What If Jeanne Dielman Had Been a Smoker?
Published in MORLEY by Various Artists. A5, 44 pages, Single colour printing, Saddle stitched, Softcover, Ed. of 100, 2022.
Published y Two Queens, Leicester and edited by Renaro.


The Morley brand of fictional cigarettes have appeared in film and TV productions since the 1960s. With their distinctive, strangely familiar packaging, Morleys have latterly become a fans’ in-joke, a symbol of knowing deception, a fiction within fictions, an artwork within artworks. For this volume, writers, poets, artists and theorists responded to the Morley fiction, through works that consider the packet, the deep breath and the temporal break afforded by the disappearing ritual of cigarette smoking.

Featuring Timothy Thornton, Pavel Büchler, Fabiola Iza, Linda Kemp, Holly Stevenson, Daniel Sean Kelly, Richard Law, Charu Vallabhbhai

Published by Two Queens – Edited by Renaro




Rather than an action film, Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feature Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is, as suggested by critic Andy Cook, a film of actions. Throughout the movie, which runs slightly past three hours, the title character, a widowed middle-class mother, performs endless domestic chores from dawn until dusk. These actions, carried out in front of the camera, giving the impression of real-time, accrued to a meticulous choreography of gestures, one with which Delphine Seyrig, the actress portraying Jeanne, struggled. For example, how should one properly bread a veal cutlet? At what pace are shoes convincingly polished? What is the appropriate span for dusting the living room’s furniture?

‘It’s not so much the duration, it’s the sensation of time,’ affirmed Seyrig while discussing with Akerman how to carry out specific movements; these were absolutely alien to them both. Domesticity is therefore turned into an anthropological inquiry in the film, and previous generations of women are summoned through Jeanne’s careful and contained gestures; they are the bearers of an embodied transgenerational memory. But, in a world ordered under a patriarchal logic, in which women are forcefully bound to reproductive labour, the eternal repetition that defines her subjecthood proves to be crushing Jeanne. The rigid routine that guides each one of her days turns into exasperation, and her confined world becomes a source of despair (as artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles proclaimed, ‘Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time’) : this is hinted by small details like putting on her coat with the apron underneath, skipping a button when closing her robe, or her disheveled hair. Yet, in the few scenes in which Jeanne’s duties pause, her absent gaze signals a profound disturbance.

Following its premiere, the film was lauded as the first significant feminist cinematographic work, as it granted visibility –and dignity– to domestic labour, which is usually rendered invisible, both on the screen and in real life. However, Akerman deploys two seemingly contradictory temporalities in this work. First, the film challenges cinematic time –one condensed and full of omissions– by avoiding the use of ellipses, as they suppress what is apparently irrelevant to show: the protagonist actually performs the actions instead of simulating them. The static camera defies the acceleration that cinema, as a technology, brought about, and the way it compresses time to narrate heroic accounts (action films, for instance), which are usually reserved for the male gender, in a standardized duration. 

On the other hand, Jeanne Dielman…, with its domesticity inscribed in its title, also stages the temporality usually ascribed to female subjectivity, necessarily maternal, measured out by repetition and eternity. Julia Kristeva delves deep into it in her 1980 essay Women’s Time: ‘There are cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature and imposes a temporality whose stereotyping may shock, but whose regularity and unison with what is experienced as extrasubjective time, cosmic time’ has little to do with linear time (the temporality assigned to history).

Throughout most of the film, the character conducts actions using, primarily, her hands, yet they seem to give her little if any respite. This stands in sharp opposition to what Richard Sennet says of manual labour: there is a link between movement and thought, and the hand leads to the mind. Furthermore, recent feminist theories affirm that doing things with your hands, crafting something, leads to an intellectual engagement with such materials (as expressed by their motto ‘to craft is to care’), and Margaret Atwood’s famed handmaid expresses the urge to use her hands to ease the anxiety that torments her: she desires to knit or to smoke. Nevertheless, Jeanne Dielman does knit a sweater for her son, but she never smokes – she performs all those house chores to fill time and prevent herself from digging into her despair.

While smoking, on its part, renders no material outcome –nor is it considered doing anything–, it does accomplish a minor revolution in time: it opens a parenthesis in ordinary experience. ‘Like the novel reader,’ claims sociologist Helen Keane, ‘the lone smoker can remove herself, at least partially, from common social time, shielded behind a curtain of smoke as she indulges in a solitary pleasure.’ What if Jeanne Dielman had surrendered herself to the enjoyment of smoking? Could this have ruptured the cycle she is looped into? ‘By creating another time outside of ordinary duration, a time that is neither busy nor idle,’ continues Helen Keane, smoking ‘is like other technologies that are valued for their temporal alterity.’

On a more practical thread, sociologist Hilary Graham has studied how smoking has enabled young, white, and working-class British mothers to bring order into their otherwise chaotic working days. Could the temporal productivity that smoking cigarettes unfurls –the alluring repetition and the brevity of the act– become a feminist ally? Perhaps, and that is probably one of the reasons for which Chantal Akerman denied her character the temporal otherness enabled by smoking: it was dangerous enough for dragging her out of the eternal loop to which women are traditionally condemned.