Thinking with Chantal Akerman’s Cinema: A Conversation on Reproductive Labor, Pedagogy, and Radical Refusal

Editor’s note: There are spoilers for Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles ahead.

Marie: On February 14th 2024, the Patriarchy and Society class of the LSE Sociology department watched the 1975 film ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ (henceforth, ‘Jeanne Dielman’), directed by Chantal Akerman. Nearly three and a half hours long, the film depicts three days in the life of Jeanne, a widowed, middle-aged single mother, and a part-time sex worker. The film tracks her daily domestic life over the course of three days, following the slow and agonizing details of housework.

It was, in other words, an intriguing lesson. Drawn to Akerman’s ode to care work and her visceral insights into reproductive labour, the household, and the totality of patriarchy we wanted to extend the conversation beyond the classroom. We gathered in the cramped Sociology common room and recorded ‘Lights, Potatoes, Scissors: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman’ as an attempt to make sense of the film through the themes we explored in the course. While the classroom attended to the subject of race, colonialism and patriarchy, we were vigilant in how these histories and exclusions structures knowledge itself.

In this spirit, the podcast is a conversation where we try to articulate and patch together our reflections, thoughts, and emotions about the film during a particularly violent time. Since October 2023, we have been inundated with eyewitness accounts, testimonies and images of atrocity after atrocity in Palestine. Although we found solace in Chantal Akerman’s reflections on reproductive labour, her Zionism sits in tension with the emancipatory, anti-colonial praxis we learnt from Palestinian storytelling and resistance.

As we sit with this discomfort, the genocide in Palestine has claimed the lives of thousands. It is only the most recent surge in violence that stretches across 18 years of the siege of Gaza and 76 years of settler colonialism in Palestine. These incalculable losses haunt our reflections on Jeanne Dielman.

Elena: In this context, our discussions of Jeanne Dielman—and the intersections of gender, race, class, and colonialism—take on a heightened weight. The ongoing genocide in Palestine reminds us that these issues are never isolated; they are co-constitutive forces, deeply interwoven into each other.

For us, watching a film like Jeanne Dielman became more than an academic exercise. It created a unique pedagogical moment in and beyond our classroom. The immersive experience of spending over three hours in the life of a woman like Jeanne invited us to confront the themes of the film on an emotional level, evoking a different kind of understanding. Mai, do you find that teaching through film opens different possibilities for students? What role does it play in the context of this course, and what do you hope it offers them beyond traditional readings?

Mai: I have taught this film for three years, and every year it creates its own space outside of the classroom. The first time, I had invited students for an optional session to watch the film one evening in the Department’s meeting room with its plastic chairs and awkward design. After three and a half hours, everyone was exhausted, emotionally and physically. Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman stretches time—or at least the minutes within the film roll to show the almost pathological nature of housework, the obsessiveness of switching the light on and off, the order of household tasks, the meticulous routine, and its complete breakdown once one thing goes wrong in the schedule. Jeanne’s housework tasks become almost compulsive, both necessary yet utterly absurd. That is to say, we had no time for discussion that evening out of sheer exhaustion.

But the film continued to create its space outside the classroom. We ended up discussing it on the narrow staircase of the Department taking one side of the stairs, and constantly shifting as people went up and down. There was something about that precarious space of the staircase that collectively created a familiar story that I think would not have happened within the confines of the classroom. The conversation moved from the structural violence of capitalism to the different methods of folding socks assembled through people’s different memories of mothers, sisters, and grandmothers doing housework. In some sense, the home space became a repertoire of the violence of gendered labour and its repetition but also of sociability and care.

For your cohort, I had already incorporated the film as required viewing for the course, and I’m sure the experience was different. What did it mean to you to watch the film within the confines of the classroom, and what did it open up for you beyond that space?

Rojin: For us, the experience was incredibly divisive. I’ll never forget the stillness of the air as the final scene slowly ended. The lulling lights and shadows from an unseen window glide across Jeanne’s face as her gaze deepens. The lights flicker on, and the rustling of students, whose limbs are most likely numb from sitting down for three hours, stir. The room is silent, everyone still processing the ending of the experience.

Mai, you opened the floor by asking, “Thoughts?” A classmate remarked, “That was long and hard to watch.”

“Why?” you asked.

“I didn’t know housework was that tedious.”

Another student said, “I don’t even know if I would classify this as a film. Who would want to watch such a thing in a cinema?”

Classmates debated back and forth what this film could be classified as, whether it accomplished what it meant to set forth, and later asked what it was trying to achieve. Within the confines of the classroom, the discussion was stilted by the uneasiness cast amongst us.

Marie: This uneasiness stemmed both from our own confrontation with Jeanne Dielman and its bold reflection on reproductive labour, as well as the affective discourse in the classroom which varied from pathological disgust to desperate attempts of sympathy. To understand this conversation, and the subsequent dissatisfaction it provoked in us, the podcast hones in on what Akerman attempted to achieve with Jeanne Dielman. Jeanne’s labour requires exploitation, alienation and a certain amount of ‘forgetfulness’, creating a sense of discomfort. It becomes abundantly clear that Jeanne’s reproductive labour—and by extension, our own—requires a definitive estrangement of ourselves, our bodies and our community.

Rojin: Undeniably, you’re transported into the yellowish “drab” colour palette of Akerman’s interiors, where the solidity of her shots evokes a striking sense of instability. The viewer becomes aware of their own body, their own restlessness, aching and searching for “something to happen.” Soon after, you are almost immersed in the film, as if you are standing next to Jeanne, aware of her rhythmic movements throughout her routine. To a hasty eye, it appears to be the mundaneness of housework, but to the more observant eye, Jeanne converses with herself through her housework and care work.

Perhaps the conversations about art and film in the classroom were constrained by the roles set in place: a student watching a movie and classifying it as such because their lecturer “makes” them. But the film took them aback and, constrained by time and the classroom, its depth is lost. Perhaps this was why we decided to continue the conversation outside the classroom: to discuss the finer nuances and understand the film’s intention.

The boredom in the film transforms when you notice how Akerman creates dialogue with lights, the closings of doors, the placement of objects like Jeanne’s husband’s photo, the money pot, and the towel. Jeanne’s world is her home, where her roles as a sex worker, caregiver, and widower are forced into one confined space. When watching the film a second time, and having ample time to discuss it, our connection to Jeanne built. We see her scrubbing her skin in the tub as a way to scrub off her sex work, the towel on the bed to divide her labour and the intimacy of her marital bed, and the money pot constantly placed in proportion to her son at the dining table as a reminder of the presence of this sex work in her home. We see her only allowing her clients in the hallway and her bedroom, with a shut door as a way to draw lines between home and work.

Elena: Rojin’s description of Jeanne Dielman draws attention to how Akerman’s careful, almost meditative cinematography immerses the viewer in the mundanities of daily life—tasks that, on the surface, seem trivial but are in fact saturated with unspoken weight. Jeanne’s housework, repetitive and seemingly devoid of drama, begins to reveal itself as a space of self-dialogue, a silent negotiation between necessity, exhaustion, and identity. It’s only by sitting with these details, by watching Jeanne’s motions without rushing to a resolution, that we can appreciate the deeper currents beneath her actions. This discomfort, this slowing down of time, is where the film’s power lies.

In the classroom, as we scrutinised Jeanne’s routine, it became clear that the discomfort our cohort felt wasn’t just about watching something mundane—it was about confronting how everyday acts of care and labour are loaded with societal expectations and absorb violence. Cooking, cleaning, and organising may seem like simple tasks, but in the context of Jeanne’s life, they are fraught with meaning. Her struggle isn’t just about gender; it’s shaped by forces much larger than her personal choices: forces of class, capitalism, and power. As we began to reflect on these connections, we saw that Jeanne’s world was far more complex and interconnected than it appeared at first glance. It was in this discomfort that the true depth of the film began to emerge in (and out) of the classroom.

Mai: It is so interesting to me how some students react with anger towards the film, while others find spaces to continue to think about it outside the course and the constraints of the university. Some students came to me after, saying we love the course, but “Why did you make us go through the agony of watching that film for three hours?” Some were really shocked that I, as the teacher, sat through that film more than six times. I always wonder whether this shock is a manifestation of a fear of confronting the mundaneness of some forms of violence. As if, somehow, the spectacular violence is more legible, more easy to get angry at, but what can we do about peeling the potatoes?

In the midst of Israel’s flattening of entire cities in Palestine today, one cannot but think about how this spectacular violence is sustained by the unspectacular and mundane slow violence of Israel’s entire settler colonial project in Palestine. What might appear as a digression is, I think, at the core of our conversation. Don’t you think that part of the film’s power lies in the viscerality of this form of mundane violence?

Alice: Yes, I have been wondering why it is so uncomfortable to watch Jeanne’s relentless routine. Why are we waiting so impatiently for something else to happen? As Elena suggests, the discomfort that builds as we watch Jeanne work is the dawning of the realisation that our everyday lives, our comfort, implicate the exploitation of others.  In making a spectacle of the invisibilised labour of care, Jeanne Dielman demands us to notice it. But, not only this, it demands us to notice what happens when we stop. In an interview about her film, Akerman describes how Jeanne’s rituals exist to keep her anxiety at bay (2009:3:04), causing us to fear the moment that she has time to sit and stare and think.

If we allow it to, watching the film enables a deeper, albeit uncomfortable, reflection about the worlds we exist in. Reflecting back now on those four gruelling hours spent in the classroom and the hours of talking and laughter in the common room that followed, it is difficult to acknowledge how much time goes by in these spaces protected by abstraction in which ‘nothing happens’. But perhaps the way Akerman forces us to notice the cracks on Jeanne’s manicured surface that reveal her own shame (Mulvey 2016) — the overcooked potatoes, the messy hair — can help us to look around the walls of our own institutions with a similar perception. What do they hide? What do we hide from? Like the light puncturing Jeanne’s home, patriarchal and colonial violence, although refracted, still penetrate the university, and our relationships within it.

Elena: Jeanne’s life, defined by repetitive chores and invisible labour, reminds us of how capitalism intimately relies on such work to function. This brought me to reflect on Himani Bannerji’s (2019) work on gender, race and class as historically co-constitutive. The unpaid labour that Jeanne performs in her home is essential for the reproduction of labour under capitalism. Without the ‘Jeannes’ who take care of their respective households, the system itself could not be sustained. Her social reproductive labour is integral to the survival of a class-based system that thrives on her invisibility.

To fully understand Jeanne, and by extension us, we must look beyond gender and recognize the complex web of power that binds us all to the same oppressive systems. The structures that control Jeanne are the same ones that have historically perpetuated violence globally—even today.  What began as a classroom discussion in our ‘Patriarchy and Society’ course about a film that seemed to display the intimate life of a woman named Jeanne soon became, for us, a deeper reflection—one that revealed how something as large as genocidal violence might be connected to the layers of oppression and acts of resistance we can witness within a single home-space.

Rojin: Akerman makes her audience feel how long time passes, that Jeanne has inhibited this world, and her struggles are present every second. In this cycle of slow violence, to wait is to prolong your freedom. As each day passed, as Western governments and their allies outwardly encouraged genocide and actively ignored international law, one realises that the struggle is in time.

Marie: This reflection on time and temporality is really interesting, both in the way Akerman instrumentalises it in Jeanne Dielman, and in Alice and Rojin’s analysis of structural violence. The experience of being ‘out of time’, as historically structured by imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, is one of marginalisation, violence and endless promises of release from hegemonic time (Rao 2020).

When Jeanne murders her client, in a scene carefully orchestrated by Akerman, it is perceived as a continuation of her routine. The seven minutes of silence after the murder, which is the film’s epilogue, is emblematic of Jeanne’s refusal of such violent, cyclical structures. Yet Akerman’s temporal reorientation is not singular, resisting both the clichéd “sentimentality of the end” and the reductionist stilt of a sex worker killing her customer as synonymous with the end of patriarchy (Margulies 1996:97). Instead, Akerman grants her audience the space to reflect with and beyond Jeanne’s quiet contemplation. It begs the question: how else might we disrupt the accumulative, ‘progressivist’ forces of capitalism, coloniality and patriarchy, without abandoning reparative possibilities, or a turn to futurity?

Alice: “The rhythm of capitalism or fascism: men are cheated by it too”. Chantal Akerman’s words, quoted by you, Marie, during our discussion, speak to this question. Akerman, through exposing this “hegemonic time”, asks us to notice how we exist in the structures of patriarchy and imperialism without necessarily realising it — because, when we do realise it, we are allowed to comprehend that these structures are fragile, obscured by a thin façade of respectability. Laura Mulvey remarks on “the poignancy of Jeanne’s disorientation” as her own veneer progressively crumbles around her (Mulvey 2016: 29).  How is it that this disorientation is somehow resolved by her stabbing a client with a pair of scissors, an act both inevitable and unexpected?

Mai: Over the years, I’ve caught myself intervening in Jeanne’s tasks: raw meat shouldn’t be put directly on the kitchen table without cleaning, as if I myself get compelled into following a housework routine of some sort. But this routine and the tedious passage of time that the film captures so brilliantly is disrupted in the final act when she withholds the compulsion to stick to the schedule. The viewer is fleetingly stunned but quickly expects a return to the routine: cleaning the scissors, washing the linens, switching the lights off. Unfulfilled, the schedule breaks down. More than anything else, Jeanne’s final act of murder is a refusal to stick to the schedule. It is an intervention in time that invites us to think about articulations of refusal.

Alice: Like Jeanne’s final act of murder, the small space that became the ‘LSE Liberated Zone’ made visible a waywardness that had been building amongst us. The encampment, as a material refusal of complicity, could been seen as an attempt to disorientate the system we exist in, whose ‘business as usual’ attitude serves to normalise a genocide. Although only for a small and brief moment, it might still ripple out and haunt the space it occupied.

Mai: Absolutely! And as Marie said at the beginning, it is hard to write and think about disruption and refusal without being haunted by the live-streamed genocide in Palestine, so, like you all, I cannot but ask, what does it mean to refuse complicity in this horror? Alice already spoke about how the LSE Liberated Zone was a site of refusal of our enforced complicity in the genocide of thousands of Palestinians. And importantly for me as a teacher, it was a site of learning from students, something that already happens in the classroom, but the liberated zone was an enactment of pedagogy through comradeship.

Alice: Reflecting on the encampment now as a space of (un)learning, we can understand that it rejected the university management’s premise that knowledge exists in a void. In doing so, it exposed a hypocrisy that would ask us to perform our anti-racist, anti-capitalist knowledge only within the confines of a classroom or an assessment. By confronting an educational institution, by acting in excess of it and refusing to be contained by it, we learned where its walls truly lie.

References

Akerman, C. (2009) ‘Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman’ Interview with Chantal Akerman. The Criterion Collection. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=8pSNOEYSIlg

Bannerji, H. (2019). Towards a Communist Revolution: Gender and Class in Capital, Volume I. In M. Musto (Ed.), Marx’s Capital after 150 years: Critique and alternative to capitalism (pp. 145-166). London: Routledge.

Khan, A. (2022). “States of Precarity and Pains of Utopic Pedagogy: Methodologies of Hope in Times of Crises.” Feminist Formations, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 318–338, https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2022.0013.

Hogg, J. and Roberts, A. (2019). Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook. London: A Nos Amours.

Margulies, I. (1996). Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. Durham  and London: Duke University Press.

Mulvey, L. (2016) A Neon Sign, A Soup Tureen: The Jeanne Dielman Universe. Film quarterly. [Online] 70 (1), 25–31.

Rao, R. (2020). Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality. London: Oxford University Press.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21428/1d6be30e.e4b34411