Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) carries out a kind of solemn purification. A young widow, Jeanne, walks around her flat, going from room to room (kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, corridors, living room); she prepares a meal, tidies up her room, prostitutes herself, does the laundry … This housebound, secluded film takes places over three days. Daily activities are shot with impassive directness: making frequent use of medium shots, so as to put body and space on the same level, Akerman shows how her character (played by the beautiful and distant Delphine Seyrig) organises daily tasks with obsessive meticulousness. Babette Mangolte, the cinematographer, shows with merciless formality this compulsive, ritualised behaviour. From a narration perspective, nothing much happens: the fussy, mechanical gestures are the story. Even sex is ‘automatised’. Something is brewing, but it never boils over. Daily life is over-organised, over-structured, but it appears as an ‘unconscious act’: Jeanne Dielman’s automaton body projects on to domestic space its own pathologies, its unconscious chaotic marks. The frenzied body of Blow Up My Town becomes, in Jeanne Dielman, a body besieged by the anticipation and the over-organisation of the mundane. Chores (cooking, cleaning, washing) follow one another, their succession determined by Jeanne’s neuroses and her need to feel protected from a life filled with inhibitions and prohibitions. According to Jacques Lacan, ‘the compulsive person solves the problem of evanescence of their desire by making it into a prohibition. The Other becomes bearable precisely when the Other is forbidden.’ The filmmaker uses long, patient medium shots to display the mental cycle of a woman who prostitutes herself to earn a living. And when she feels pleasure with a client, when enjoyment overtakes her, her reaction is to murder that man: ‘she kills because she wants to get order back’.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is more than a movie about home seclusion. Chantal Akerman explores the structure of an inner life that feels threatened, and she archives a mental disorder, hoping that by compulsively organising daily life, she might find a cure. Babette Mangolte’s unmoving, frontal camera acts as a sort of hourglass: as time passes in each shot, the psychological pressure felt by Jeanne Dielman slowly increases.