Jeanne Dielman

7/30/2019 Jeanne Dielman

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Deja-Vu Melodrama: An Iconographical and Iconological Analysis of

"Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles"

Editor's Note: As you will notice, this is quite a long essay on many aspects

of Chantal Akerman's masterwork which has reopened this week at FilmForum with a new 35mm print. This article investigates and discusses

specific details about the film, including the possibly shocking ending (if

you don't know what's coming). While this essay may help inform a first

viewing of the film, it includes "spoilers" of the events that take place in the

film not that there are really that many. Just wanted to warn everyone

going in. JH

The purpose of this essay is to investigate what I shall claim is a liaison

between Chantal Akermans 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du

Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and the melodrama. Multifarious by nature,

Jeanne Dielman consequently resists being shoehorned into any specific

category, genre, or mode, thus the aim here is not to force an overdetermined

prefix onto the film, but rather to highlight its critical potential as it engagesin a larger sociopolitical and aesthetic discourse both with and via the

melodrama. By analyzing the structure of the film, together with its use of

mise-en-scne, the focus in the first part of the essay will be on elements the

film appropriates from the melodrama, and how the relationship between the

melodrama and Jeanne Dielman can be characterized, via investigating to

what degree the film can be defined as a generic pastiche. This

iconographical analysis will further compare the film in relation to the

framework of the Hollywood family melodrama, as defined and explainedby Thomas Elsaesser in his article "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations

on the Family Melodrama."

The second part of the essay will focus on different levels of critique


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inherent in the filmic text of Jeanne Dielman, by focusing on three such

critical discourses I believe the film engages in. The first, and most basic

level of critique has to do with the relationship between Jeanne Dielman as

an avant-garde and/or modernist film and its attitude towards the

traditional and commercial art institutions and industry in this context theHollywood industry and specifically the Hollywood family/domestic

melodrama. The second and third levels of critique will be investigated in

relation to the films ambiguous ending, through looking at the pre-

determined socio-political framework inherent in the melodrama: the

bourgeois framework, which defines much of the realm of the (Hollywood)

melodrama. This aspect will be highlighted through a discussion of the

films relation and approach to the happy ending, where further the feminist

potential of the film will be researched though looking at different feministinterpretations of the film. Finally, these aesthetical and political discourses

of Jeanne Dielman will be brought together and considered in relation to the

ideological schematics and categories of Comolli and Narbonis canonical

1969 essay Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.

Melodrama and the structure of Jeanne Dielman

Jeanne Dielman of the films title is a widow and a housewife/homemaker of

the petite bourgeoisie in Brussels, who lives alone with her teenaged son

Sylvain, and earns her income through prostitution, accepting a different

client in her apartment every afternoon. Over the course of three days in

diegetic time, the film depicts in great detail the quotidian routine and

platitude of the protagonists life, a routine that consists of conducting banal

household chores. As Jeanne Dielman with small, precise gestures and

minimal effort peels potatoes, shines her sons shoes, prepares dinner or

brews coffee, the camera continually keeps her in medium close-up as she

spends large parts of the day in the kitchen. There is further an absence of

the shot-reverse-shot editing technique found in classical Hollywood

continuity style, as the protagonist is constantly to be found within the static

frame, or in two-shots with her son. The shots varies between being long


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often longer than two minutesand consequently constitute whole scenes or

sequences, rhythmically interrupted by intervals of shorter shots, as Jeanne

paces back and forth between the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, the

bathroom, and back. Most of Jeannes actions are depicted in real time, with

no edited cuts or ellipsis, so for example when Jeanne peels potatoes or takesa bath, it will take three full minutes both in the diegetic and real time

everything is literally done as well as enacted. A notable exception to this

convergence of diegetic and real time happens as Jeanne welcomes her daily

male customer into the apartment, and leads him to the bedroom which she

has carefully prepared by letting in fresh air and putting a white towel over

the bed covers. In these events the camera does not follow Jeanne into

bedroom as it has done earlier, but rather lingers in the hallway, and through

ellipsis and progressively darker lighting, the passing of time is marked.Extremely little dialogue is uttered in the film, with the exception of hasty

conversation at nightas Sylvain is in the habit of interrogating his taciturn

mother about sex and sexualityoften in relation to his deceased father;

when Jeanne formally greets her male customers, and lastly brief exchanges

of dinner recipes with her neighbor.

The film presents and depicts Jeannes routine in great detail, and the same

actions are to a large degree repeated every day. In the same way that the

film invests a lot of time in establishing Jeannes routine, it spends close to

the same amount of time on the unraveling of this routine. It is a about

halfway through the films running time, then, and correspondingly close to

halfway through the three days of the films diegesis, that Jeannes first

mistake is made, and she finally but unwillingly disrupts the routine she so

carefully seems to have organized and imposed on herself1. This first

rupture happens as Jeanne during the afternoon of the second day, as usual,

goes to put her hard-earned cash in the porcelain soup tureen that stands on

her living room table, but forgets to put on the lid, which is her usual habit.

Jeanne discovers this mistake later in the evening, as Sylvain gets home

from school, and puts the lid back on. And so, throughout the following day

which is the third and last day of the films narrativeeverything really

begins to unravel around Jeanne Dielman and her routine massively falls


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apartbeginning with an undone button in her robe, shoeshine spilt on the

sleeve of her night gown, and then her schedule becomes displaced as she

arrives at the post office too early, then at her regular caf too late. When she

returns to her apartment that afternoon, she discovers that has received a gift

from her sister that she barely has time to open before her male client of theday arrives, and she hurriedly hides the gifta pink nightgownunder her

bed, leaving the pair of scissors she opened the parcel with on the dresser.

Here then, for the first time in the film, the camera follows Jeanne into the

bedroom with the customer, and the film finally reaches its climax

literallyas Jeanne unexpectedly has an orgasm. Also for the first time, the

camera is positioned above Jeanne, who is laying on her back on the bed,with the client on top of her. The film then cuts to Jeanne sitting in front of

the mirror in her bedroom, which reflects the customer dozing off on her

bed, and as Jeanne finishes buttoning her blouse and straightening her skirt,

she gets up, grabs the pair of scissors, exits the frame, then suddenly

reappears in the mirror frame as she plunges towards the man, stabbing the

scissors in his throat and consequently kills him. In the next and last scene,

Jeanne quietly sits in the dark by her dining table, vis--vis the soup tureen,

for seven whole minuteshands and clothes bloodied.

The film operates with several codes and elements from the Hollywood

family melodramas vernacular and structure, which is perhaps signified to

the fullest through the films mise-en-scne, and corresponds to Thomas

Elsaessers claim that the melodrama is iconographically fixed by the

claustrophobic atmosphere of the bourgeois home and/or the small-town

setting (62). Interestingly then, in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce,

1080 Bruxelles, even the title of the film, which gives the full address of the

protagonist, fences the character in, and defines her within a very limited

and ineluctable sphere: the bourgeois home. For Elsaesser, this signifies the

iconographical framework of the melodrama, but as I shall argue in the

following, it is also the iconological framework in Jeanne Dielman, that the

film explores and critiques from different angles.


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Inside her apartment, Jeanne is surrounded by quotidian objects, each

assigned a very specific function, not to mention a specific place in the

apartment where it belongs, as Jeanne meticulously and compulsively puts

everything back in the right place after having used the object, so that the

dish used for breakfast is immediately cleansed before re-using the same

dish for lunch, and the tote bag is emptied and hung up on the hook above

the sink after grocery shopping. In a similar way, Jeanne Dielman has her

own defined place in the apartment where she belongsthe kitchen, where

she spends most of her time seated at the kitchen table preparing meals, or

standing by the stove waiting for potatoes to boil or coffee to brew. Also

confirming Jeannes designated place in the kitchen is the color schema of

the film, which operates with a palette of grays, greens, browns and blues,

and Jeanne too becomes a part of this mise-en-scne when she puts on her

blue and gray checkered kitchen apron and consequently in a chameleon-like

way becomes a completely integrated part of the environmentthe kitchen

sphere, from which she cannot be separated but is completely absorbed.

However, not only does the mise-en-scne define Jeanne Dielman within

this atmosphere, but as we have seen, the cinematography too. Jeanne is

constantly in the frame in medium close-up throughout the films running

time, with the exception of the moments when she moves between rooms. Inthis sense, the film is doubly confirming Jeannes role within the four walls

of her home, both through the camera framing, and with the mise-en-scne.

Together, these elements underline the extremely defined boundaries of her

existence.

The films use of excess is another element of the film that corresponds to

the melodrama, and in Jeanne Dielman this is first and foremost an excess oftime signified through repeated gestures, actions, and routine. As we have

seen, the film uses diegetic time synchronically with real time, and scenes

that would normally only be referenced or hinted to as an off-screen event in

a commercial Hollywood melodrama, is instead played out from beginning

till endthen recycled and accumulated, such as the preparing of meals,


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doing the dishes, drinking a cup of coffee, et cetera. Elsaesser explains that

in the melodrama there is: an intensified symbolization of everyday actions,

the heightening of the ordinary gesture and a use of setting and decor so as

to reflect the characters fetishist fixations (56). In Jeanne Dielman it is this

strict routine and schedule that functions as the fetishist fixation of Jeannein the film, and consequently the intensification and accumulation of these

ordinary gestures presses the narrative and the character towards as

resolution, as her surroundings and routine will become increasingly

problematic and suffocating, (elements which will be further explored when

discussing the films ending in later parts of the essay).

Jeanne Dielman and pastiche

As we understand how Jeanne Dielman employs much of the structure and

vernacular of the melodrama, it is however clear that the film is not a typical

or conventional melodrama in itself, as it displaces and negates much of the

generic conventions of the genre or mode. Ivone Margulies in her book

Nothing Happens, has articulated Jeanne Dielmans appropriation of the

melodrama as such:

Jeanne Dielman continuously evokes the feeling that its narrative spreads

over, selects and recombines elements of another, fully constituted narrative.

The film seems to stretch over a conventional narrative and to displace its

melodramatic affect, otherwise conspicuously absent, into banal and

mundane gestures. At times, an action like brushing shoes, or waiting for

water to boil for coffee, seems to take on the dramatic intensity of one of

those incidents in a 40s Hollywood melodrama when someone slaps

someones face or waits anxiously for a lover (84).

As becomes evident with this quote, there does not exist any specific pre-

text for the pastiche, but rather a whole decade of Hollywood melodramas.

In this sense, the nature of Jeanne Dielman as a pastiche must be


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characterized as highly palimpsestic, as it is layered over a whole subgenre

of melodramasthe family and domestic melodramas, by appropriating

certain elements of the melodrama such as the bourgeois milieu, the female

heroine in a claustrophobic setting, and her repressed sexuality, while other

elements are negated or displaced like the excess of emotion, the negation ofmelos, and more. In this sense, the film can be understood as a generic

pastiche of the family/domestic Hollywood melodrama, as it pastiches the

framework of the melodrama more than quoting any specific film. In

addition, I will here suggest that the film is a simulacral pastiche: a copy

with no original, which effectively allows the film to simultaneously

establish a strong relationship with the melodrama, while also critiquing and

subverting it, as it is neither too close nor too distant from it. Thus, in

concordance with Richard Dyers assertion that: pastiche reminds us that aframework is a framework (177), Jeanne Dielman highlights both the

qualities that correspond to, or negates the melodrama, and the framework

and structure of the melodrama itself becomes important because the

pastiche must always remind its audience that it is one step removed from

that which it pastiches.

If we consider the film a generic (simulacral) pastiche of the Hollywood

family/domestic melodrama, perhaps pastiche as it is utilized in this context

lies closer to the postmodernist definition of the term as advocated by

Frederic Jameson, who places the pastiche close to the parody (Dyer 157),

like Jeanne Dielman here seems to have chosen the family melodrama as its

generic clich (Margulies 85). For example, elements that points towards

parody are: the constant allusions to the Freudian Oedipal-conflict, as

Elsaesser points out was employed extensively in the Hollywood family

melodrama (58). In Jeanne Dielman, this element is close to being ironical

and comical, like how the relationship between Jeanne and Sylvainmother

and sonis articulated through overt references to the Oedipal drama, as

when Sylvain expresses anger towards his deceased father for using his

phallic sword on his mother, and the question of the (law of the) father and

patriarchy becomes central, as Sylvains relation to his mother is

fundamentally characterized by his oscillating between wanting to be like, or


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unlike, his father (Nowell-Smith 71). As the film echoes the structure of the

melodrama and plays with our expectations towards the genre as suggested

by Margulies, the overt emphasis on the Oedipal conflict seems like a

fundamentally parodical element of the film. In this sense, the film seems to

be masquerading itself as a melodrama, which is to say that the filmironically poses as a melodrama while at the same time is clearly aware that

it is not, which it signals through employing several aspects of the

melodramatic framework and vernacular, while at the same time

exaggerating some of these aspects, while displacing or negating yet others.

And so, by making a detour to photography and the artist Cindy Sherman, I

will illustrate and exemplify in what way Jeanne Dielman is a parodical and

simulacral pastiche of the melodramatic genre or mode.

Cindy Sherman developed a series of photographs named Untitled Film

Stills in the mid-1970s, in which she poses in front of the camera dressed up

in costumes, imitating conventional female stereotypes in Hollywood films

where the housewife-character from the melodrama recurs. However, these

photographs are not replicas of any pre-existing film (stills), they rather play

with the memory and familiarity of the audience with the melodrama, byoperating with a clearly recognizable iconography. Like Jeanne Dielman

then, Cindy Shermans Film Stills never refer to any specific film, actor, or

character, but the composition of the images, and the mise-en-scne is

fundamentally recognizablemuch like a dja-vuso that the question of

the referent will always be evoked. However, there is no specific referent in

existence, and the images rather exist as monadic signs. I would assert that

this is also the case with Jeanne Dielman, which through its agency of being

a generic and simulacral pastiche is heavily referencing the melodrama, butto pinpoint specifically what it pastiches becomes difficult, as there is no

single scene, line of dialogue, or part of the mise-en-scne which implies a

referent, or an original. Instead, it is the memory of the melodrama that is

evoked in the spectator, from seeing the pastiche, and experiencing a dja-

vu.


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Critiquing melodrama from the inside-out and the outside-in

As a simulacral pastiche of the melodrama, Jeanne Dielman draws attention

to its structure and framework by negating or displacing several elements ofthe melodrama, while enhancing yet others. In this sense, by employing the

structure and vernacular of the melodrama, Jeanne Dielman succeeds in

critiquing the genre or mode, both from the inside-out as well as from the

outside-in.

Remembering that Jeanne Dielman is an avant-garde and modernist

film, we understand that this critique and foregrounding of the filmsstructure and technique is in large part inherent to its avant-

gardist/modernist nature, and that this critique will be directed towards

the institutions and definitions of established practice, as well as negating

the dominant cinema (Smith 399). In this context, the Hollywood family

melodrama is the dominant cinema institution that is criticized. One element

of critique in Jeanne Dielman is expressed via negating conventions of

Hollywood film, which first of all is manifest with the length of the film,

which is more than double the length of the mainstream Hollywood film.

Elsaesser points out how the Hollywood melodramas needed to be

compressed as a commercial necessity (52). As an avant-garde film,

however, the same commercial conditions and/or conventions do not apply,

and in Jeanne Dielman, the length of the film is foregrounded to accentuate

the false narrative efficiency of the family melodramas, as they leave out the

very elements that Jeanne Dielman chooses to highlightnamely the

platitude and banality of the protagonists routine, life, and existence.

The cinematography is a further critique of the conventional film language

in Hollywood melodramas, as it refuses to film Jeanne in close-up, or show

her point of view. Instead, we see her in medium close-up, in an open frame,

and are never allowed her point of view. Another element the film critiques

and subverts is the films use of excess. However the excess of time in


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Jeanne Dielman does not correspond directly to the melodramas excess of

pathos and action, or even melos, it is cosequently a fundamentally different

use of the pattern of excess than found in the conventional family

melodrama. This gap as well as others, between the melodrama and Jeanne

Dielman as an avant-garde film, opens up for a critical discourse of themelodrama, and it is especially the ending of the film that have sparked

fruitful discussions of the film in film theory.

Feminist and political critique

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith in his article Minnelli and Melodrama defines themelodrama as a fundamentally bourgeois formmade for and by the

bourgeoisiecreating a sphere where no social power exists and where

characters can really only occupy the middle ground (71). Jeanne Dielman

both incorporates and foregrounds this class construct and its relationship

with the melodrama as a generic pastiche. The claustrophobic framework of

class and genre conventions that belong to the realm of melodrama becomes

accentuated in the films denouement, and questions whether a happy ending

is really possible according to the genre or mode. In the elongated ending of

the film, which starts with the protagonists mishaps and miscalculations and

further accelerates into a total disintegration of her routine and schedule, the

narrative slowly presses towards a resolution as Jeannes ineluctable

situation with a life consisting ofand dominated byquotidian objects

and strict routine has finally crowded in on her, becoming more and more

complicated and excessive. Ernst Bloch discusses the happy ending in

relation to capitalist and socialist societies in his book The Principle of

Hope, and writes:

The consciousness reaches the other side in a mediated way, enters into the

struggle for the happy end, which already senses itself, almost announces

itself in the dissatisfaction with what is available. The discontented person

then sees all at once how bad capitalist conditions are and how urgently the

socialist beginnings need him (444).


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Here, Blochs writings can be transferred to Jeanne Dielman who signifies

the discontented person, dissatisfied with what is available for her within

the capitalist-bourgeois sphere she inhabits, and therefore already

envisioning a happy ending for herselfeven if it might be in despite of

herself. In addition, the feminist text of the film adds another dimension to

the dissatisfaction of Jeanne Dielman, underlining her repressed situation, as

she is probably forced into prostitution to make money in a society that

defines her role within the domestic sphere where her capitalist

responsibility is to consume goods, but not participate in the profit-making

side of capitalism. Instead, as a widow with modest means whose first

obligation is to take care of her son and run a representative household, not

being able access the male-dominated job market freely, has had to find

alternative ways of earning money: hence prostitution. Jayne Loader

describes her as such: [Jeanne] is presented as an automaton, geared for

maximum efficiency and functioning perfectly, a victim of both the domestic

science movement and the petit-bourgeois Belgian culture that produced

her (330).

In the essay Classical Hollywood film and melodrama E. Ann Kaplanwrites: for feminists, melodramas open up space prohibited by the so-called

classical realist film text, which is restricted to oppressive patriarchal norms

(278). Here then, it becomes interesting to consider how various feminist

critics have interpreted the ending of the film differently, and how they

evaluate to what degree Jeanne Dielman opens up space. Feminist critics

Jayne Loader and Claire Johnston represent two opposite poles in their

evaluation and interpretation of the film with its ending. Johnston

approaches Jeanne Dielman from a semantic and psychoanalytic point ofview in her essay Towards a Feminist Film Practice: Some Theses, which

builds on Laura Mulveys essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,

and asserts that the film signifies a repressed sexuality with the main

character, which in the ending erupts like a parapraxis in the moment of

jouissance. For Johnston, the murder of the male client functions as an


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annulment of this pleasure and takes place to restore the symbolic

(patriarchal) order (326), and she further evaluates that this ending has

positive connotations for feminism, as it has succeeded in underlining the

artificiality of the patriarchal language and the Symbolic Order (326).

In contrast to Johnston, who summa summarum evaluated the film and its

ending as a successful critique of the dominant patriarchal cinematic

language, Loader in her essay Jeanne Dielman: Death in Installments

reads the same ending as a capitulation to the same patriarchal language, by

turning to violence in the films ending. As Loader points out, both Jeanne

and Sylvain are victims in this film, but as Jeanne willingly accepts her

victimized position she is consequently responsible for the victimization ofher son, through conserving the traditional patriarchal values (333).

Therefore, the murder cannot be a total act of liberation for the character,

because it does not express a rebellion towards patriarchy per se. Instead, for

Loader, the murder symbolizes the monstrosity of Jeanne, as she is willing to

go to extremes to have autonomy in the only sphere possible: the home

(334).

A third reading of the films ending, then, is done by Ivone Margulies in her

book Nothing Happens. Margulies is fundamentally skeptical towards

psychoanalytic readings of the film, as it for her seems dangerous to assume

that the unconscious of the character can be made cinematically visible,

and further warns against reducing the film to its climactic murder scene

(95). Instead, Margulies reads the murder as a narrative necessity, as the film

is using a narrative clich which demands a resolution (98). However, for

Margulies it is impossible to argue either for or against whether Jeanne acts

through a monotonous, routine, nonintelligent movement automatically

or instead of her own will autonomously (99). Important to remember

then, is Linda Williams explanation that the female hero [in melodrama]

often accepts a fate that the audience at least partially questions (Williams

in Margulies, 1996, 85).


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Perhaps these various interpretations of the ending will always co-exist, in

addition to possible other readings. In this sense, characterizing the ending

as either happy or unhappy is difficult, if not impossible, as the film

oscillates between the two, and therefore occupies the same middle ground

where Nowell-Smith places the characters of the melodrama, with the lack

of social power to go beyond its determined framework, even if the dream of

achieving a happy end, as Bloch suggests, will always be present. Therefore,

according to the genre conventions of the melodrama, the protagonist exists

within an overdetermined situation, fenced in by the social, political, and

economical framework of the (petite) bourgeoisie, that forces the protagonist

to realize what is on the other side of the fence: the happy endingand

pushes the protagonist into a struggle for itwhile at the same time

disallowing the protagonist to fully achieve this happy ending, but instead

allowing for an unhappy happy endingthe middle ground between the two

alternatives.

Cinema/Ideology/Criticism

Having highlighted the different levels of aesthetic and political critique at

work in Jeanne Dielman, it becomes interesting to consider the film in

relation to the heavily influential essay by Narboni and Comolli from 1969,

contemporary with the film itself. For Comolli and Narboni, all cinema was

inherently ideological, or an expression of the dominant ideology. The

question was only to what extent the film was aware of this fact itself, and

how it approached the ideological system it functioned within. According tothis idea, the authors developed a system of categories and arranged films

according to their (critical) approach to the dominant ideology.

As Jeanne Dielman operates with an ideological critique on (at least) two


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levelsboth politically and aestheticallyor on the level of the signified

and signifier, as Comolli and Narboni writes, the category (b) seems to

summarize neatly the potential of critique inherent in Jeanne Dielman.

According to Comolli and Narboni, for a film to belong to this category, the

film must engage in a double action, attacking the ideological assimilation ofthe film on two fronts, namely on the level of both the signifier and

signified. The latter here means dealing directly with a political subject

(816), which Jeanne Dielman quite frankly does through tackling both a

feminist and (bourgeois) political subject-matter. On the level of the

signifier, it is an attack of the dominant form, which is implied, and which

we also have seen that Jeanne Dielman does, through its pastiching and

appropriating the melodrama, while at the same time critiquing this genre or

mode from within.

And so, via this iconographic and iconological analysis which has

investigated the Hollywood family melodramas vernacular and framework

and its liaison with the avant-garde film Jeanne Dielman, I hope to have

illustrated how the film ultimately succeeds in analytically critiquing the

melodrama genre or modefrom both the outside and insideby

employing certain tropes and structural codes of the melodrama, while at the

same time subverting and negating several of these same elements. Reading

the film as a simulacral and generic pastiche of the melodrama, the

relationship between the melodrama and Jeanne Dielman allows for an

understanding of how the film can be defined as a copy with no original.

Finally, by pastiching and appropriating elements from the melodrama, the

film opens up an arena for several layers of critique, both on an aesthetical

level, as well as on a political level in relation to the films ambiguous

ending, which ultimately illustrates how the film corresponds to the category

(b) of Comolli and Narbonis ideological classification system.

Bibliography:

Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,


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1995.

Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale

University

Press, 1995.

Comolli, Jean Louis, and Jean Narboni. "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism."

Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Sixth ed.

vols. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969/1989.

Dyer, Richard. Pastiche: Knowing Imitation. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Elsaesser, Thomas. "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family

Melodrama." Home Is Where the Heart Is. Ed. Christine Gledhill. vols.

London: British Film Institute, 1987.

Fowler, Cathy. "Chantal Akerman." The Oxford Guide to Film Studies.

Eds. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1998.

Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Art and Culture. Critical

Essays.

Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.

Johnston, Claire. "Towards a Feminist Film Practice: Some These."

Movies and Methods. An Anthology. Ed. Bill Nichols. Vol. 2. Berkeley and

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.

Kaplan, E. Ann. "Classical Hollywood Film and Melodrama." The Oxford

Guide to

Film Studies. Eds. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1998.

Krauss, Rosalind. Cindy Sherman 1975 1993. New York: Rizzoli

International


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Publications, 1993.

Loader, Jayne. "Jeanne Dielman: Death in Installments." Movies and

Methods.

An Anthology. Ed. Bill Nichols. Vol. 2. Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1985.

Margulies, Ivone. Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist

Everyday.

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996.

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. "Minnelli and Melodrama." Home Is Where the

Heart Is.

Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: British Film Institute, 1987.

Pravadeli, Veronica. Performance, Rewriting, Identity. Chantal Akerman's

Postmodern Cinema. Torino: Otto Editore, 2000.

Smith, Murray. "Modernism and the Avant-Gardes." The Oxford Guide to

Film

Studies. Eds. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998.

Documents

Jeanne Dielman