This is a pre-#MeToo story. Instead of looking at it top down, I was looking at it bottom up. Akerman films herself like the subject of a Gustave Courbet painting, resplendent curves and pale flesh intersecting the harsh dark interiors in which she’s trapped. It was more about the ordinary than the extraordinary. There had been experimental filmmakers before, and many of them had asked you to stare unblinking at ordinary things until you understood something new about what film could do to the human mind, but this was different. That's it. At least twenty people walked out of her talk, each footfall louder than the last. Raging Bull is "an Othello for our times." Film critic Roger Ebert gave Winter’s Bone five stars in recognition of Debra Granik’s talent. It is a fine balance to get that. And I don’t believe there was a more honest or daring filmmaker of the last 50 years. I kept thinking about Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” a lot. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles seems more akin to Roman Polansky’s Repulsion or Todd Haynes’ Safe, where we watch a descent into isolation and madness than a sympathetic depiction of the plight of the housewife. Really, no matter where they worked, this kind of gendered division of labor with the tasks that they got versus the tasks that the men got, [happened]. I love your visual approach to telling this story. Jeanne Dielman Jeanne Deilman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) [10] Long known for being extremely hard to see and extremely long, Jeanne Dielman is nothing short of a minimalist masterpiece. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is not likely to be a film to leap to one's lips when suggesting French films to neophytes for fear of losing a friend forever. I have a lot of friends in the film industry. And then I watched a grimy pirated copy of "Je, Tu, Il, Elle" in my frigid little room and it was like someone took off a blindfold I’d been wearing all my life. But when that person is Keith Uhlich of Time Out and you imagine him looking like this and you realize he’s referring to … You feel as if you understand each other. He was like, "I know these guys. by Colin Marshall “No good movie is too long,” Roger Ebert once wrote, “and no bad movie is short enough.” Oh, how my inner cinephile regrets bringing up the 201-minute length of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles so early in the discussion, it supports that dictum so well! Opportunities, chances to prove her worth in front of appreciative crowds of intellectuals, come to look like a never-ending walk towards a firing squad. I both experienced and witnessed misconduct. We got rid of Harvey Weinstein, but everything's not fixed. It terrified me, by the way. And you actually go into these offices, and they're really kind of dingy. You’re scoreless the rest of the time. She understood the character, and who she thought the character was. The whole iceberg is left. You don’t ever see him, but apart from the predatory behavior on a name-checked casting couch, the clues—a deep voice, multiple homes in the city, messiness with food the assistant has to clean up—leave little room for doubt that it’s Harvey Weinstein. I am wondering what you want people to take away and do after they watch this movie? But we just found a really great actor. I miss her so much. That kind of toxicity, it trickles down from the top. You can sit and experience every second of the work they’ve created, because they’re creating for you whether they know it or not. It was a process in post where we brought in the actor and tried a bunch of things and he's great, Jay O. Sanders. I was shocked by that movie. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975/Belgium, France/Chantal Akerman) Three hours of potato peeling and passionless sex. most overrated: Jeanne Dielman is at #98 on the TSPDT list and I can’t get behind it after one viewing. Chantal Akerman was forcing men to look at a woman who could have been any of their wives or mothers, for over three hours. We needed to sense his power over everyone. I hated him when he said, "Oh, we need more women producers. But I felt there was also an uneasy thriller-esque component to this movie. At the Locarno film festival, her latest film "No Home Movie," was booed. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. "News From Home" only provides a glimpse into what Akerman had left behind and what she saw as she read these heartbreaking missives from her past life, but didn’t give much indication what Akerman herself was going through. We only hear music—this really heartbreaking tune—in the beginning when we see the New York City cityscape go by, and in the end. The cameras seem to be set lower than usual (sorry, I don't know the terminology), the sound is all diegetic and it isn't persistent like the wind sounds in Turin Horse. I feel like the interesting thing is, when you talk about the film industry, people assume it's so glamorous. To be honest, it wasn't in the script. With fascinating histories painstakingly unearthed by Malone this book is a treasure of delights that honors more than a hundred years of female filmmaking. According to critic Roger Ebert, the movie's uniquely twisted world-building helped make it the “first true horror film. I interviewed about 100 people. You portray that system of silence so sharply in this movie. I kind of was trying to find a way to analyze this whole situation as it was unfolding in the press. But it wasn't like the assistant had a lot of face-to-face time with him. After "Jeanne Dielman", she would make three more masterpieces before the decade was over. Did you talk to any assistants who worked for some recognizable names in the industry? That was great. I think that was really helpful. Ebert's argument conceives of society and culture - and the capabilities of the human mind itself - as static: reached out to and engaged with only by an act of emotional button-pressing. Then the crazy thing is, after the Weinstein story broke, we all realized that there's a big ecosystem of enablers. You know what it takes.” He sounded belittling. The film treats female bodies like vessels that cannot hold all of the radiant female mind and its innumerable intricacies. I wanted them to empathize with her discomfort. She poured cold water on the male gaze. It gives a window into Akerman’s lifelong inherited anxiety, and the ways in which her work was a tribute to the woman who so cared for her, who sent her money to help support her young daughter, making art she probably didn’t understand. Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. And guess who the boss in question is? I suddenly got on the phone and started texting a bunch of people. And, more to the point, who is behind the camera? I feel like it is all part of this such toxic culture we've created. I was terrified listening to it. I think it borders on the experimental line of where I divide what I like and study and what is in the Stan Brakhage/ maya deren space. Oh, how my inner cinephile regrets bringing up the 201-minute length of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles so early in the discussion, it supports that dictum so well! Everything i needed about how toxic this system is from just hearing of! 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