Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles depicts three days of Jeanne Dielman, a middle-class housewife, mother, and part-time prostitute living in Brussels, which are ordinary but become irregular in the end. The camera moves through the hallway, rooms, kitchen, and bathroom to stare at her performing her tightly scheduled daily routine for a long time and steadily. It is an innovative feminist transition to shift domestic chores, like peeling potatoes and kneading flour, which has never been introduced to the realm of representation in the cinematic world, into the center of the art.
With her signature style—steady camera, minimalistic format with temporal continuity as the main axis, and storyline almost to none—Chantal Akerman engraves subtle changes with repetitive household gestures to maneuver to a point where misogyny peeps out unexpectedly in patriarchal capitalist society. The last shot lasts for seven minutes, making the audience confront Jeanne Dielman’s face only to regurgitate on the previous three days and their relationship with the accidental outbreak and its meaning. We encounter the historical moment when radical feminist politics and radical aesthetics happily intertwined by a female artist from Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. [KWON Eunsun]