Autour de Jeanne Dielman. 1975/1984. France. Directed by Sami Frey. Edited by Agnès Ravez, Chantal Akerman in 1984. With Akerman, Delphine Seyrig, Babette Mangolte, and others. In French; English subtitles. 68 min.
Sami Frey’s behind-the-scenes portrait of two women shaping Jeanne Dielman is an extraordinary document, and a beautiful film in its own right, about the push and pull between an actor and a director, one of them a screen legend and a feminist activist, the other a 24-year-old with only a handful of shorts under her belt, yet both equally strong-willed and clear-eyed about how a veal escalope should weigh in one’s hands. Imagine having a filmic record of Auguste Rodin bringing his figure of Balzac to life in clay, and you have some sense of the monumentality of a film about Chantal Akerman and Delphine Seyrig at work. In witnessing this process of paring down a profusion of words to wordless action, one is reminded of Marcel Proust’s thoughts on “the deadening effect of habit, which cuts away from things we have seen many times the taproot of deep impression and thought which gives them their real significance.”