Chantal Akerman’s Elusive Interiors: What the filmmaker’s portrayal of women reveals—and withholds

Chantal Akerman's Elusive InteriorsWhat the filmmaker's portrayal of women reveals—and withholds Emily LaBarge (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Delphine Seyrig in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. End Page 154 I am stunned when I hear Delphine Seyrig say it: "femme d'intérieur." The actress is speaking on the 15 February 1976 episode of Les rendez-vous du dimanche, a French celebrity talk show, discussing her title role in Chantal Akerman's film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The show's English subtitles use "housewife" to describe Jeanne, whose life is carefully controlled and cloistered. What Seyrig calls her is femme d'intérieur, End Page 155 which translates to "interior woman," a phrase we do not have in English, but which encapsulates a major theme in Akerman's work. I am watching this program at the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, where the exhibition Chantal Akerman: Travelling is on view (it is at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, from September 2024 through January 2025). The first retrospective in Akerman's country of birth, it charts the film director's forty-year career. The interview runs on a television set in one of the exhibition's many rooms of multi-channel video art works, single monitors playing interviews and television show appearances, and archival documents. Seyrig, the Lebanese-born French actress, and Akerman, the young Belgian filmmaker, are attempting to explain to the host the importance of the 201-minute film, released the year before, in 1975. Conveying the film's significance is difficult because its subject matter seems excessively ordinary, so ordinary, in fact, that it is not usually pictured in cinema at all: three days in the life of a woman as she goes about her domestic affairs—cleans, shops, cooks, rinse, repeat. One variation from the ordinary is that she stops her household chores each week-day afternoon between five and five-thirty to perform another kind of labor: sex work with a male client, a different man each time. Jeanne is a widow, and this sex work is how she pays the bills, keeps the house, and supports her ungainly teenaged son, Sylvain. He speaks in heavily accented French (for unexplained reasons, his first language is Flemish), reads at the table, rarely makes eye contact, never says thank you, and looks too old to live at home. (The actor, Jan Decorte, was twenty-five at the time.) We watch this apparently ordinary woman as she moves through her one-bedroom home, a space weighed down by heavy mahogany furniture (sofa, wardrobe, and table) and drenched in oppressive shades of green, pale mustard (wallpaper, chairs, kitchen tiles), and rose (washcloth, drapes, bathroom wall). The colour red also appears: veal, ground beef, blood gushing from the neck of her third and final trick after she unexpectedly stabs him with a pair of scissors. It's not that Jeanne doesn't go outside—she visits the butcher, a café, and goes to several shops in a vain search for a button for End Page 156 Sylvain's jacket—but the rhythm, aesthetic, framing, and action of the film are so defined by a confined set of interior spaces that the street, the sky, and the people in the city seem unreal, a gray Brussels mirage, when they briefly appear. A film with relatively sparse dialogue and no soundtrack, save for the radio or television occasionally playing in the background of the cramped rooms at 23 quai du Commerce, Jeanne Dielman is not only about Jeanne's life in the interior of her apartment, but also about her interior life. Many of Akerman's films explore this duality of inner and outer experience, from her experimental shorts to her more mainstream features. Nothing much happens, not usually, not in the way film has taught us to expect. What does happen is whatever happens to you as you watch the long shots of static spaces and silent, solitary characters; in this sense the films are about your own interior. Like many women artists who lived through the rise of second-wave feminism in...