> I you he she/I, you, he, she Je Tu Il Elle (1974) .....Julie

A closer look at my town Saute ma ville (1968) Chantel Acker Mann's film genius

When she was young, Ackermann could be said to be a film genius. When she was 15 years old, she watched the famous director Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot Le Fou". She was determined to make a movie of her own, but after three months of studying in film school, she dropped out and studied film at home. In 1968, when she was 18 years old, she had completed her first short film. "A Closer Look at My Town." Understanding Film

In 1971, Chantel Akerman and the famous Belgian screenwriter and director Samy Szlingerbaum moved to New York and began to gradually understand American experimental films. In particular, her contact with people in the literary and artistic circles such as Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, Stan Bracki, and Jonas Marks enabled her to gradually establish her own film style: pessimistic humor and criticalism. . Trilogy

Her first feature film "Je, Tu, Il, Elle" (Je, Tu, Il, Elle) is a trilogy about self-reflection. It was shot with improvisation and took only 8 days, and the cost is very low. She went on to film Jeanne Dielman (23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles). This film is not only the most important Belgian film in a long time, but also one of the best "women's films" internationally. She received critical acclaim in 2000 for successfully directing the controversial "Bewitched". This film is inspired by Volume 15 of the novel "In Search of Lost Time" by French stream-of-consciousness master Marcel Proust.

Chantal Akerman, who currently lives in France, is not only considered one of the representatives of European auteur cinema, but also one of Belgium's most prolific directors. Her most recent work is 2007's "The Big Brother" with Thai director Abi "The State of the World" co-directed by Chapong Weerasethakul and Chinese director Wang Bing. Features of the film

The background of avant-garde figures is always included in the feature film, and its content focuses on the emotions and lives of contemporary women. Akerman's creations are famous for their use of long shots to express the sense of time, clever use of sound effects, and correct handling of the dialectical relationship between authenticity and artistic capacity. Chantel Akerman talks about Chantel Akerman's "Mother and ***"

What kind of movie is "Jeanne Dielman"? It is Akerman Mann's 1975 three-and-a-half-hour film, it is also a famous "feminist" film, and it is also a film with a very revolutionary spirit in both form and content. In short, Akerman, a Belgian female director who has made very few films, has been able to establish a monument for her by countless film critics and film historians thanks to the film she made in her early twenties. Its uniqueness and avant-garde have far exceeded our imagination. I believe that there has never been such a wonderful movie-watching experience before and there will never be such a wonderful movie-watching experience again!

The content of the film can be summarized in one sentence: Three days of daily life of a middle-aged widow (the film is actually from the afternoon of the first day to the afternoon of the third day, which makes it just over two days). The filming technique of the film is also very "simple" - a fixed long lens. (The selection of camera positions in the film is very strict. For example, the kitchen has two camera positions: front and side. In total, there are only a dozen or so camera positions in the whole film.) The scenes in the film are also very "monotonous" - more than 90% of them are in Filmed in the apartment where Jeanne Dielman lives. Is there anything special about the daily life of this middle-aged widow? Is it worth "wasting" our three and a half hours? In fact, 90% of Dillman's life is ordinary and ordinary: getting up, cooking for her son, buying vegetables, knitting Sweatering, washing dishes, making the bed...Then the movie takes more than three hours to show Dillman getting up, washing his face, cooking, eating, and shining his shoes...and it's all "monotonous and boring" long shots: none The camera moves and there is no scene exchange. Compared to other movies, it's like vodka and plain water. If there is anything special about that 10%, it means that Dillman will receive a regular prostitute at home every afternoon.

The film shows this "special work" with "sparing ink". The film would rather spend ten minutes "completely record" Dillman washing a few dishes, and wash them again the next day, than give even one more shot here. . The guest rang the doorbell, and Dillman stood up and opened the door, helped the guest get his hat and scarf, and then the two of them walked through the corridor to the bedroom. The corridor light went out and then came on again. Dillman and the guest walked out of the bedroom, and Dillman handed the guest his hat. , scarf, the guest gave Dillman money, and finally opened the door and left. In less than a minute, we entered Dillman's life, but her life is still mysterious and puzzling. The audience thought they had completely understood this woman, but she is far from being as simple as we thought! The ending shot of the film The sudden cut to the bedroom shocked the audience enough to offset the "tedium" of the three hours. It turned out that the director wanted to create suspense and did not deliberately erase Dillman's "***" identity. On the contrary, the film also reminds the audience of Dillman's "***" identity from time to time. Dillman placed the money given by the prostitute in a ceramic jar on the dining room table in the living room. We can see this ceramic jar juxtaposed with Dillman at many times in the film: when Dillman is eating with his son, when Dillman is knitting, when Dillman is withdrawing money... It can be said that this ceramic pot is It is the most frequently seen object in the film, and compared to other frequently appearing objects such as sofas, pots, coffee pots, cups, etc., this ceramic jar has an obvious symbolic meaning. If the "***" identity is "special", then the "mother" identity should be "ordinary", but the movie turns this "ordinary" into "special". Every aspect of Dillman's life revolves around his son. He gets up in the morning to make breakfast for his son, helps his son clean his leather shoes, goes to the street to repair his son's leather shoes, looks for the same type of buttons that are missing from his son's clothes, and buys groceries for his son. Making meals, washing dishes, and the film goes on and on depicting Dillman's actions. Akerman is not only meticulous in his images, but most of the few dialogues in the film are with his son. The other small dialogues with the shoe repairman, wool seller, and button seller are actually based on his son as the starting point. of. The son recited Baudelaire's "The Enemy" to Dillman, and there was also a memoir with a strong "Oedipus" complex. This is the hidden message set by the director. These hidden messages (what happened in the bedroom and Dillman's night out with his son) is the "hide and seek" between the director and the audience in space. The image of Dillman will always remain in the minds of the audience. She will always be a mystery, just like the sudden killing of the prostitute in the end. Act, real or fictional? Accidental or inevitable?

Dillman's multiple identities: mother, housewife, *** are pushed to the center position in the film, which is also a "feminist" film The biggest feature. Feminist Annette Kong pointed out that in movies, women are usually socially constructed as the "other" or "outsider" in a male-dominated world. Women cannot tell their own stories because the images are controlled by men, and women are usually viewed as As a sexual object, only its beauty and sexual attractiveness have value. Akerman's film can be seen as a challenge to the hegemony of traditional male films. Not to mention women as the center of the story, the prostitutes, including Dillman's son and other male figures, are all portrayed as extensions of the heroine's life. Additionally, the late husband is completely objectified through a photograph on the dressing table in his bedroom. In a shot at the end of the film, Dillman faces a dressing table, with the frame in the lower left corner showing Dillman's face and the prostitute on the bed behind him. In this shot, Dillman is the only "dual existence" with a subject (the actor himself) and a mirror image, while both the prostitute and the late husband are "objectified" or "mirrorized". Three-dimensional becomes flat, a completely "feminist" perspective. "Identity playing" is a value orientation that must be strongly criticized in "feminist" movies. Just like Beauvoir's famous saying, "Women are not born, but become acquired." Society has added the identity of "woman" to women, so you must play the role of "woman" well. Dillman's "double identity" is a sharp irony. This society imposes on women the two extreme identities of "mother" and "***". She has to play both a good mother and a sex worker. We can see this kind of plot setting in many movies. In Pasolini's "Mama Roma", the Roman mother sells her body in order to let her son live a superior life. This masterpiece of Pasolini's "Neorealism" period cannot be regarded as "feminism" The important reason for the movie is that it criticizes class issues rather than women's rights issues.

Similarly in Elia Kazan's "East of Eden", the absence of "mother" and the presence of "***" reflect the pain and confusion of the son's growth. It was only with Ackerman that Jeanne Dillman, a female figure who shoulders the dual roles of "mother and mother", was truly regarded as a "centered" rather than "marginalized" subject, with society and male roles becoming foils. The mystery of Jeanne Dielman also breaks the single and stereotyped writing mode of female images in previous movies. Killing the prostitute in the end is a kind of destruction of "identity play". This destruction is violent and extreme. And the resistance we see in Jacques Rivette’s masterpiece Celina and Juliet is light-hearted and playful. The several identity exchanges between Selina and Julie (such as Julie taking over Selina's magic show job) are very interesting. What's even more amazing is that Rivette also invented a "magic world" in which the two heroines The shuttle back and forth between the "real world" and the "conceptual world" also allows this film to contain other deep thoughts in addition to expressing "feminism". As a "feminist movie", "Selena and Julie Voyage" tends to narrow its scope, but "Jeanne Dielman" tells the audience from the first shot that this is a thoroughly "feminist movie" ". "Mother and ***" is a kind of "Anna Karenina-style" or "Madame Bovary-style" female destiny. Can such dogmatic rules really be solved like Dillman with a pair of scissors? In the last scene of the movie, Dillman is sitting in a dark living room, and the mottled blue neon outside the house fills the room through the blinds (I suddenly remembered that the protagonist's room in Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" was also decorated with neon The 5-minute silence (shrouded in a rainbow, only red) was Dillman thinking, and Ackerman was thinking.

"Jeanne Dielman"'s experiments with cinematic time and space are bold and unforgettable. What traditional movies want to do is stretch out the time, and the time span in a movie is usually very large. The most amazing thing is the montage of bones transforming into spaceships in Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey". This is a major advantage that movies have over dramas. Changes in drama time are often achieved through transitions between acts, because it is "live". The dramatic style of "Jeanne Dielman" is very obvious, for example, the change of time is achieved by inserting subtitles. At other times, Dielman's repetitive and monotonous life is arranged in the order of the timeline. Time is placed in a position by the director that requires the audience to experience and feel it (we usually don’t pay attention to whether this incident happened in the morning, at noon, or at night when watching commercial movies? This incident is different from the previous one) How long is the interval between events? These questions) This movie magnifies time and shortens it (compared to the audience's normal psychological time when watching a movie) You may ask, why does it take so long to make a cup of coffee? time? But it may take longer in real life because the time in traditional movies is much faster than in reality. Akerman's experiments certainly expanded the scope of cinematic expression. When talking about "real-time cinema", we cannot fail to mention Agnès Varda's "Cleo from 5 to 7", which is also a film directed by a female director and with a female protagonist. It tells the story of what happened two hours before and after female singer Cleo went to the hospital to receive the results of her medical examination (she suspected she had a terminal illness). "Jeanne Dielman" goes further than "Cleo from 5 to 7" in that Cleo's two hours are fresh and unfamiliar to the audience; while Dielman's three days A lot of it is repetitive and familiar. Repetition and familiarity do not mean rigidity and boring. Dillman's life is full of unexpected things. Although most of these things are extremely ordinary (such as accidentally dropping the shoe brush when brushing shoes on the third day), they can get closer to the essence of life. In the spatial experiment, we can see that because the camera is fixed, Dillman sometimes walks out of the frame. The traditional method is to have the camera follow the protagonist, but the lens does not move and allows the protagonist to walk in and out. The film breaks through that frame. Without the limitations of the frame, this is no longer as simple as "recording", it is more like a challenge to traditional film theory.

Long shots collage three days of the life of an ordinary middle-aged widow, a film that wanders between simplicity and complexity, reality and illusion, a story about "mother and ***" "The struggling women in the role reversal have together created the most bizarre and unique myth in the history of world cinema.

Features of Chantal Akerman's films

Chantal Akerman (Chantal Akerman) is undoubtedly the most outstanding female director in Belgium. Born in Brussels in 1950, she graduated from the Ecole Supérieure du Film in Paris and later made several short films and feature films in France, Belgium and the United States. The narrative techniques of European art films after World War II had a great influence on her, allowing her to focus on depicting women's accidental encounters and unexpected occurrences. She takes women's work, love, and desires as her long-term themes of concern. The films she directs explore multiple narrative structures and she has made films of various types (documentaries, musicals, diaries, etc.).

Her first feature film "I, You, He, She" (Je, Tu, Il, Elle) is a trilogy about self-reflection. It was shot with improvisation and took only 8 days, and the cost is very low. She went on to film Jeanne Dielman (23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles). This film is not only the most important Belgian film in a long time, but also one of the best "women's films" internationally. She received critical acclaim in 2000 for successfully directing the controversial "Bewitched". This film is inspired by Volume 15 of the novel "In Search of Lost Time" by French stream-of-consciousness master Marcel Proust.

Characteristics of Chantel Akerman's films: they always put the background of avant-garde figures into the feature films, and their content focuses on the focus on the emotions and lives of contemporary women. Akerman's creations are famous for their use of long shots to express the sense of time, clever use of sound effects, and correct handling of the dialectical relationship between authenticity and artistic capacity.

Chantel Akerman, Chairman of the Horizon Section Jury of the 65th Venice Film Festival, 58-year-old Belgian director Chantal Akerman can be said to be a film genius. When she was 15 years old After watching the famous director Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot le Fou", she decided to make a movie of her own. However, after three months of studying in film school, she dropped out and studied film knowledge at home. In 1968, when she was 18, she completed her first short film, "A Closer Look at My Town."

In 1971, Chantal Akerman and the famous Belgian screenwriter and director Samy Szlingerbaum moved to New York and began to gradually understand American experimental films. Especially her contact with people in the literary and artistic circles such as Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, Stan Brackey, Jonas Marks, etc., enabled her to gradually establish her own film style: pessimistic humor and criticism. .

Chantal Akerman, who currently lives in France, is considered one of the representatives of European auteur cinema and one of Belgium’s most prolific directors. Her most recent work is with Thai director Apichatpong- "The State of the World" co-directed by Weerasethakul and Chinese director Wang Bing. A whole life in three days

On an extremely sleepy night, I selected "Jeanne Dielman". This 201-minute work is full of fixed long shots and very little dialogue. Got me on steroids. This is a movie that many directors want to make but never make. It is hard to imagine that the Belgian avant-garde female director Chantal Akerman made it at the age of 24. "Jeanne Dielman" has a strong sense of form. It faithfully records the daily life of the middle-class heroine for three days, and uses subtitles to clearly mark "End of Day X". Directors often hide cameras in the living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom of an apartment, then turn them on, and then switch and broadcast live. The stillness, monotony and rigidity of his shooting technique perfectly echo Dillman's external and inner life - this form itself is what Ackerman wants to express. We even saw such a "black screen" several times: after the protagonist turned off the light, the camera remained in darkness for a few seconds. Akerman likes Andy Warhol, and many of his films point a camera at a target and let it run on its own. Akerman also likes Godard. The hidden edge of "Jeanne Dielman", its reflection on traditional middle-class women, is extremely Godardian and revolutionary.

This is basically a chamber drama, and it is the film of Delphine Seyrig alone - the beautiful European actress who appeared in Alain Resnais, Duras, Among the films by Truffaut, Bu?uel and others, she used her performance-free performance in this film to vividly interpret Dillman, a puppet who lives a highly mechanical and stylized life. The three days she was recorded, one day to be precise, were her entire life. We watched her peel potatoes. After peeling one potato, she put it in the water and peeled another one. The shot is completely real time, that is to say, the length of the shot is the actual time it took her to peel the potatoes. We watched her spread out the exquisite tablecloth and put the knives, forks and napkins in front of her and her son’s seats. Her movements were regular and skillful like a restaurant waiter; we watched her and her son eat, watched her wash the dishes, and watched her Knitting a sweater, watching her take a shower, combing her hair, watching her sit and be in a daze... She would also go to a cafe to sit in a fixed position and drink a cup of coffee, but to use the popular Internet slang, what she drinks is not coffee. It's loneliness. And when she finds that someone has taken her seat, or the waiter she is familiar with is not on duty, she feels uncomfortable all over - when her life is so empty that only the form is left, this form is her destiny.

I was mentally prepared for the shocking and tragic ending of the film. If I didn’t explode in silence, I would perish in silence. This explosive demise once again occurred in the film "Why Mr. R Kills Crazy" co-directed by Fassbinder. The film also uses a set of repeated actions to express implicitly Dillman's sexual intercourse at home - she introduces a strange man into the bedroom every day, then sends him to the hall, hands him a hat, Coat, scarf, and took the money. What's interesting is that Ackerman deliberately let her head "come out of the painting" every time. The next action was that Dillman put the money into an exquisite porcelain jar. If we understand Dillman's sudden move to kill her client in an abstract way, what she really wanted to kill was "the man". Let's review the men around her: She is a middle-aged widow, and she does not love her husband. The rest of her life begins to revolve around her son - cooking for him every day, shining shoes, and giving him pocket money. , or even go to a clothing store to find the same button for his clothes... The rest of the men are just clients.

Beauvoir said that women are not born, but created. Akerman is a feminist, but not as explicit as Kathleen Brea. When I was in a daze with Dillman face to face with blood on his hands in the last few minutes of the film, I thought of a sentence said by the heroine in Godard's "No. 2": "When you can't get along with a man, you always... You can leave him. But when it is a country, when the entire social system is against you, what should you do?"