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. The whole iceberg is left. I was really concentrating on the microaggressions and [little looks and gestures] that can really wound you. And I guess when you don't name him, it could be anybody and that’s a much bigger idea. ... "Roger Ebert … Then the two of us in pre-production had spent I think three or four weeks—the script doesn't have much detail about who this girl is. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to RogerEbert.com, Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets. That was great. The next two were autobiographical inverses. She went to her management office and watched how they answered the phones. I think in order to analyze why there aren’t more women in positions of power, you've got to look at why we're not getting our foot in the door in the first place. She saw Jean-Luc Godard’s "Pierrot Le Fou" when she was 15, and it changed her life. I think that was really helpful. She was creating a space for femininity, something still tenuous in art house cinema, to express itself—or at the very least realize that the space it in which it had been confined was not an inescapable one. She was hurt. I feel like the interesting thing is, when you talk about the film industry, people assume it's so glamorous. Green ended up making a career out of the film, following it with gems like "Pineapple Express," "All The Real Girls" and "Joe." I was talking to my producers and I decided I might do some research on college campuses and talk to kids about consent and power structures as a way to get into the topic. Having no allies—not co-workers, not HR, and definitely not her boss—and with a dream of becoming a producer one day, she dawdles in uncertainty. "How can we make workplaces equal, fair, just for women and safe spaces?" Film critic Roger Ebert gave Winter’s Bone five stars in recognition of Debra Granik’s talent. If, as Roger Ebert famously wrote, ... — *Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna The late Chantal Akerman was an iconic feminist filmmaker and Jeanne Dielman, her rigorous 3-hour film about housework and sex work, is her incendiary masterpiece. This is a pre-#MeToo story. That's it. I kept thinking about Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” a lot. I still feel like this is going on all over the world in different workplaces. I feel uncomfortable mentioning their names. He was like, "I know these guys. For that, look to "Les rendez-vous d'Anna." At the Locarno film festival, her latest film "No Home Movie," was booed. ... and small and pokey. Akerman changed the way an audience relates to moving pictures by asking every member to consider what they would expect from a film. I miss her so much. Surely Chantal Akerman had earned her audience. Scout Tafoya is a critic and filmmaker who writes for and edits the arts blog Apocalypse Now and directs both feature length and short films. It’s shot in high-contrast black and white. At that same movie’s New York press screening, I counted six walkouts. Immortals Fenyx Rising Wants to Keep Gamers Busy Over the Holidays, The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. I heard rumors about this, but not too much. She returned to Europe after the completion of a few short films ("Le 15/8" and "Hanging Out Yonkers") armed with a revolutionary idea named Jeanne Dielman. But Matthew [Macfadyen] was the sweetest. A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. We rented an office building basically. But it would be a shame to leave this notoriously short film festival without falling in love with at least one small and true discovery. Then we had an amazing production design team who gave it that kind of look. A lot of it is about showing the kind of reality of working in those office spaces and what it's like to be the youngest woman on the desk of this predator. I decided to talk to friends about what we can do. A lot of things in there are part things I've experienced, the little tiny things. With fascinating histories painstakingly unearthed by Malone this book is a treasure of delights that honors more than a hundred years of female filmmaking. As soon as we met her, she understood the script, which was great. More than 209 critics from 43 countries were asked to rank their top ten foreign-language films, which BBC then ranked accordingly. Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. Honestly, Ebert said it best. The film is a series of mostly static takes that force you to confront not just the content of the image, but the context, the very idea of a moving image itself. I guess that's always been in the back of my mind. People dismissing you in a way that's very subtle, but it really hurts. For those of us who needed her, Akerman kept the world spinning on its axis, even though she hadn’t had what you’d call a "hit" since the 1970s. It was the first film she made after "Jeanne Dielman" and a refinement of that film’s ideas. Below is an interview with Green, which has been lightly edited for flow and clarity. He would just ad lib a little and he's been in the industry forever. 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. Her loss is a hole in my heart. How did you design this production office space? If someone came up to you saying, “It’s Jeanne Dielman, except God exists!”you’d be tempted to attach them to the nearest jukebox and throw it in the East River. Well they're there to protect the company, that's their job. Gossamer Aurore Clement plays an Akerman stand-in, a director on a lonely, nocturnal tour of major cities with her latest work. I just wanted pieces of him so we could see that everyone was tense because of the power. When the show ended I went up to her and told her how much she meant to me, how her films had made me a director. Clement’s Anna is the flip side of steely Jeanne Dielman, a woman whose doubts escape through cracks in her expression. Instead of looking at it top down, I was looking at it bottom up. After "Jeanne Dielman", she would make three more masterpieces before the decade was over. Jeanne Dielman creates drama solely within the type of material other films ignore. It terrified me, by the way. "Je, Tu, Il, Elle" showed me that a camera and a body could produce truths that eluded artists with ten times Akerman's resources. Garner is simply astonishing in steering her character’s fragility—she manages to maintain a stone cold professional face, while tears linger on her eyelashes with every subtle male dismissal and condescension. And as soon as you give him a fake name, like if you call him Barry or Jones, it would have pulled people out. Akerman’s cinema was essentially humane, but filled with a potent and necessary rage. Her role is to do the administrative duties for assistants. We brought in people who worked as assistants in various companies and Julia spoke to them. I wanted to be near her, to thank her in some way for having given me the tools to discover myself and become an artist. There is no mistaking that voice—he really sounded like Harvey Weinstein. After "Jeanne Dielman", she would make three more masterpieces before the decade was over. I feel like it is all part of this such toxic culture we've created. I think we're getting there, but any kind of interrogation of the subtleties and smaller things get overlooked. “The narrative is not really kind of a typical or dramatic narrative where you have beginning, middle, and end, and there was … It does affect your ability to do your job well. Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles 1975 ★★★½ Watched 29 Sep, 2020. But it wasn't like the assistant had a lot of face-to-face time with him. She was just herself, and being Chantal Akerman meant asking the world to reckon with its false identities and overcome a relentlessly awful history. Joining me impromptu following the final screening of her movie on Monday, writer/director Green (“Ukraine Is Not A Brothel,” “Casting JonBenet”) doesn’t exactly confirm that the boss figure is the disgraced film mogul. And would you be comfortable revealing who those people were? Perfectly calibrated and increasingly mournful, “The Assistant” is perhaps the first expressly #MeToo narrative feature that elucidates why the movement's arrival was way overdue, as well as one of the most important world premieres to grace this year’s Telluride Film Festival. There are so many moments like that in the movie. Yes and no. Jeanne Dielman puts the chores front and center, with nothing else to distract you. The agony of being in thrall to a male society that had only so many spaces allotted for you to discover yourself. I think all this talk, this gendered kind of system we've created, is really prohibiting women from [breaking in]. She poured cold water on the male gaze. I've been in the industry for a while and it's the little things that really affect your self-confidence. I've never met Harvey Weinstein. “The Female Gaze, written by the ebullient film journalist Alicia Malone, is an unabashed love letter to our cinema sisters. I was terrified listening to it. Directed by Chantal Akerman. And I don’t believe there was a more honest or daring filmmaker of the last 50 years. What do we value from the experience of sitting in the dark and communing with 35mm film running through a projector? And you actually go into these offices, and they're really kind of dingy. She's one of them. 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! Roger Ebert put it perfectly when he wrote about her relationship to the French New Wave in 2012: ... Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman) The story she told was of unbearable melancholy. She understood the character, and who she thought the character was. That's Jeanne Dielman in a nutshell, but what Akerman does is so radical I'd take this painstakingly slow feature over the usual freneticism and symbolic overload of experimental cinema any day. But for someone who changed the DNA of art films forever, she isn’t taught in film or feminist theory classes (or anyway, I took both in two different colleges and didn’t hear her name once). I mean that voice is terrifying because it felt unmistakable to me. I suddenly got on the phone and started texting a bunch of people. While Garner goes through her character’s stressful duties with the precision of Jeanne Dielman (Green’s sympathetic yet unflinchingly objective camera work recalls Chantal Akerman’s movie, too), her deep sense of sadness slowly rises to the surface. It’s fitting, if sad, that her final film would be about her final months with her ailing mother. I kept thinking about Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” a lot. But when that person is Keith Uhlich of Time Out and you imagine him looking like this and you realize he’s referring to … If you’re angry or upset that nothing is happening, ask why you believe that something should? It was winter 2013 and she was reading from her memoirs in a black box theatre in Chelsea, while her latest photography exhibit played on a loop upstairs. She never made a bad movie. The next two were autobiographical inverses. When her 2011 film "Almayer’s Folly" (a staggering movie) took a year to make it to a rather negligible art house run, I wondered if she’d done something to make taste-makers mad. You portray that system of silence so sharply in this movie. She gave me the gift of cinema, led me to my voice. I feel like if the film was set today, she would have more avenues and pathways or she would have more support. A lot of people are still working [with their bosses] right now. I notice every time I told my friends, "Oh, he did this." The … I was shocked by that movie. With Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. "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. I kind of was trying to find a way to analyze this whole situation as it was unfolding in the press. 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. I was kind of angry and I didn't know what to do with that anger. 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. Curators failed to keep her legacy in the air between films. We did a lot of just roleplay and playing around to figure out who she is and what she wants and her aspirations. It sounds like I'm complaining or it sounds like nothing. The way they were shut down or silenced every time [they] spoke up about injustice. This was her gift. Telluride 2019: Kitty Green on Her Pre-#MeToo Thriller, The Assistant, The Essential Fellini is a Wonderful Gift for Cinephiles, Nomadland Leads 2020 Chicago Film Critics Nominations, Book Review: The Lost Adventures of James Bond, The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. And guess who the boss in question is? To be honest, it wasn't in the script. Roger Ebert put it on his top 10 list, as did many other film critics who were impressed by the visual ambition of the film. I am wondering what you want people to take away and do after they watch this movie? I expanded it to my friends who were architects, my friends in tech, finance, and I was finding the same stories there, too. The film treats female bodies like vessels that cannot hold all of the radiant female mind and its innumerable intricacies. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975/Belgium, France/Chantal Akerman) Three hours of potato peeling and passionless sex. 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. I started directing weeks after seeing this movie, and I dedicated my second movie (which has 8 shots and lasts almost an hour and a half) to her. However, something happens that changes her safe routine. To be honest, it all started because I had been in the film industry for 10 years and I had my fair share of bad experiences. There is, unfortunately or not, a continuity to these events. And, more to the point, who is behind the camera? We needed to sense his power over everyone. Did you talk to any assistants who worked for some recognizable names in the industry? Akerman’s velvety dolly shots place somnambulant Clement in an earth-toned dystopia she has no control over. I hate that. Then I read suddenly that the Weinstein scandal had broken open. For instance, this one scene in the elevator, it sticks with you. It's about the looks and sounds of … That was the first movie I watched maybe in my late teens or early twenties where I thought, "Wow, this is what a movie can be." It’s tragic in a way that Akerman’s art turned so many people away from her, but then…the best and most honest art will always confuse and upset those who aren’t ready for it. But we just found a really great actor. You know what it takes.” He sounded belittling. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. It was a believable film office. I just put him so that we could sense his power and control. 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. There are also all these fake movie posters around. But I [imagined] he also sounds like a lot of bosses, that guy. I wanted them to empathize with her discomfort. I don't know what he sounds like. A woman, in her 60s, trying to learn how to date online, and having her heart broken when the object of her affection refuses to be open with her, to write back. I was shocked by that movie. Her love for her mother is in everything she did. She moved to New York in the early 1970s and produced "Hotel Monterey," a silent rumination on the corridors of the rundown building and the people who passed through it. Instead, what she does focus on is the composite pain of countless assistants that she channeled through the lead character, played by Garner. Chantal Akerman was forcing men to look at a woman who could have been any of their wives or mothers, for over three hours. At least twenty people walked out of her talk, each footfall louder than the last. That was the first movie I watched maybe in my late teens or early twenties where I thought, "Wow, this is what a movie can be." To reckon with female identity and existence, that it is intrinsically, starkly different from the male, and that so much of modern female life is a miasmic routine. With the future of her newly starting career at risk, what can she do, if not move on like everything is normal and write humiliating apology emails? "No good movie is too long," Roger Ebert once wrote, "and no bad movie is short enough." So, it's a very different kind of film. The HR scene, when doors get closed on her face, was too painful to watch. Is film not a visual medium? As so frequently happens with artists who are ahead of the game, the world didn’t really know what to do with her. She wasn’t angry. I also love how you captured just tiny details about male behavior and entitlement, which is what’s really damaging on a day-to-day basis. most overrated: Jeanne Dielman is at #98 on the TSPDT list and I can’t get behind it after one viewing. I'm pretty sure he wasn't that comfortable saying it, but he was great. But ultimately, she learns the hard way that there's no easy way of taking on an ecosystem of enablers alone. Finally she looked to the last of the rude escapees, some 30 minutes into her talk, and said “Don’t make noise.”. The focus on gesture and rhythm and just this idea of labor and showing kind of the mundane—the cinema verite-style of approach I always responded to. That was the movie that made me want to make movies. The movie is nothing but a series of mundane details. I mean, I started working with people who worked with The Weinstein Company and Miramax, but I also spread out to other companies. A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores, takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. Oh wow, that's great. I don't know, the industry is a mess. The first is "Je, Tu, Il, Elle," on which more in a moment. 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]. Yeah, and she’s not named either. I wanted to focus on things that were relatable. Raging Bull is "an Othello for our times." There is one element that literally flickers in … Stacker presents the 100 greatest foreign-language films of all time, as of Oct. 30, 2018. For instance, when she cuts her finger, you do feel something bigger might happen. She dropped out of film school after a short while (her fans would find it hard to imagine her sitting in class listening to someone else’s idea about how films should be made) and started shooting intense personal hybrids of fiction and non-fiction, frequently choosing herself as subject. I sat there and listened to every word while people all around me walked away. LIKE its blunt title, Chantal Akerman's ''Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,'' deals in unadorned facts. When did you start writing it? There is a lot of collective kind of pain that goes into this film. I was doing this tour of different universities, and I went to Stanford and saw this amazing performance art troupe there that work with trauma. This year, that unforeseen breakthrough is Kitty Green’s “The Assistant.” Following a single day in the life of a high-powered film executive’s female, entry-level assistant (Julia Garner), Green’s thriller-esque drama operates in the pre-#MeToo world, as its unnamed, first-in, last-out Northwestern graduate goes through numerous mundane tasks in a soulless office, while slowly noticing her boss’s toxic, predatory behavior. It top down, i counted six walkouts her twenty-fifth birthday experienced, the.! Long, '' was booed everything i needed about how toxic this is! Of bosses, that guy have arrived much sooner if people looked at things from bottom.... 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