About Smocks (on Chantal Akerman, Violette Leduc)

In the opening shot of Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, the actress Delphine Seyrig stands at a kitchen stove and adds salt to a large aluminium pot. The set lighting is harsh and flat, and the pastel colours of the decor, asinine. She replaces the lid, lights the gas flame with a match, turns left to the kitchen sink where she washes her hands. She dries them thoroughly on a white cotton tea towel that hangs conveniently from a hook between the stove and the sink, then briskly unbuttons her house smock. This is a knee-length cotton coat-like garment, blue checks on a white ground, that fastens up the front with small white buttons.  The fit is streamlined but sensibly roomy, closer at the shoulders then flaring out a little from the waist, to indicate her tall, mature figure without emphasizing it in any way. The smock says that she is a modest housewife. It’s difficult to date this garment; it could have been purchased new for the shoot at a popular street market or a modest department store, or it could be a cast-off from the 1940s or 1950s; the slightly puffed sleeves suggest the latter might be the case. Its effect is workaday but crisp and demure. It has a small patch pocket at the front hip, big enough for spare hairpins but not for a dusting rag. At the hem, her slightly longer black skirt is visible, at her throat the smock’s pointed collar is open to show a cream-coloured blouse, and the short sleeves reveal the longer sleeves of her grey wool cardigan. The camera is fixed, framing the stove, the sink, a wooden table, and behind it, the window with its greenish print curtains. Seyrig turns to her right, moves towards the camera to hang the smock on a hook outside the frame, then leaves our view, turning off the light as she exits. She will button herself back into the smock each time she re-enters the kitchen, and also for the rounds of housekeeping she undertakes in the two other rooms of the oppressively orderly apartment: the bedroom, where she makes the double bed and spreads the quilted satin coverlet, smoothing it with a characteristic light spanking gesture, which she also uses on freshly folded towels and garments before placing them in the vast mahogany armoire that matches the tint of her stiffly coifed hair; and the living room, where she collapses the fold-out studio bed her son sleeps in at night, and dusts the innocuous figurines that populate the what-not cabinet, and next the soup terrine, where she stores her housekeeping money.

The blue and white checked cotton housesmock worn by Delphine Seyrig in order to become or to play Jeanne Dielman is identical to the blue and white cotton housesmock described by Violette Leduc in Mad in Pursuit, which she carefully irons before writing, or entertaining, as if to write is to invite guests to one’s table, or conversely to tidy up a mess. There is one minor difference between the two garments—Leduc’s smock is belted at the waist, the belt made of the same blue and white checked fabric. Her biographer and friend Jacques Guerin kept this belt as a momento or fetish for decades after Violette Leduc’s death in 1972, which was the same year Chantal Akerman was in New York living in the glamorously cluttered Soho room that she documents in her early film La Chambre. The 11-minute-long slowly rotating pan of Babette Mangolte’s camera shows the cineaste lounging in a dishevelled bed at times eating an apple, at others perhaps masturbating, wearing a smock-like white flannel nightgown, the light unctuous on the room’s modest surfaces and objects, which oddly include a spinning wheel. In an account of her travels by foot in the south of France in 1960, Leduc mentions the checkered smock of an itinerant Arab merchant, belted at the waist, which she had seen in the town of Florac then described in a letter to Simone de Beauvoir as a cache-détresse, mask of misery, cut ironically from the long “cloth of sadness”, making the merchant indistinguishable, she said, from the sculptor, the schoolteacher, the hardware store clerk. And the femme d’interior, the cineaste, and the writer.

Such is my smock—identical in every particular to the smock of Jeanne Dielman, of Violette Leduc, and the itinerant salesman of Florac.

When I watch Delphine Seyrig’s smooth, then gradually unravelling cyclical motions in the grotesquely wallpapered apartment of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, it occurs to me that in structuring a feature length film around the banal, repetitive rituals of domestic maintenance (dishwashing, bedmaking, potato peeling, breading the veal, dusting, applying a slash of lipstick, running errands, checking the mail, remembering to switch off the lights, buttoning and unbuttoning the smock, writing letters, folding garments, turning tricks, remembering to duly wash her snatch, scrubbing the bathtub, polishing shoes, and so forth) Chantal Akerman is decisively mounting a negative image of conventional film narrative. Those films routinely excise necessary workaday actions and gestures and their strict grace, as if a housebound choreography could carry no moral weight, as if its dramatic potential were absent, as if such forms of female work and all the styles of undertaking that work did not support our very lives. It is an astonishingly rigorous choice to place them at the core, as the substance of a domestic tragedy, as a realist portrait of negative space. “I’m not a militant,” she said of this film, “I simply make films that are not colonized.” Akerman is stating that the rigorous iteration of these measured movements, culminating in the fictive achievement of their implosion, is more than worthy of aesthetic presentation and judgement— the representation of non-colonized gesture is for her a necessity. Jeanne Dielman is an incendiary manifesto of style. It draws on a maximum of dignity in the three-part framing of feminine constraint and its violent refusal. This refusal arrives as necessity, not excess. When I button my own smock I enter the economy of her covert theatre.