CHANTAL AKERMAN: The Frommerian feminine pseudo-ego and moral confinement.
“Every jump is supported again /But somewhere is possible / a jump like a fire, / a jump that consumes space / where it should end. /I’ve reached my ultimate insecurities. / Here begins the territory / where it is possible to burn all ends / and create one’s own abyss, / to disappear inwards.”
Roberto Juarroz
A particularly significant image exposed by Fromm in The Fear of Freedom is the fundamental relationship between man and freedom offered in the biblical myth of man’s expulsion from Paradise. The myth identifies the beginning of human history with an act of choice, but singularly stresses the sinful character of that first free act and the suffering it causes. “Man and woman live in the Edenic Garden in complete harmony with each other and with nature. There is peace and there is no need to work; nor that of choosing between alternatives; there is no freedom, nor is there thought. Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: but he works against the divine order, breaks and exceeds the state of harmony with nature of which he is a part without transcending it. From the point of view of the Church, that represents authority, this act fundamentally constitutes a sin. But from man’s point of view it is the beginning of human freedom. To act against the orders of God means to free oneself from coercion, to emerge from the unconscious existence of prehuman life to rise to the human level. Acting against the commandment of authority, committing a sin, is, in its positive human aspect, the first act of freedom, that is, the first human act. The act of disobedience, as an act of freedom, is the beginning of reason.
Chantal Akerman has plagued her cinematographic pieces with a discomfort that is commonly found in functional places, her characters seem to fight against the repression of their instincts and the automatic conformity of life as the main container and confinement space, always emphasizing one of two extremes: the discrepancy between our “individual self” and the world or the complete and tragic symbiosis and subsequent disappearance of the individual in that exercise. In her works, she has chosen cinematographically and vitally a deep feeling of loneliness and anguish that entails the exercise of freedom and “freedom from” without often making the outcome of “freedom for” clear. In his filmed works, there is something terrifying that always hides, there is always a setback, a back of things and a constant suspicion of routine, security and approval that we find in social and private relationships, ultimately any form of distraction that we find outside, an outside that has been shouted so loud that it has gone unnoticed as an inside.
Saute Ma Ville, one of the first short films directed by Chantal Akerman, makes us witness a suffocating domestic routine of a woman. In erratic gestures she induces herself in a chain of activities, all of them in an apparent domestic confinement, none with an explicit or express meaning. When performing them, her body seems to be alienated in physical and psychic mechanics that are portrayed with powerful precision.
The whole corporal monologue that Akerman as the main actress raises a possible connection between repression and the existence of what Erich Fromm called pseudo-acts and the operation of elimination of certain parts of the real self that have been silenced or mutilated. Saute Ma Ville makes use of a single female character, temporarily making invisible any kind of external force that inaugurates the female-domestic ideal. The woman witnesses her own theater which she eventually comes out of as if it were a spell on her. Her body and her will are disconnected from her thought and emotion and her body adopts an erratic and mechanical path. The woman in the kitchen proposes a deformed sense of duty, but bearing in mind that the pressure in the form of duty has been strong enough to drown out the feeling that she does it because she is obliged to do so, creating in the woman a pattern of pseudo-will, something that socially must want.
Conceiving the female body in Chantal Akerman’s films as an extension of the social body justifies the physical density that we see on the bodies that she creates and that therefore reveals any structure that weighs on it; this weight deforms and transfigures external expectations until they take on the appearance of one’s desires. Towards the end of the story of this domestic and mainly female short film, the woman experiences a feeling of terror and a drive for self-destruction in a lapse of self-awareness that she can no longer remain with: she takes a bouquet of flowers in her hands and blows up her kitchen with her in it.
The precise alternation between housework and sex work in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1090 Bruxelles (1975), one of her best-known feature films that narrates the suffocating routine of a housewife who diligently and subserviently responds to the care of her teenage son and during the day she works as a sex worker to keep the financial situation of her household afloat, again brings up the pseudo-self and their respective pseudo-acts. The content of the will, thoughts, emotions originate from outside and are given in such a vast way that the impression arises that those pseudo-acts constitute the rule and that they can be perfectly logical and rational; Maternal duty and “Freedom” as disfigured instruments eliminate parts of her individual self in the protagonist and force to place the pseudo-feeling of duty and care in substitution of others that have been repressed. “The pseudo-ego, on the other hand, is just an agent who, in reality, represents the function that the person is expected to fulfill, but who behaves as if he were the true self.” Rommer expresses in The Fear of Freedom.
Jeanne plays various roles of care and satisfaction of needs: (domestic and sexual) and is subjectively convinced that she is herself in each of them. But in all of them she is no more than what she is expected to be; Erich Rohmer explains that in dreams, fantasies or breaks the true self emerges “Sometimes it is about bad thoughts or emotions that were repressed because the individual experienced fear or shame.” Which would largely explain the destructive drive at the end of the film when she cold-bloodedly murders the man in her bed, very much in line with the domestic explosion she carries out in Saute Ma Ville.
Much of the time, however, Jeanne is in the strictest of conformity, graciously receiving coat, hat and scarf not only from her useless teenage son but from the men who come into the house to satisfy their sexual desires. The static and long-lasting shots that do not intend to hide the emptiness or the silence accompany her in her automatic and dictated journey, we see her get up robotically, make the same breakfast every day, prepare her son’s shoes, ask the same questions every day. day after day, walk the same path in his labyrinthine house. All these gestures of servitude and subjection are external gestures that she has made her own. The hyperactivity and compulsiveness of both domestic and sexual action, where she has the illusion of having everything under control and that they do not have any peculiar taste for her, are only of an instrumental nature. The vase that hides the money that sustains the home stands there as a symbol of abundance and provision for her in her dining room, the result of this sexual instrumentalization.
In both cases, the evasion mechanism is constituted by the complete adoption that is imposed from the cultural, social, and family guidelines. The gap between the Self and the world disappears. He compares this mechanism with animal mimicry: they merge with the environment that makes it hard to define them. The best word to define them is automaton. He does not live in anguish, but he has lost his personality. Jeanne unfolds and collects her domestic life with a simple folding bed in which her son sleeps. She wears a checkered uniform for her housework, like any diligent employee, and wears a different one, for her work hours as a prostitute. Of both tasks, she slave. The unconscious expression of that internalized and rooted slavery in her own creates in her a compulsive tendency towards action and the disposition to make her life a simple instrument on the one hand of domination and adoration. This type of pseudo-thinking can be found in aesthetic appreciation, opinion regarding politics, religious beliefs or daily life. The point is not whether they are wrong or not, but the originality of the individual’s thought: to what extent they think and to what extent the thought is the property of an invisible authority.
Chantal Akerman uses body weight to reveal that no action there is spontaneous, not even humming music, a terribly unconscious gesture. Jeanne’s individual self makes an appearance towards the end of the film when the character begins to fail in her routines, we begin to notice the cracks in the system that she has built. Even so, the impossibility of verbalizing it is infinite, it is only the man and the master who notices the flaws in his employee’s boss: “Mom, your button”, “Mom, aren’t you going to turn on the radio?”
Jeanne finally ends up committing the tragic sinful act, which expels her from her personal paradise: the routine and the benefit of not having to choose between two paths. In that masochistic and, to a large extent, sadistic paradise where he not only puts himself at the service and integrates until he disappears with the other, but also enjoys the limited control and authoritarianism that this offers him, where thought is not possible and at the same time freedom is not possible, she decides to exercise her freedom and overcome the state of coercion, she sits in silence and stripped of her uniforms, she rests in horror and destruction.