Meditating Through my Self-Imposed Boredom: On Chantal Akerman’s Groundbreaking Feminist Work

"Boredom is the response of somebody who can neither bear nor arrange (or

perhaps just doesn’t want) to be relieved of themselves – either sensorially

or affectively – by an object at hand". - Vulgar Boredom, Richmond

My experience sitting through Chantal Akerman’s seminal work, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has me thinking about boredom in new ways. Just two weeks ago I accepted an invitation from a new friend to come out and see this feminist masterpiece, which unbeknownst to me at the time would lead to 3 hours of sitting with myself in boredom. While this new friend admirably lasted the full 3 hours, I couldn’t sit still without taking a few bathroom breaks. I remembered finally leaving the film with a peculiar and somewhat newfound sensation of both admiring the directors dedication to representing the monotony of French bourgeoisie housewife society, while at the same time feeling stupid that I hadn’t done sufficient research beforehand. The films affect brilliantly captured the slow psychological breakdown experienced by a woman trapped in a cyclical doom of washing dishes, preparing food and being a perpetual coat rack to the men in her life- all for 3 hours without pause!!!

One could describe this film as solely the "spaces, forces, and moments" that pass the time.

After my second bathroom break I decided to let the film do its thing, I gave in to Akerman and I let her have her way with me. I decided to trust the artist as I knew she was telling me something important and that it required a certain endured duration for the point to get sufficiently across. This had me thinking about the strand of boredom I was experiencing. On the one hand it mirrored Warhol’s “Kiss” with a kind of undesired voyeurism that we as an audience were itching to jump out from and yet, the last scene where the protagonist finally breaks her characters mold allows for a new kind of boredom, vulgar boredom. With the surprising final scene we get little closure as to how Jeannie self-reflects on her actions (given the fact that she had just stabbed a strange man in her bed). As for the final 7-9 minutes of the movie, we see her sitting still at her dining room table, unable to parse through her emotional coding though sensing a general tone of high intensity. I do wonder if woman like Jeannie would be better off having access to casual gaming as Bogost points to precisely what is significant about them: "casual games are bound up with feelings about work, many are explicitly aimed at the working woman, and they tap into a perceived shared longing for a better working life". Jeannie's boredom results from being a slave to household chores with little meaning and yet I'm not certain candycrush, diner dash or any other causal game for that matter would have done the trick for her, though

occupying the category of 'Female Complaint Genre'.