criterionforum.org

I am fascinated by this film and can't wait to see it next week even though I accidentally know the 'twist' at the end. Can someone translate the title for me into English?

thanks in advance.

Jeanne Dielman peels 23 potatoes in 1080p--oh wait, oops...

aox wrote:I am fascinated by this film and can't wait to see it next week even though I accidentally know the 'twist' at the end. Can someone translate the title for me into English?.

It's just an address -- in Brussels, Belgium.

aox wrote:I am fascinated by this film and can't wait to see it next week even though I accidentally know the 'twist' at the end. Can someone translate the title for me into English?

thanks in advance.

It's just her address, aox. Just think of it as "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce St.." etc etc
EDIT: Michael beat me to it.

Thanks. What a great, and what I presume, fitting title.

I had an awful film professor from the English department back in college who claimed there was no such thing as a 100% completely "feminist film". Perhaps an email is in order 9 years later?

aox wrote:I had an awful film professor from the English department back in college who claimed there was no such thing as a 100% completely "feminist film". Perhaps an email is in order 9 years later.

He was right! JD is much, much more...

foggy eyes wrote:

aox wrote:I had an awful film professor from the English department back in college who claimed there was no such thing as a 100% completely "feminist film". Perhaps an email is in order 9 years later.

He was right! JD is much, much more...

Minimalist?

I dig Swo17's translation of the title.

cdnchris wrote:DVD Review

Thanks for the review, Chris. It's too bad about the transfer, but my hopes are still up that they might be relatively minor, as you mention. I suppose that unlike, say, Carne's Children of Paradise, there's simply no way this movie would have stood being split between two discs...after all it's the length of the thing (and the continuous passage of time in the film) that is very much part of the movie. I guess I'd choose the minor transfer issues you mention to splitting the movie up.

kekid wrote:What are the thoughts of the forum members on why Criterion is choosing not to release major new DVD's simultaneously in the Blu Ray format? It appears to me that there is something more to their choices than the rights to release a particular film in the Blu ray format. I am particularly disappointed by their decisions not to release Salo and Jeanne Dielman in Blu Ray.

In the case of Jeanne Dielman, CC was not even working with an HD transfer. Why would they release it on Blu-ray? As opposed to say the last two JLG releases - THOSE should have had a Blu-ray release.

I'm still dumbfounded as to why The Human Condition is not being released on Blu-ray as well.

cdnchris wrote:

HerrSchreck wrote:Once again CC resorts to its practice of busting up good supplements like episodes of Cineastes Notre temps.

According to IMDB the original is 63-minutes. Here it is 17-minutes. But after researching on the "interwebs" (I've never seen the actual episode) the full version is primarily made up of clips from her films. While I don't know the reasoning for cutting the episodes down for other releases I would assume rights issues were a problem here.

That's almost certainly a factor - unless the producers of Cinéastes de notre temps cleared all the global retail rights upfront at the time of production (so extraordinarily unlikely as to be hardly worth considering), anyone licensing the material will have to check the provenance of every second of footage. And film clips are a particular pain, as you rarely get them for free and sometimes can't clear them at all.

I've had to go through this process myself, and it's eye-wateringly painful having to lose material for reasons entirely beyond your control (or budget) - especially because you know there'll be all kinds of mad conspiracy theories speculating as to why they were dropped.

[quote=""membrillo""]
I'm still dumbfounded as to why The Human Condition is not being released on Blu-ray as well.[/quote]The have to wait until six months after the Japanese release it in Blu. They Probably had no choice but to drop the blu option. Once the Japanese release it or the embargo goes away criterion will certainly look into a blu release. Why else do you think they haven't jumped on Seven Samurai, easily their biggest title.

As has been widely publicized throughout the forum, I recently set out to watch Jeanne Dielman with a fresh reveal of the final twist heavy on my mind. Last night I finally watched it. Here are my thoughts. (Given where this is coming from, I've used spoiler tags liberally, though these are mostly pretty safe--safer certainly than the essay in the Criterion booklet!)

Try as I might to forget that I knew the ending, the film unfortunately leaves you with p l e n t y of time to remind yourself of just that, while Jeanne is endlessly shining her shoes or massaging the meatloaf. However, from reading back through this topic, I can see that a lot of people have apparently come to the film with this same knowledge, and I wouldn't necessarily call it a bad thing. I suppose if I had known nothing going in, I might have wondered about an hour in what the hell this was all leading to, but with the end in view it all made perfect sense, and I feel I was able to appreciate the film in some respects on the level that someone watching it for the second time might. Besides, what's a spoiler anyway? Isn't it a spoiler

Spoiler

just to know that there is a twist at the end? Or that the film is 200 minutes long?

Shouldn't everyone go in to Jeanne Dielman thinking it's a 90-minute film about a race car driver on her day off?

I can see how there could be multiple readings of the film but the one that interests me the most is the idea of

Spoiler

conveying Jeanne's descent through subtle changes to her daily routine. This sets up the entire structure of the film really. We are going to show her crack at the very end, and we want to show her gradually losing it through the way she runs her errands, sits in a chair, burns the potatoes, washes the dishes, etc. In order to convey madness through these actions, we have to show them in painstaking detail. And naturally, in order to distinguish that something is clearly off here, we have to show how these same tasks usually play out, in the same painstaking detail.

Why, this 3 1/2 hour movie practically writes itself! But the effect works brilliantly, and I was left on the edge of my seat for several scenes that, taken out of context, would have been completely boring. Like when she was washing dishes, and put a sudsy dish on the rack, and you just knew there was going to be hell to pay.

An aside: The only thing that kind of threw me off in this respect was the potato peeling scene. It was a great scene, sure, but

Spoiler

I was seriously expecting this to be the centerpiece of the film, like 30 minutes straight of her just peeling potatoes. I mean, I've peeled potatoes before and I know it can take a while to do, especially when you've got a lot on your mind like Jeanne clearly did. I had totally prepared myself to have some long, orgasmic, potato-based epiphany, but it was all over in three minutes or so.

Anyway, moving on...

I suppose the one element of the film that didn't benefit from the knowledge of how it would all end was, well, the ending, which I still find completely necessary to the film in light of the discussion above, but which was drained of all suspense,

Spoiler

and over in a moment.

WEAK SPOILER FOR REYGADAS'S BATTLE IN HEAVEN FOLLOWS

Spoiler

I have to assume that an unspoiled viewing of Jeanne Dielman's ending would have left me with my jaw dropped in much the same way that my recent viewing of Reygadas's Battle in Heaven did, though unfortunately I'll never have the memory of the kick in the gut that that film provided, which upon reflection elevated my opinion of it considerably.

Even without this though, Jeanne Dielman is a sprawling masterpiece, and I look forward to future viewings where unsolicited spoilers will be far from my mind.

A word on the transfer though--while the film was certainly watchable, this was slightly below what I've come to expect from Criterion. Many of their SD titles look so good upscaled you could almost mistake them for Blu-ray from a safe distance, but the same sadly cannot be said for Jeanne Dielman. They may very well have done the best they could for a film this long on one disc, but given the possibilities of how good I'm sure this could have looked on Blu, it's a bit disconcerting that they didn't splurge for the Blu treatment. I really do hope they decide to upgrade this at some point. It certainly deserves it.

Well, since MoC is releasing this, we still can hold out hope for a Blu-ray (hopefully region A!).

james wrote:Well, since MoC is releasing this, we still can hold out hope for a Blu-ray (hopefully region A!).

I'd assume not, since all of these releases stem from the French / Belgian releases of a few years back and the chances of anybody retransferring a niche film of this length are remote. The Belgian disc looked good on my old CRT and I'm sure Criterion would have wrung every extra pixel out of what was provided.

Re. swo's first spoiler: exactly -

Spoiler

just knowing there's a spoiler is probably enough to figure out exactly what form it takes, which is one of the reasons I don't like the twist ending very much: it's the obvious twist and I don't think the previous several hours need to be justified by violent action.

Re. swo's second spoiler:

Spoiler

I find this aspect of the film much more compelling and disturbing than the climactic scene - you are actually watching this woman's breakdown in progress, noticing the signals even before she does. In fact, I find the shot before The Shot much more emotionally moving: her palpable distress and entrapment during the sexual act. Personally, a transition from this to that eerie final shot would have been much more effective for me than the reductive meaning the film currently has. Still a masterpiece, of course.

zedz wrote:Re. swo's second spoiler:

Spoiler

Personally, a transition from this to that eerie final shot would have been much more effective for me than the reductive meaning the film currently has. Still a masterpiece, of course.

Spoiler

Interesting idea. Like I said earlier, this was pretty much the only moment when I wasn't completely engaged with the film, which I had chalked up to having had the moment spoiled for me. But I love everything leading up to and following it, and it sort of bridges the gap between the two, so it seems like something of a necessary evil. I do like though the way Akerman described (I think) how this scene was shot with the exact same cold efficiency as, say, Jeanne dropping a fork earlier in the film.

In my mind if I excise the shock ending the following scene where she sits in the lounge doesn't really change in the gravity of its meaning - what is Jeanne going to do? Though with the reveal in there is the movie really feminist or does it really portray anything about the human character?

Certainly in an age where both men and women now can live a life similar to Jeanne's doesn't this film just paint women badly?

----

Michael wrote:

Spoiler

Does anyone have an issue with how unrealistically the murder is handled? The way she stabs the john and he dies just like that. Its fakeness threw me out of the film because the whole three hours before the murder was a very realistic portrait of a woman spending her days.

Spoiler

Yes, very disappointing in an otherwise very natural and realistic film. Spoiled the ending a bit. Incidentally, I knew there was a big finish but didn't know what it would be, but had guesssed by the end. Was just glad she stabbed him where she did and not somewhere more, er, feminist-oriented.

-

Does anyone have any theories as to where Jeanne and her son went out to every evening? Perhaps no theory required, and I just missed an obvious point, but it could have been joint-therapy or bowling for all I know.

I'd assumed they were going out for a (joyless) drink, but I hadn't thought that much about it.

I like the idea of joint therapy. (Well that worked a charm.) How about primal scream therapy? Jeanne et fils wrapped in blankets howling at each other for twenty minutes then going back to their flat in silence.

Is that a spoiler? I don't know with this film any more.

I guess it was somewhere that the son didn't like going much, as he asked her if they could skip it for a night. Now I want to watch again and see if her mood starts to change after the last outing. Those outdoor night scenes were none too clear.

Double spoiler warning here maybe?

Spoiler

When I watched this a year or so ago, I kept thinking back (just a little) to that first season of

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman

Spoiler

which had a similar slow unravelling...

I think they just went for a walk around the block to get exercise after dinner.