Jeanne Dielman and Visual Pleasure

In Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, traditional models of cinematic spectatorship are disrupted in favor of long takes, surveillant camerawork, and an unconventional narrative structure. Comparing the film to Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which posits concepts of the male gaze in direct correlation with models of Hollywood narrative storytelling, one can see how Akerman deviates from traditional notions of the male gaze through the mediated gaze of the camera. Through the objective, surveillant camera and in its deviation from a traditional cinematic male gaze, Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman realizes Mulvey’s vision of an alternative cinema outlined in “Visual Pleasure.”

Laura Mulvey develops a psychoanalytic approach to film studies in her essay and details the way in which a politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is possible. Though Mulvey references the potential for avant-garde cinema to challenge traditional models of the male gaze, writing that “[t]his is not to reject [mainstream film] moralistically, but to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it, and, further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions,” (8) her essay treats this as a counterpoint to the conventions of Hollywood cinema rather than a normative approach. Mulvey introduces the idea of the displayed woman at the center of Hollywood filmmaking practices. She cites Hitchcock’s Vertigo as a primary example. In Hitchcock’s film, a close-up of Scottie leads to a camera dolly into Madeline, directing the audience’s gaze through the movement of the camera and connecting it to the male subject as the bearer of the look. In Vertigo, Madeline’s green dress sets her apart from her surroundings while in Jeanne Dielman, Jeanne’s muted clothing often acts as camouflage for her environment. This look emphasizes the female subject as the figure who “holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire,” (Mulvey 11). Her intention is to undermine traditional visual pleasure by deconstructing the basis of these long-standing patriarchal standards, and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman is an example of the formal realization of this process of deconstruction.

While the cinematic world of Jeanne Dielman is irrefutably intimate, it deviates from normative representations of sexuality and what Mulvey refers to as “to-be-looked-at-ness,” (11). Akerman and cinematographer Babette Mangolte’s camerawork ensures this, taking scenes of privacy traditionally sexualized within Hollywood cinema and stripping away conventional sexualization within them. When Jeanne is taking a bath, her nudity is not exhibitionistic, nor is the camera voyeuristic as in Hitchcock. Jeanne is low in the composition of the frame, shot in profile, alternating between cleaning herself and the faucets of the tub. Jeanne is identifying herself as a part of the fixture, as if her body is another part of the home to be cleaned. Film scholar Marsha Kinder illustrates this in a 1977 essay, writing that “[w]hen Jeanne bathes before dinner, we don’t merely see a few erotic glimpses of flesh in the water; rather, we witness the entire functional process as she actually scrubs every part of her body and then cleans out the tub. The graphic details destroy the eroticism and make us aware of just how unrealistic and contrived most other bath scenes really are,” (4). This elimination of eroticism is most clearly shown when Jeanne is seeing clients as a prostitute. As Jeanne takes her clients into her room, the camera does not follow as the mobile camera in Hitchcock’s film does. The spectator is denied entry into this space. Not only is this an unconventional cinematic depiction of sex, it is also a rejection of on-screen sex entirely. When the camera is finally allowed into Jeanne’s room for her final client of the film, this direct representation leads to narrative consequences. While having sex with this client, Jeanne fights against an undesired orgasm. Up to this point, Akerman had worked deliberately to remove sexual pleasure from every aspect of the film, and in this final encounter, a man has broken this threshold. Through the mirror on her vanity table, Jeanne looks back at the man lying in the same bed that she has carefully made and remade multiple times in the past two days. She stands up, yielding a pair of scissors laying on the desk (used one scene prior to open a package), walks over to the man in her bed and stabs him. This moment parallels Akerman’s own formal rejection of eroticism throughout Jeanne Dielman, and evokes Mulvey’s call-to-action. From physical appearance to his placement within the frame, with his face only being shown in reflection, the man represents an inaccessibility to the male figure as a surrogate for the audience’s spectatorship and pleasure, and Jeanne is destroying what is left of it.

Voyeurism and scopophilia are integral to a woman’s role in the classical narrative film. Mulvey establishes Freud’s essay on scopophilia as a basis for Hitchcock’s utilization of this pleasure in looking. Mulvey writes that “[a]lthough the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other,” (9). Hitchcock creates an obsessive voyeur in Vertigo. Mulvey continues: “In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates… Scottie’s voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally blatant: he has chosen … to be a policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a result, he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty and mystery,” (16). While Hitchcock uses the active/male figure and his look to drive the narrative, Akerman removes the male figure as the bearer of the gaze, substituting Scottie’s gaze for the objective camera’s. As the audience is subjected to an objective and surveillant point of view, these moments of intimacy, whether they be a bath or a sexual encounter, leave no room for vicarious or scopophilic pleasure. Mulvey concludes this section, saying “the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on to the performer,” (9). Through the deliberate omission of the central male figure, and by extension the dominant male gaze, Akerman creates a distance between the audience and the events of the film.

According to Mulvey, the active/male and the passive/female can coexist, so long as the male is able to project his fantasy onto the female. She claims that a woman’s presence works against narrative development and proceeds to quote Budd Boetticher, who writes: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance,” (qtd. in Mulvey 11). Chantal Akerman subverts this concept in Jeanne Dielman, allowing Jeanne to exist as the generative source of narrative. Men appear at her door at designated times, she has sex with them, she gets paid, and they leave. How these men feel about Jeanne is of no importance to either Jeanne herself or to the narrative. The men in Jeanne Dielman occupy the place traditionally held by the woman in conventional narrative fiction. The narrative is not dependent on these male figures, but is instead dependent on Jeanne and her schedule. When her schedule is interrupted, the narrative suffers.

In contrast to Mulvey, who states that men are unable to bear the burden of sexual objectification, Akerman plays with this concept, having men appear only when sex is imminent, apart from Jeanne’s son. Akerman is, as Mulvey states in “Visual Pleasure,” “leaving the past behind without rejecting it,” (8) something central to Jeanne Dielman. Akerman utilizes many aspects of conventional narrative film in order to both solidify her points regarding the woman’s place in a patriarchal society, as well as acknowledging the past and playing to the expectations of the audience’s gaze. Sex is a prominent narrative device in Jeanne Dielman, something intrinsic to the Hollywood formula. A woman is at the center of the film, and though unconventional in its presentation, she is still subject to the gaze of the audience. The film reaches its climax with the murder of the third client, exploiting another essential element of Hollywood filmmaking in the form of violence as a narrative device. Akerman understands that these are aspects of visual pleasure that, regardless of their patriarchal nature, contribute to the development and coherence of the narrative. She includes each of these familiar characteristics while contradicting their premises; sex is part of Jeanne’s profession; Jeanne exists at the center of the narrative, to be looked at by the audience, but not as an object in equivalence to Hitchcock’s Madeline; the murder Jeanne commits at the climax of the film is not part of a male fantasy, nor is it conventionally cinematic, with no camera movement or music to suggest its importance over other moments of Jeanne’s daily routine.

Mulvey takes the notion of the displayed woman further, stating that women exist as a sexual object for both the characters within a film and the audience members viewing the film. Mulvey writes that “[a]s the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence,” (12). The two different perspectives merge into one, allowing the spectator to feel more power over the displayed woman than they regularly would. Akerman does away with this omnipotent perspective in favor of a singular, objective perspective in the form of the camera. Akerman deconstructs Mulvey’s description of traditional visual pleasure with a formally rigorous camera, rejecting the male gaze. The film is told exclusively through static long-take shots, with the average shot length being 53.4 seconds (Jones) and the film’s runtime totaling 202 minutes. With few exceptions, Jeanne is shown solely in medium shots, capturing her from her waist up. Discussing the idea of fetishistic framing, exemplified in the glamorous depictions of Marlene Dietrich by director Josef von Sternberg, Mulvey states: “The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look,” (14). Akerman and Mangolte’s distanced framing encapsulates Jeanne Dielman as a woman, defined not through close-ups or other mediated framings, but through a series of routines and small conflicts. Jeanne goes through her routine, a fragmented and monotonous list of chores that don’t traditionally lend themselves to a compelling narrative. Akerman worked relentlessly with Delphine Seyrig (Dielman), honing Jeanne’s movements, expressions and idiosyncrasies. Jeanne Dielman isn’t just an exercise in duration, but an examination of these exact routines and the way in which the audience interprets them through performance.

Another essential aspect of the traditional narrative is the possession of the displayed female figure by the surrogate male. The merging of the spectator with the active male figure within the film allows for the feeling that with the power of existing within an actionable space comes the opportunity to dominate and possess the woman: “…the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis,” (Mulvey 13). Not only does the lack of an ever-present male figure in Jeanne Dielman make this identification impossible, but the men present within the film are so impotent that it makes this form of identification wholly undesirable. Jeanne Dielman leaves no room for a male viewer to project his fantasy. Jeanne exists out of reach from the audience, making her world purely spectacle, not something to be an active part of.

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman is representative of Laura Mulvey’s concept of an alternative cinema: one that leaves the past behind without rejecting it. Typical Hollywood conventions of sex and murder are strewn throughout Jeanne Dielman, but they exist solely, as Mulvey states in her introduction to “Visual Pleasure,” as a counterpoint to the customary narrative structure of Hollywood films. The male gaze is overruled in favor of an objective perspective that simultaneously deconstructs conventional visual pleasure and, through striking mise-en-scène and meticulously shot compositions, is able to present a new, radical form of visual pleasure.

Works Cited

Jones, Ian. “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, Belgium) Directed by: Chantal Akerman.” Cinemetrics, 16 May 2010, https://cinemetrics.uchicago.edu/movie/c52e594f-da88-4623-9cec-80288258345.

Kinder, Marsha. “Reflections on ‘Jeanne Dielman.’” Film Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 4, 1977, pp. 2–8., https://doi.org/10.2307/1211576.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18., https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6.