24-year-old Chantal Akerman 3-hour and 21-minute Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelle premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 14 May 1975. It was released in France in January 1976 and was not shown in the US until 1983.
Akerman shot the film in 5 weeks, using an all-female crew, and Jeanne Dielman has been called “a rigorous structuralist experiment, a stealthily revealing character study, and a feminist statement on alienation within the domestic sphere,” and was a commercial success in Europe.
Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the ’60s in Brussels (Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles) 1994, dir. Chantal Akerman
“[…] she who was once so elegant. She who was once such a beauty. Everyone said so. And I was so proud of her, of my mother, this beautiful woman. And I loved her. I loved her so much when she was young, my mother. Her youth, her beauty, her dresses. Especially this one summer dress with thick golden and orange stripes. She looked so radiant in it. She would call me to help her do it up at the back and I loved that. Then she would ask me if she looked OK. Yes, you look beautiful. This dress really suits you. It brings out the darkness of your eyes.” Chantal Akerman with her maman Natalia(Nelly), featured in My Mother Laughs[tr. Daniella Shreir]
“Yes, there were times when we were happy together. Yes, happy. Quite simply happy. Sometimes after awful arguments. We were both exhausted so we felt much better and let the argument come to its end. Sometimes she would sleep on top of me and these strange sobs would suddenly overwhelm her. Rasping, childlike sobs. She’s crying, she’s coming. She’s crying or she’s coming. Maybe both at the same time. I’d never heard anything like it. One day someone mistook her for my daughter at the supermarket. And C. had smiled. She’d said, age doesn’t matter. Does it matter to you? I was lying when I’d said no. And when I’d met her at the train station in London for the first time I’d got a shock, she looked about 17. She’d said nothing. I said to myself, I’m mad and then, but who cares. Her walk had something of a 17-year-old girl, even though she was thirty. She laughed. Whenever she suddenly broke her silence with a laugh, like a 17-year-old girl, I thought to myself again, who cares. That was how she walked and laughed, but the way she watched me was heavy and dark. In London we ate, we drank, I talked without stopping, we kissed, we loved each other. Yes, we loved each other, we’d already loved each other for so long, we’d loved each other before we’d even met, we’d loved each other as soon as we’d started writing to each other and maybe we should have continued to love each other like that. Yes, at that time we were madly in love. We loved each other over email, over texts, over Facebook. She sent me songs, sometimes in Greek sometimes not, poems in Greek sometimes not, sometimes even in English or French, or any other language. I listened to the songs. I read the poems. My heart was beating. Life was beginning again. But not anymore. Now it feels like the end of life. We could no longer breathe. Luckily there was the dog.” -Chantal Akerman, from My Mother Laughs[tr. Daniella Shreir]
“Actually, I have no idea. What was I doing there. I’d been against this all my life. Even so, I had been to a great number of weddings especially when I was young and every time I’d tried to put on a brave face and seem carefree and young for my father. I don’t know whether he knew it at that time, that I was an odd one, but I could tell that he hoped that one day it’d be my turn.
If I was anti-marriage why had I been at so many weddings which were always such a palaver to attend because you had to get dressed up in order to be there and when I dressed up I was less visible and so people didn’t whisper to each other, that one over there isn’t married yet. To belong, probably, but I still didn’t belong. No, not at all. And I was anti-marriage. But probably not enough not to go. This time it was my niece’s wedding and thanks to my sister I had a niece and I belonged a bit. I belonged but I felt even more alone. More alone than ever.” -Chantal Akerman, from My Mother Laughs[tr. Daniella Shreir]
The personal and the public. Private letters and open spaces. Home, exile. Chantal Akerman’s News From Home is often torn between personal introspection and visual ethnography. Here, its slow composure is put in to conversation with the chaos of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. Whilst the former tackles the personal and transcends towards the universal, the latter uses the universal to invoke a self-observating experience. If Koyaanisqatsi signals a life out of balance, News From Home tries to rectify that balance - in pace, in space and in the everyday -Jessica McGoff
This is my new video essay in which I compare two ways of approaching the relationship between spaces and people in News From Home (Dir: Chantal Akerman) and Koyaanisqatsi (Dir:Godfrey Reggio).
![“[…] she who was once so elegant. She who was once such a beauty. Everyone said so. And I was](https://64.media.tumblr.com/e995232f6f742da3e3ab4e22ae330594/5d67cc1a5bc77a56-72/s1280x1920/f10e75257003048425f8929b81ef6e14bb25bec2.png "“[…] she who was once so elegant. She who was once such a beauty. Everyone said so. And I was")
