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Play, download and edit the free video Chantal Akermans Jeanne Dielman: The ritual of domesticity subverted (a video collage).

Watch Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman, a widowed housewife, mother of a teenage son, and part-time prostitute perform her obsessive daily routine in a collage of simultaneous images and sounds in Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feminist cult classic.

My focus is on the almost hypnotic effect the protagonist’s rigid repetition of household menial tasks has on the viewer. In “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” we follow the main character for 3 days as she makes breakfast, cleans her son’s shoes, prepares meals, washes the dishes, bathes, eats, sleeps, and receives her male clients in a perfect choreography of the mundane that is emphasized by Babette Mangolte’s static camera work, the framing, and the sounds: the tapping of her shoes as she walks, the switching on and off of the lights, the running faucet, the clanking of the dishes as she washes them.

Images and sounds are overlaid and juxtaposed to reveal her growing frustration in subtle expressions as things slowly spiral out of control until the violent climax of the third day.

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