“The most boring, monotonous films [sic] any director ever made. In this film, they just show the woman doing her clean up chores around the house”
– Top YouTube comment on a clip from Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
In the half-century since the protests of May ’68 proved that the French radical left was alive and kicking, sweeping economic changes have reformatted the landscape of labour around the world. Where industrial production was once central, the postmodern economy has taken a turn towards what Michael Hardt called, in 1999, affective labour: work in sectors from healthcare to entertainment that rely on the production and manipulation of care and affect. Rather than manufacturing cars, the labourers of today’s dominant capitalist countries manufacture an intangible experience: “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion – even a sense of connectedness or community.”¹ This definition extends beyond the formalised service economy to include “the homework economy”, the phrase coined by Richard Gordon to describe the often uncompensated labour of literal housework, along with care labour and maternal or kin work, encompassing a whole suite of activities that constitute a long-neglected facet of the class struggle. Notably, as Gordon points out, this labour has historically been assigned to women; in the past few decades, however, the characteristics of the homework economy have become common, ascribed to labour performed by people of all genders.² The new frontier of labour rights must therefore address the newly feminised conditions of labour: precarity and vulnerability, under-compensation, and the seeping of work into all hours of the day.
The past fifty years of European art cinema is replete with films that take up the class struggle – but the primary site through which the struggle is explored remains the factory. Where, if anywhere, has the turn towards affective labour been represented in the avant-garde cinematic tradition that arose from May ’68? When I turn to friends in search of examples, we invariably arrive at the same answer: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Chantal Akerman’s sprawling, methodical analysis of a widowed mother’s daily routine. Jeanne Dielman probes three days in the life of its eponymous protagonist (Delphine Seyrig) in exacting detail, rendered in static tableaux often around ten minutes long, the length of an entire roll of film. For a wearying 225 minutes, Jeanne methodically performs the housework that appears to be the centrepiece of her life, rarely leaving home unless the completion of a domestic task requires it. Each moment is recounted with extreme care and precision: the film’s extreme length, coupled with the heightened intensity of the long-take tableaux, celebrates the minutiae of the domestic, feminised labour that most cinema – whether commercial or avant-garde – typically prefers to make invisible.
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What are the origins of European art cinema’s workerist tendency? A good starting point might be Paris, in February 1968. That month, the French government removed Henri Langlois from his post as the head of the Paris Cinémathèque, citing his administrative inefficiency and refusal to collaborate with state officials sent to interrogate his archiving methods. The French intelligentsia, so aligned with film culture of the time, responded with horror: public demonstrations gathered in the streets and achieved international fame when filmmakers and critics from Jean-Luc Godard to Roland Barthes formed the Committee for the Defence of the Cinémathèque, protesting the government’s intervention in an independent cultural institution. By April, a solution was negotiated: a new government agency was established to oversee film preservation, leaving the Cinémathèque, albeit with a reduced state subsidy, free to organise screenings under the guidance of a reinstated Langlois. This apparent stability, however, would barely outlast the month.
While the film world organised in Langlois’s defence, students at the University of Nanterre began to form a movement of their own. Opposing the alienation and conservatism of university life, students advocated for issues from ending the war in Vietnam to increasing sexual liberation and self-expression. The protests became widespread by early May, when a violent confrontation between students and police took place at the Sorbonne. Days of demonstrations followed, culminating in a strike by the Students’ Union, eventually joined by the teaching and labour unions. On May 13th – days after Langlois’s reinstatement at the Cinémathèque – the unions demonstrated jointly, marching through Paris with a banner that read: “STUDENTS, TEACHERS AND WORKERS TOGETHER”.³ Factory strikes and sit-ins took place throughout the month, spreading from auto and aircraft workers to film technicians.
Scarcely a month after the Langlois Affair, French film culture was once again swept up in a liberatory struggle – but this time, rather than the niche, liberal cause of defending the Cinémathèque, they were implicated in a national revolutionary project. French film culture, a central part of the broader cultural landscape, began to question its own relationship to the ruling ideology, with magazines including Cahiers du Cinéma offering newly Marxist-informed critical approaches to film theory. If the Langlois Affair was the incident that incited French film culture’s venture into leftist reform, the protests of May ’68 led to calls for a full-out revolution. An August 1968 editorial in Cahiers called for “revolution in/through the cinema”, positioning the demonstrations to reinstate Langlois as a logical prologue to the broader national wave of protests that followed.⁴ Directors and technicians alike called for a complete restructuring of the national film industry, demanding a greater degree of self-management for workers, elimination of censorship, and the abolition of profit-making as a goal for the entertainment sector.⁵
Radical avant-garde production groups were formed, operating in direct opposition to the mainstream film industry as they sought collective modes of production and new circuits for distribution and exhibition. Through such collectives as the Dziga Vertov Group and SLON (Société pour le lancement des oeuvres nouvelles), labour struggles become a central topic in post-1968 French cinema. These groups pioneered new developments in film structure and form, aligning the class struggle with the challenging of outdated, inadequate modes of cinematic representation. As a lasting consequence of the May protests, the cultural sector – emblematised, in many ways, by Cahiers – became aware of its own role in the class struggle, that, as Pierre Gaudibert (curator of the Paris Museum of Modern Art) put it, art’s service of “integration into the ruling ideology and into the system…is not the only possibility”.⁶ The cinematic tradition that arose out of this period – a radical workerist approach epitomised by such films as Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout va bien (Everything’s All Right, 1972) and Chris Marker and Mario Marret’s À bientôt, j’espère (Be Seeing You, 1968) – remains eminent in discussions of the cultural sector’s relationship to the class struggle.
Half a century later, film studies students still read Marx and Althusser alongside Bazin and Eisenstein, suggesting the enduring impact of May ‘68 on film culture by and large. But when this relationship between cinema and class struggle was forged, it dealt primarily with a narrow definition of work – implicitly, factory work – while leaving other kinds of labour untouched. Where European cinema of the past 50 years has taken up a critical stance regarding class struggle, it has generally done so with a distinctly workerist slant, symbolically carrying on the legacy of the ’68 protests where students, auto workers, and film technicians marched in unison. The importance of this history of struggle is indisputable – but this configuration notably excludes the forms of labour historically performed by women, and the feminised conditions of labour that increasingly impact workers, regardless of their gender, all over the world.
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Over the course of Akerman’s nearly four-hour film, Jeanne unyieldingly performs the work associated with the housewife, a central figure of affective labour. She boils potatoes, cleans her bathtub, eats dinner with her son and reads alone. One evening, she watches the neighbour’s baby. Occasionally, she has sex with unnamed men. She is only paid to do the latter. Neither instance is treated any differently than her other everyday tasks and chores; Akerman declines to treat Jeanne’s sex work as spectacle. Depicted as casually as any other household task, it’s clear that neither is more “work” than the other – just that only one is viewed and compensated as labour within the economy outside her apartment. The rest of Jeanne’s daily tasks, performed with the same detached resolve, are assumed to fall under another category – “labours of love,” perhaps – that don’t seem to warrant pay, let alone recognition.
As the film progresses, Jeanne’s execution of her daily routine takes on the character of obsession: she goes about her tasks devotedly but a grating discomfort emerges in Seyrig’s movements and expressions. Through an entire dinner with her son, she hardly looks up to meet his gaze, focusing strenuously on her plate as though eating has become just another task to check off her to-do list. Immediately after finishing, she jumps up to tidy the table, attempting to clear his glass before he’s finished drinking. She waits, almost mechanically still, with her arm poised to grab the empty cup, until he downs the last sip. Here, we see the physical and emotional toll that Jeanne’s lifetime of affective labour has wrought: she moves almost robotically, motivated by the neurotic need to straighten, fold, and scour. “Jeanne has to organize her life, to not have any space, any time, so she won’t be depressed or anxious,” Akerman explained in an interview with the New York Times celebrating the film’s 2009 restoration.⁷ The impact of Jeanne’s taxing, repetitive labour can be read on her body, not unlike the physical brunt of work on a factory line.
We witness Jeanne’s deterioration as the film moves towards its eventual, startling climax and the burden of her labour is shockingly self-evident. All the more amazingly, this conclusion is reached without the aid of conventional narrative strategies. As Mary Ann Doane points out, the film is built by linking precisely the scenes of domestic down-time that a classical film would exclude, putting the time between the events that narrative cinema deems unfit for representation in the foreground.⁸ Even the moments that might be deemed “interesting” enough to represent in a classical film – I’m thinking particularly here of Jeanne’s sex work – are never sensationalised, shot and edited no differently than the scenes where she makes coffee. In this sense, Jeanne Dielman’s syntax directly opposes the shorthand that classical narrative cinema has developed for representing reality, appropriating the moments that classical realism might leave on the cutting room floor.
According to the film theory that emerged in France following May ’68, this makes Jeanne Dielman all the more revolutionary. In the October-November 1969 editorial for Cahiers, Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni, explicitly referencing the protests of the previous year, set forth a new metric by which they believed the radical potential of new films ought to be evaluated. Noting that “every film is political, inasmuch as it is determined by the ideology which produces it”, Comolli and Narboni suggest that even films with political content risk reproducing the dominant ideology if they abide by the established system of representing reality. It is only through breaking these established codes of representation, they argue, that films can “attack their ideological assimilation” and thus become politically effective.⁹ Jeanne Dielman does precisely that – it’s often received poorly by those who wander into a screening or stumble upon a YouTube clip unaware, lamenting the “boring, monotonous” character of its alternative representational approach. Revolutionary on the levels of both form and content, Jeanne Dielman fulfils the ultimate goal that post-’68 film criticism outlined for politically conscious cinema.
So why, then, is Jeanne Dielman – or any other depiction of feminised labour – so frequently left out of conversations about cinema’s relationship to the class struggle? With the semicentennial of May ’68, several film programs addressing the legacy of cinema and labour have been announced at local theatres and on my university campus, but not one, so far as I’ve seen, has featured a single film directed by or focusing on women. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that while filmmakers like Marker and Godard explicitly declared the Marxist intentions underlying their work, the politics behind Akerman’s film are more subtle. In ’68, an 18-year-old Akerman was still in Belgium, completing her sole term at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion. If she did participate in student protests that year, no record of her involvement remains. She released her first film in the same year: Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town, 1968) stars Akerman herself and depicts a young woman revolting against household chores, dirtying her floors and demolishing her kitchen before following through on the titular promise and blowing up her home altogether. A symbolic evisceration of traditional gendered labour, potentially informed by the revolutionary character of ’68? This reading, if merited, has yet to be affirmed by any of the forthcoming “cinema and labor” themed programs I see cropping up this month.
If we can forgive her for not being French and twenty years older, Akerman is the much-needed counterbalance to post-’68 avant-garde cinema’s workerist slant. Fifty years after the May protests vivified the connection between cinema and labour, the class struggle is, more than ever before, situated around discourses on sex work, care work, and emotional labour – exactly the forms of affective labour that Jeanne performs on-screen. As the precarious conditions of economic postmodernity make work resembling Jeanne’s increasingly commonplace for people of all genders, Akerman’s corrective to the leftist avant-garde’s narrow definition of labour is more relevant than ever.
1 Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor.” Boundary 2. Summer 1999, pp. 89-100. 96. 2 Richard Gordon, Cited in Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York; Routledge, 1991. pp. 149-181. 3 Silvia Harvey, May ’68 and Film Culture, British Film Institute, 198, 5. 4 Cahiers du Cinema no. 203, August 1968. 5 Harvey, 21-22 6 Pierre Gaudibert, Action culturelle: intégratiou et/ou subversion, Casterman, 1972, 106. 7 Dennis Lim, “Then as Now, the Terrors of the Routine.” The New York Times. January 16, 2009. 8 Mary Ann Doane, “Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body.” October, vol. 17 (Summer 1981), pp. 22-36. 34. 9 Jean-Luc and Paul Narboni Comolli, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” Cahiers du Cinema, nos. 216, 217, October-November 1969. pp. 27-36. 30.
