small shops and post offices are the few locations. Space is right, and women’s rights are limited in these spaces. Due to her special status as a prostitute, the bedroom has become the most complex and dramatic enclosed space in this not rich space. Na Dillman's bedroom is also her working place in a small private space, which makes the space a transparent and public part, which is in line with the disappearance of the boundary between public and private space in modern film.
Although in terms of plot content, the overall state of the film is "anti-narrative", Ackerman's sense of design and manipulation in the form of this film also constitutes the greatest conflict with the text. The film starts with a pick-up. The arrival of the guest interrupts Jeanne Dillman, who is busy in the kitchen. In a textbook-level fixed shot, she takes the guest's hat and coat and brings the guest into the bedroom. Our peeps were blocked from the door along with the camera eye. When the guests left, Jeanne Dillman went to the bedroom to open the window to ventilate (this is one of the actions she repeats every day), and we entered the space of the bedroom, but only saw the large bed that may still be warm and a communal towel. This limited "exposure" makes our curiosity about this space unabated, and at the same time, it is also imaginative. It wasn't until Jeanne Dillmans went to bed on the first night that we finally saw the rest of the bedroom, mainly a picture of her and her late husband on the dresser, which served as some sort of evidence that the man in the apartment The owner's past presence, present absence, and, at the end of the film, the crime of Jeanne Dierman. We look at the stabbed man in the dressing table mirror and the framed photo of Jeanne Dillman with her husband, both of which simultaneously attract and share our visual attention, while dispelling the dramatic horror of death , which also confirms the absurdity and cruelty of existence itself. The complex and ambiguous space of the bedroom partially fulfills the narrative function of the dramatic climax of the film, and Jeanne Dillman eventually leads to destruction in the overlapping of the two spaces.
The presentation is almost repetitive and synonymous with other spaces in Jeanne Dillman’s home, such as the kitchen, which occupies most of her day from morning to night, with her expressionless repetition of her habitual movements, Pour the coffee beans into the grinder, brew coffee, add milk, brush my son's shoes, etc. It is worth noting that the son only enters the kitchen space during breakfast. This reminds us that the kitchen is not so much a platform for women to exercise their rights as a cage for fulfilling their obligations. In other words, it is the most decent way for women to express their right to love. And every night, the passage of Dillman and his son going out together becomes a deliberate "concealment" in the film's spatial narrative, and Ackerman makes their action area beyond the scope of the audience's "peeping".
Regarding the textbook-level fixed shot mentioned above, film critics or scholars will always refer to the special composition of this shot when discussing the film. Ackerman photographed a prostitute picking up customers, but stuck the scene on her body below the head and above her thighs. This reminded me inappropriately of a scene in the early Chinese film "Goddess" when Ruan Lingyu's Sister Ruan was picking up customers on the street. Director Wu Yonggang creatively only shot Ruan Lingyu's feet pacing back and forth, following another pair of men's leather shoes. The addition of , and the joint appearance of two pairs of feet, implicitly express the awkward opening of a one-time transaction. I don't think that Ackerman's intention of this unconventional composition represents some kind of "invisible person" of a prostitute, nor that it rebels against the position of women being consumed and viewed in Phallusism (she The status in the film is still the same, there is no difference), I think Ackerman is trying a different way of spatial expression, emphasizing the deliberateness and limitation of the image itself, the camera does not follow and adapt to the actions of the characters. At the same time, this is also simulating a voyeuristic perspective. In Ackerman's view, non-frontal pictures seem to be a kind of private voyeurism. This also seems to remind the audience that we are about to start a peeping for three and a half hours, and the object of the peeping is the lady in front of us.
At the same time, the film's exploration of time inside and outside the image is also intriguing. As Akerman said in the documentary "Akerman Self-Portrait" (Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman, 1997), when people saw the film and thought she was an excellent practitioner of theory, the truth was not. so. So, when everyone who watched the movie thought that the time in the movie (peeling potatoes, shining shoes, curing meat, etc.) was real time, in fact time was completely reshaped in the movie, which gave People leave a real-time impression. When directing actress Delphine Selig and asking her to speed up or slow down certain body movements, Ackerman said: "I don't want it to 'look real,' I don't want it to look Naturally, I want the audience to feel the time in it, not the time it actually needs.”
As a sound film with no dubbing and little dialogue, the narrative effect accomplished by a small proportion of voices in it is amazing. Among them, a letter from Dillman's sister and the daily dialogue between mother and son (the latter accounts for most of the dialogue in the film) are usefully supplementing the hidden part of the plot in the form of "counter-narrative". In their bedtime conversation, we learn about Dillman's not-so-happy married life, when his son said he wouldn't sleep with someone he didn't love if he was a woman The response was: "You don't understand, you're not a woman". The son recites Baudelaire's "The Enemy", and at the same time recalls the "little tricks" of his childhood with a straightforward Oedipus complex. There is more silence between mother and son.
At the end of the film, Jeanne Dillman sits at the dining table with blood on her white shirt, and we still don't know what she's thinking in this long shot. Would Jeanne Dierman's life have ended in the same way if her husband hadn't died six years ago? I think if it was Ackerman, she would give the same answer. The mundane housework imprisoned every woman in the apartment, and they were like a ticking time bomb that could explode at any time.
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