Neuropsychologists talk about flash memories. Or the precise, vivid memory of the circumstances in which information was learned. The older ones remember precisely what they were doing and where they were when the death of JFK or Marilyn Monroe was announced. The same goes for the fall of the Berlin Wall, the September 11 attacks or, one day – who knows? –, the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
For movie buffs, one date is special, imbued with a particular emotion: their first viewing of Jeanne Dielman, or rather Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels in its full title, film by Chantal Akerman, released theatrically in France in 1976.
Everyone has their memory, their flash. Laura Mulvey, one of the most influential British film critics of the 20th centurye century, at the origin of the concept of male gauze (erotic view of actresses by male directors), still relives this screening at the Edinburgh festival, in Scotland, in August 1975, and “the overwhelming feeling of seeing a film like no one has made before”. It was at Champollion, a famous cinema in the Latin Quarter in Paris, that actress Sylvie Testud discovered him in the 1990s, before working with Chantal Akerman on The Captive (2000) and Tomorrow we move (2004). “An indescribable shock. »
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The essayist Hélène Frappat, author of the essay Gaslighting or the art of silencing women (L’Observatoire, 2023), had viewed it on “a VHS passed on by someone” at the end of the 1990s. As for the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton, who would become the filmmaker’s companion, she still laughs at these two ladies in the queue of a New York cinema, at the beginning of the 1980s , Who “regretted not having brought a sandwich” by discovering the length of the film. Jeanne Dielman lasts three hours and twenty minutes.
The most famous feature film by the Belgian filmmaker, born in 1950 and died in 2015, is the story of three days in the life of a housewife, played by Delphine Seyrig, widow and mother of a teenager. In a series of still shots, the camera shows her, dressed in a checked apron or woolen vest, shopping, polishing shoes, peeling potatoes, breading cutlets. And, every late afternoon, to prostitute herself.
Quoted by Gus Van Sant or Alice Diop
Who saw Jeanne Dielman ? Not many people. When it was released in January 1976, at the same time as Jaws, by Steven Spielberg, there are only a few thousand who go to theaters. For a long time, the film remained “this myth shared only by film buffs”, according to Hélène Frappat. “A well-kept secret, darling,” confides curator Marta Ponsa, who worked with curator Laurence Rassel on the vast retrospective currently devoted to Chantal Akerman at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris.
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