Well theheroine of “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” is a prostitute-wousewife, but she leads quite different life than Jeanne Dielman. She’s out and about shopping for most of the film — paying for her purchases with money she earns from hooking.
I haven’t yet seen “Jeanne” but look forward to watching it. Is neorealism “timid”? I’m not sure, when the idea was not to be sensational.
On another note I believe I just watched an interesting precursor to “Jeanne”. A Polish documentary short called “The 24 Hours of Jadwiga L.” (1967) directed by Krystyna Gryczelowska. It played at the Krakow Film Festival that year.
ThisLife
Here’s a paragraph below I took from the booklet that comes along with the Criterion release of Jeanne Dielman, and even though I’m sure some of the ideas expressed in this paragraph are well-founded, I was a little miffed by the mention of 2 or 3 Things, since it’s not even attempting to be a realist film and is anything but timid and conventional. It’s an essay film for crying out loud:
‘Made in 1975, when the artist was only twenty-five years old, the film upped the ante on neorealism’s mandate of “social attention.” Akerman’s real-time, matter-of-fact presentation of a woman’s everyday seemed to mock the timidity of the neorealist demand for “a ninety-minute film showing the life of a man to whom nothing happens.” In postwar film and video, banal kitchen scenes (in Umberto D., 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Semiotics of the Kitchen) are signs of an inclusive realism, a new politicized energy. Akerman’s “images between images,” those scenes neglected in conventional representation, gave this impulse a strong feminist accent. But more than a corrective to traditional cinema, Jeanne Dielman is a lesson in structural economy: the full visibility given to daily tasks exacts, as its cost, the more sensational scenes of Jeanne’s prostitution. These encounters last the time it takes to cook dinner.’
Thoughts?