Revisiting Jeanne Dielman: Autour de Jeanne Dielman (2004), Woman Sitting After Killing (2001) and Akerman’s ‘cinéma de ressassement’

Abstract

This article revisits Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), seeking to map its nomadic trajectories through different media. I elaborate on Akerman’s notion of a ‘cinéma de ressassement’, a cinema of mulling over or chipping away. Rather than focusing on the film itself, I concentrate on two lesserknown works that explicitly return to Jeanne Dielman, functioning both as works in their own right and as paratexts, revealing the film’s processes in different but corresponding ways: the installation Woman Sitting After Killing, made for the 2001 Venice Biennale, and Autour de Jeanne Dielman, a making-of documentary shot on Portapak by Sami Frey in 1975, edited by Akerman and Agnès Ravez in 2004, and released as a special feature on the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film. The article contends that these two ‘returns’ to Jeanne Dielman rework the complex temporalities of the film in addition to revisiting its political concerns. Autour de Jeanne Dielman places Jeanne Dielman squarely within a feminist framework through its central positioning of Delphine Seyrig’s feminist discourse. I map the ways in which ressassement exposes the processes of a feminist filmmaking concerned with disrupting ‘chrononormative’ (Elizabeth Freeman) narratives. Building on B. Ruby Rich’s characterization of Akerman’s work as a ‘cinema of correspondence’, ultimately the article asks what counts as productive labour, suggesting that Akerman’s returns to Jeanne Dielman highlight its commitment to feminist and queer failure as a productive working method.