Saute ma ville

After having seen "Jeanne Dielman", I can clearly see how great of a filmmaker Chantal Akerman is, and, although I disliked this film, I'm still highly interested in her other works. However, this is one of the worst films I've seen recently.

Yes, it was her first film, so I shouldn't be too angry, of course. She made it at only the age of 18, so I probably shouldn't be expecting "Citizen Kane", but it was still a pain to sit through! It felt pretentious, nonsensical, and, overall, the film was really annoying. Now I'm sure there's people out there saying I didn't get it, and that I should never watch Chantal Akerman's work because of my views on this, but, there is not necessarily any actual meaning here. With "Jeanne Dielman", people (including myself) can make tons of theories and such on the film. I mean, it is a film that has been analyzed time and time again! Here, I just don't see anything!

I don't know, maybe I'm stupid, but it seems like this isn't a very good film.

I saw this first film by Ackerman on french channel Arte and I was fascinated by its simplicity of conception and execution. Ackerman gives a wonderfully quiet example of small, no-budget, personal short film which can be a lesson for any young and fresh student of film or anyone with a great passion( but not much means) for film-making and recording the world with a camera. young Ackerman plays in the film and from the first minutes you get the mood and the means together as the soundtrack of the film is solely composed of constant humming of some tune by -supposedly- the main character who is a lonely girl living in an apartment. This is one of the most ingenious approaches to the composition of film music I have ever heard! and you wonder if it has been repeated again. We follow the girl entering the building, up the stairs and into her small kitchen and very soon realize that we will only see HER. She keeps humming and even makes appropriate noises when attending to things in the kitchen. The obsession with the kitchen leaves one wondering " Can a kitchen really drive someone mad?". Here domestic life of a lonely woman seems like an unbearable and crushing prison with no hope of redemption( a theme that Ackerman returns to it later with great force). When the girls cooks and cleans and gradually makes a mess of everything you get a comical view of quiet breakdown rarely seen. Fixed camera position is in accord with a claustrophobic mood and also relates to a documentary style camera which the film emulates to some extent. This is a film about what we may -and usually will- call domestic hell ,though it never loses sight of intrinsic humor of the situation. I love Ackerman's performance and her determination to be a filmmaker, standing on her own feet and making an amateur film a must-see.

It's interesting to find out that the film that made Chantal Akerman want to make films was Pierrot le fou (she talks about it on an interview from the Criterion collection, easy to find online); she was 15, didn't think films were art and only knew vaguely of the 'auteur' theory. Like for many future filmmakers, Godard blew up all the notions for what a film could look like or be, and a movie like Pierrot is one that I'd imagine would strike up a 15 year old's imagination. Thus we have her first film, English title 'Blow Up My Town', and it's both a tribute (at the end) to Pierrot, while also being an unintentional test run for Jeanne Dielman, her 1975 masterpiece.

This is very... student film-y. It sounds shallow to described it that way, but that's what this is. It's following a young woman (Akerman plays the girl) who comes to her apartment, puts away some groceries, cooks noodles, and proceeds to tape her door and windows in so she can... clean, and eat, and then shine her shoes and dance a little. It has no concrete story, and I'm sure Akerman would've been horrified if it had any conventional story to it. It's a portrait of a young woman coming undone, but in a way that is kind of playful - the sound effects emphasize this, with a kind of 'la-la' singing from time to time, this couched between some intentionally awkward special effects - but not much more.

I did enjoy watching it, but for what it was: a glimpse into what a filmmaker wants to explore in about 10 minutes. Its ending is kind of weak - is there no other way than how this girl is going to go out - but I liked how rough and odd it was. It's a nice little short that finds someone at 18 trying out this thing called film equipment on something that can be done easily: take an apartment (I wonder if it was Akerman's own) and just have some wonky, self-indulgent expression into female boredom, alienation and anxiety. 6.5/10

I've seen a number of movies from Akerman and almost all have been absolutely dire - mind numbingly boring, lacking in story and character development...... But because she is a woman and a feminist reviewers on here and other platforms have their trousers around their ankles for her. I've seen her described as a minamalist......ie nothing happens in her films. They are like watching paint dry. Why on earth would anyone want to see Jeanne Dielman at the cinema ? Nothing happens. When I was watching it my wife came in during a 5 min long scene in which we see a motionless Dielman sitting in a chair ....and my wife asked why I had paused the film....... I had to explain that I hadn't paused it, it was just that nothing was happening. She just laughed. Akerman clearly thought she could be a director. But we can't all be what we want to be in life. Some things need talent. She has none, but luckily she is part of an age that rewards the untalented.