Two prints of Munch’s Madonna, variously tinted, hung sidebyside in square frames of blond wood.

The creamcoloured shade of a standing lamp overlapped the bottom lefthand corner of one.  The Madonnas hung in the corner of the room, perpendicular to the bookcase.  The room had been furnished in dark wood.  An armchair upholstered in a fabric with a foliate pattern stood under the leftmost Madonna, beside the standing lamp, angled away from the door.  The door stood open, framing the two Madonnas, the armchair, taking the morning light from a source beyond the jamb, the standing lamp, a radio, vase, and a framed photograph of a man.  The room appeared to be an office or study.

The room stood empty.

***

A shadow rippled over the jamb.

The standing lamp was on, casting two blank patches of light on the wall. The lefthand Madonna, in the waist of shadow described by the sections’ eccentricity, was tenebrously illumined, while the righthand Madonna, between the flaring curves’ divergence, lay in mottled darkness.

The shadow retraversed the jamb without crossing the open door.

The room stood empty.  But the warm light and mellow shadows allowed for the subtle play of reflected movement to ripple over the glossy panels of the open door.

In another room, a light flicked off.

— Dean Kyte, “Two Madonnas”

Flânerie is an altered state, and as such, like all means and strategies we use for ‘getting out of ourselves’, from drunkenness to drugs, the strategy of seeking novelty in familiarity which is the psychogeographic praxis of flânerie may be filed under the head of the ultimate altered state:—poetry.

Going, with Pascalian ennui, out of his room for the millionth time, unable, in his boredom, to stay quietly in it, the flâneur seeks transcendent poetry in his (re-)encounter with the Joycean ‘reality of experience’—the banal prose of everyday life.

As a young writer learning my craft on the Gold Coast, still innocent of the beautiful French language to which I have subsequently consecrated my life and having only the barest concept of ‘flânerie’ as the thing that I was doing, the adventure of ‘going to the movies’, navigating by train, bus and foot the odyssey to distant cinemas to report on a film for one of the magazines I was then writing for, was the focusing object which directed the rudderless wandering of my dérives to and from the church of the cinema.

The religious experience is also a poetic altered state. So too is the revelation of light before us in the secular, platonic cave of the cinema.

From critiquing to doing, from the theoretic pleasure of receiving the revelation and then evangelizing about the experience for an audience of readers to the active æsthetic frisson of shooting footage on grainy video or Super 8, of recording location sound or cobbling together an imagined Foley after the fact, of mounting images and sounds beside each other and discovering new relations of significance refractory to human language, and finally, sometimes, as in the example above, writing the script after the film or video has been made, and finding, in the voice-over narration, another layer of meaning embedded invisibly in the visible;—this is, in rough summary, the altered state of embodied poetic praxis I call ‘flâneurial cinema’.

In the flâneurial video above, we have a study in stillness and subtle change:—two shots, taken more or less from the same setup, at different times of day and observing the interaction of light—natural and artificial—with a typical Melbourne interior—a California bungalow utterly characteristic of mid-twentieth-century domestic architecture in an inner-city suburb such as Brunswick, where this footage was shot.

It took me about eighteen months of staring at that peaceful domestic image in idle moments after I had made the video, entering and re-entering the two-dimensional ‘paradis artificiel’ I had created out of footage I had shot, sound I had recorded, other effects that my eye ‘heard’ in that paradisal stasis for me to ‘see’ with my inner ear the invisible text—the voice-over narration—embedded, buried in the banality of the visible—the reality in the actuality of that videographed experience.

Written in the style I call the nouvelle démeublée noire—the ‘unfurnished, dark short story’—the style I have been developing over a number of years, based on the French Nouveau Roman, to explore specifically fictional offshoots of the flâneurial prose poetry in The Spleen of Melbourne project, “Two Madonnas” is my modest hommage to a film I encountered far too late in my life for it to influence me as flâneurial filmmaker and videographer, but which I reverence as a writer, and which has deeply influenced how I approach words, not images.

In 2022, Sight and Sound, the house journal of the British Film Institute, conducted its eighth decennial poll of the world’s top film directors and critics to discover what these eminences thought were ‘The Greatest Films of All Time’.

In 1952, De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1947) got the guernsey. For fifty years, from 1962 to 2002, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) was unassailable—and uncontestable, even. Then, in 2012, after thirty years of steadily closing in on Kane, rising up the ranks of critical opinion, my personal favourite, Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the classic film of flânerie, claimed the top spot.

It had taken so many decades to dethrone Citizen Kane, for critical opinion, conservative and slow to change, to shift even slightly, that I think I was not alone in believing Vertigo would be safely returned in the 2022 poll as the Greatest Film of All Time.

But out of nowhere, a dark horse vaulted 34 places up the rankings from its entering position in 2012 to knock Vertigo off the top spot and Citizen Kane into third place—Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), directed by Chantal Akerman (1950-2015).

Despite my adoration of Vertigo, I was surprised—shocked, even—but not at all displeased by this result, for Jeanne Dielman (as this three-and-a-half-hour domestic epic is more frequently called) is the clearest example I can point to of a ‘flâneurial film’.

There are two currents in the cinematic tradition, the narrative and the experimental, and very early on—way back in the first decade of the twentieth century—the narrative current, which is a pseudo-literary, theatrical strand, not properly cinematic at all, foreclosed decisively on the experimental, which is intent upon investigating the native æsthetic properties of the cinematic apparatus itself.

As Laura Mulvey wrote in her appreciation of Jeanne Dielman for Sight and Sound:

Interest in gender in cinema and the objectification of women has gathered momentum, especially as awareness of the misogyny inherent in the industrial mode of production—what we call ‘Hollywood’—has become widespread. Perhaps as the oppression of women in the film industry has attracted attention, fuelled by the #MeToo hashtag, so has the oppression of women on the screen itself, in its fictions and inscribed into film language.

— Laura Mulvey, “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”, Sight and Sound, Vol. 33/01, Winter 2023, p. 88

The film’s dramatic elevation in esteem does speak to the political moment, post-#MeToo, and, coming from the theorist who has given the world beyond film studies the much-abused concept of the ‘male gaze’ inherent in the cinematic apparatus—with all the dubious ‘visual pleasures’ that the Hollywoodian exploitation of the feminine spectacle affords us in mainstream narrative cinema—this is a perspicacious insight into how cinematic form and content intersect and interact in an unusual and inseparable way in Jeanne Dielman.

Directed by a 25-year-old Belgian auteure and made with an almost all-female crew, Jeanne Dielman is both a political statement on and experiment in the material conditions of the art-form, and as a narrative emerges indirectly from the material conditions of the feminist experiment, as a productive consequence of the plastic properties of film form itself, I was not at all displeased to see Jeanne Dielman overtake my favourite film, because even more than Vertigo, Jeanne Dielman is the flâneurial film par excellence.

In one of the most cited articles on The Melbourne Flâneur , “Are there flâneur films?”, I stated unequivocally that it is in the character of the films themselves—that is, in their plastic form rather than in their ostensible narrative content—that the flâneurial resides.

Moreover, in advancing the theory behind my praxis, as an auteur who is seeking a new form of poetry embodied in the prose of quotidian life and inscribed through a new graphology of film, video, and audio, I have brought to your attention Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’—the ‘time-space’ of narrative.

In “Two Madonnas”—as in Jeanne Dielman—we have what might be termed the ‘domestic’ chronotope, a necessarily ‘feminine’ configuration of space and time that determines the kind of narrative that can emerge from the physical co-ordinates of a homely interior, whether it’s a suburban bungalow in Brunswick or a centre-ville apartment in Brussels, and the temporal co-ordinates of such a space in our day or in the mid-1970s.

The chronotope is the first formal constraint that limits the range of permissible content that may emerge in the sensemaking apparatus we call a ‘narrative’, that device which meaningfully interprets, for human beings, the configured co-ordinates of a particular space at a particular time in its history.

What I’m calling the ‘domestic chronotope’ is necessarily ‘feminine’ because it deals with the enclosed, sheltered space and with private life—spheres of peaceful retirement from the madding throng that are symbolically governed by the feminine.

The wide-open world of the street and public life, places and occasions of action, are necessarily masculine. These are the sites of flânerie and of the flâneur pur-sang, and as sites of action—visible, observable action—these are the kinetic sights that narrative cinema constructed on the Hollywood model prefers because they present visual pleasures as photographable and photogenic as the so often exploited (and exploitable) spectacle of the feminine.

I saw the films of Michael Snow and Jonas Mekas—they opened my mind to many things—the relationship between film and your body, time as the most important thing in film, time and energy. Seeing their films gave me courage to try something else, not just to make money. Before I went to New York, say in 1968, I thought Bergman and Fellini were the greatest film-makers. Not any more, because they are not dealing with time and space as the most important elements in film.

— Chantal Akerman, cited in Marsha Kinder, “Reflections on Jeanne Dielman”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 4, Summer 1977, p. 2

Could it be that the fourth dimension—not the length, breadth and depth of matter—is the essential subject and material of the cinematic medium?

And could it be that invisible time, as the essential subject and material of the art-form, has to be represented indirectly, as material space and spatial relations in order to make itself visible—registrable—on the plastic medium of film?

When we talk about ‘relations’, we begin to talk about another one of those concepts, like sheltered space and the private life, that is symbolically governed by the feminine principle.

The narrative cinema is one of visible kinesis. It’s a masculine cinema that appeals to our conscious, rational minds as linear cause and effect—the chatter of ‘discourse’, of superficial, ostensible ‘content’.

If ‘relations’ exist in this masculine cinema, then they are too often of the type which feminist film theoreticians decry—unequal, conflictual competitions for dominance: Duke Wayne and Monty Clift sending each other spectacularly flying with big, kinetic punches.

The narrative cinema has looked naïvely, instrumentally at material, representable objects in space, manipulating them as ‘actors’ and ‘props’ personifying fictitious ‘dramas’ while remaining, in its single-minded conscious concentration on the visible, the superficial spectacle, stubbornly blind to the invisible time that unconsciously governs these objects’ relations with each other as fluid patterns, subsisting, dissolving, reconstellating themselves continuously.

If the feminine governs these subtle temporal relations, then these physical ‘bodies’—a soup tureen containing cash, potatoes to be peeled, dishes to be washed, but also babies, people in stores, men ringing at the door, a son—exude their unique ‘energies’, their magnetisms of attraction or repulsion, into space.

Jeanne Dielman and the things of her environment are all in a subtle yet dynamic interaction with each other as an abstract pattern of relations, one that, through an experimental rather than narrative lens—which is to say, through a properly cinematic investigation of brute matter rather than through an exploitative operationalization of it for pseudo-literary, theatrical ends—cinema is capable of making visible to us in the medium’s initial form as actualité.

The actualité, the uninflected, static shot of undirected reality, is the basic building block of experimental cinema, and as primordial cinematic form, I propose it, in my own praxis, as the basic building block of a renascent, ‘flâneurial’ approach to filmmaking and videography.

The marvellous poetry of life—Joyce’s ‘reality of experience’—that is couched in the banal prose of the quotidian is made transcendentally manifest by the actualité, and yet it’s a form with which audiences, deranged by their identification with the conscious mind, all the melodramatic chatter of narrative ‘content’ they had absorbed from the stage and the nineteenth-century novel, had grown bored by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.

The flâneurial film reclaims boredom, reclaims ennui as that privileged Baudelairean condition of profound, fruitful creativity, by leveraging empty time and undramatic space.

Appropriating two terms from Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961), I have discovered from my own experience that there are two strategies by which one flâneurially chances upon marvellous novelty in the midst of banal familiarity: the rotation and the repetition.

The rotation is the singular altered state that takes us wholly out of the prison of Proustian habit, into a higher, broader consciousness of our unified relation with the cosmos and affording us the vision of a new life.

It is towards this fundamental breaking of the patterned cycle of stultifying habit that Jeanne Dielman is tending over the course of its three-and-a-half hours: Two novel events occur in rapid succession at the end of the film that break the pattern of established material relations decisively, and the final seven-minute scene is Jeanne confronted with the vision of her ‘New Life’—albeit she is gazing into the abyss of what I call ‘the Noir Place’.

Jeanne’s interior autonomy is complicated by a presence from outside, a hint of a parallel, perhaps film noir-ish universe: a blue neon light flashes continually into the sitting room, its penetrating beam hitting a glass-fronted case that stands directly behind the dining table. Almost invisibly, the flashing light unsettles the interior space, like a sign from the unconscious pointing to a site of repression.

— Mulvey (2023, p. 87)

The repetition, by contrast, is the conscious attempt to engineer a flâneurial rotation—to repeat the transcendentally novel experience, often with diminishing returns, for there tends to be a half-life on the transformative power of rotations.

The domestic space is a site of both rotation and repetition in Jeanne Dielman, and if the form of the film is tending ultimately toward a rotation that breaks Jeanne’s flâneurial pattern of regulated wandering decisively, it does so through a triple cycle of repetition, as we return, with her, to chronotopic sites of flânerie established in the first revolution of the quotidian cycle.

In repetition, familiarity preponderates over novelty: If we regain something of the initial rotatory force of our encounter with the reality of experience, that ‘something’ tends to be a subtle variation upon the first experience.

In Jeanne Dielman, the scopic pleasure of flâneurial repetition—Mulvey’s ‘visual pleasure’—tends to be more a pleasure for us than for Jeanne: The subtle variations in her (re)-encounters with the stultifying reality of her domestic experience in the second and third revolutions of the established cycle are like imperfect, degraded ‘impressions’ stamped on the plastic film form, and as our flâneurial regard wanders with leisure over frames which have ceased to scopically engage us as sites of novelty, the subtleties of these imperfect variations on the first, rotatory revolution gradually begin to acquire a freighted suspense driving towards a decisive shattering of the pattern.

Adding to the list of aspects that escape the reductions of the plot, a careful form of attention is demanded by Jeanne Dielman, since the film provides a kind of audiovisual detox from our usual privileged viewing position.  Our problems begin when we try to treat time and space as external to the ‘action’, when in fact they are protagonists with as much importance as Jeanne herself.  Akerman found her gaze in the cinema when she encountered Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and La Région centrale … (1971), and space has never operated as background in her films since then.  When we try to provide a plot for Jeanne Dielman we tend to focus on changes in Jeanne’s psychology, unable to convey the drama of sunlight, shadows, emptiness and fullness through which the film ‘takes place’.  Akerman deletes the full range of devices through which a film can be said to interpret the surface of the world and inflect it with levels of significance, leaving a flat unaffective style of filming.  Suddenly, actions take their full duration with no intervention.  There are no close-ups or zooms, no camera angles or camera movements, and our position in relation to Jeanne remains at a neutral distance.  Similarly, there are no point-of-view shots to show us what she is seeing, or to promote identification or indicate significant narrative information, to heighten emotional intensity or comment on the characters or situation.

— Catherine Fowler, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (2021, p. 11)

And when we speak of Jeanne Dielman, possibly the most opaque character in cinema, it is impossible to avoid talking about the equally opaque Delphine Seyrig as the performer of this flânerie, the flâneuse who guides our scopic dérive across the frame and through this abstract, architectonic, chronotopic sculpture Akerman has fashioned from the brute material of time.

There are two definitional dimensions to flânerie, the activity of walking and the passivity of idle being, and both are privileged in this feminist experiment that depreciates masculinist histoire.

To walk is to march; to march is to protest: the flâneur protests, in his idle wandering, the unbearable conditions of technological, capitalistic modernity, and Delphine Seyrig, who would be radicalized by her participation in Akerman’s feminist experiment, protests constantly and eloquently, through the clipped sounds of her brisk footsteps, against the technological, capitalistic model of Hollywoodian narrative cinema with its exploitative male gaze.

In retreating back to the housewife in the kitchen and insisting that we share time with her and pay attention to how she lives her life, Akerman exposes how the patriarchal system works, thereby insisting that we remember the lives of those who can’t just drop everything and walk in the streets. … [B]y reintroducing the personal, we can understand the retreat to the housewife not simply as a gesture against patriarchy, but also as giving space to Akerman’s aunts and mother as a particular generation of Jewish women who had survived the Holocaust and were untouched by feminism. 

— Fowler (2021, pp. 54-5)

Seyrig is, of course, one of the most seraphically ethereal beauties in the history of the art-form, and as far as her acting chops go, it might be fair to amend the claim of Henri Langlois that ‘il n’y a que Louise Brooks’ to say that, in cinema, there is only Brooks and Delphine Seyrig; no other actresses count.

It might also be fair to say that her performance in Jeanne Dielman is easily the equal—and possibly even superior—to Falconetti’s performance in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), for it is not a performance—an abbreviated simulation of action in the mode of narrative cinema—but an embodiment of every single action that Jeanne carries out, in the experimental mode of the actualité:—every dish she washes is actually being washed by the seraphic sphinx, Delphine Seyrig.

Dreyer famously tortured a performance out of Falconetti that has become definitional as the gold standard for female acting in the cinema, and Akerman similarly—though more subtly—tortures a performance out of the ‘grande dame’ Seyrig through domestic slavery, such that she transcends the definition of ‘performance’, embodying actions, carrying them through to their material ends as actualité.

I think it’s a very important film—a new step forward—not just for me, but for the history of film-making. I usually take an interest in the form or style of the films I act in; yet I realize that as an actress, I’ve been expressing things that are not my own, but others’. I feel a much greater involvement in this film. It’s not a coincidence that Chantal asked me to do it. … I can be my own size. It changes acting into action, what it was meant to be.

— Delphine Seyrig, as cited in Kinder (1977, p. 6)

I don’t invoke the comparisons to Brooks or Falconetti as the definitional silent screen actresses—and thus the definitional screen actresses tout court—frivolously: Catherine Fowler, in her monograph on Jeanne Dielman for the BFI Film Classics series, tells us that Seyrig frequently turned to actresses of the silent screen for inspiration in how to physically interpret her parts because, from their forced reliance purely on embodied action, without the advantage of Seyrig’s beautifully musical voice to aid them, she learnt ‘how gestures should always be carried out to their end point’.

Jeanne Dielman is essentially a silent film—which I also consider to be a fundamental criterion of a renascent flâneurial cinematic form—and Seyrig’s charming contralto and perfect French hardly aid her in interpreting Jeanne, who is as much pure body performing motion in space as the ‘labour-saving devices’ of domesticity whose operation enslaves her.

As Fowler (who devotes an entire chapter of her monograph to analyzing the omnipresent Seyrig’s performance) observes, the comédienne’s unusual interest in the plastic ‘form’ and material ‘style’ that the abstract temporal sculpture of a film takes is reflected in this almost ‘dancerly’ basis of the physical body completing a motion in space.

And as a physical structuring device for Seyrig’s psychological interpretation of her characters, I would argue that this ‘embodied’, almost choreographic style of acting is itself a fundamentally ‘feminine’ approach: The ‘brute matter’ of the beautiful female form is generative, through the embodiment of action, of the invisible psychology of actorly performance, as opposed to a more rational, masculine approach which starts from the ‘inside out’, reading interpretatively between the lines of superficial narrative content.

The physical structure of the female form in a chronotopic crystal lattice of space/time generates the type of fictional narrative that can potentially emerge from these actual structuring constraints.

Fowler, citing examples from Seyrig’s pre-Dielman filmography, convincingly shows how embodied feminine shapes—the fashionably gauche asymmetry of A’s poses in L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), Fabienne Tabbard’s seductive helicoid convolutions upon herself in Baisers volés (1968)—are as determinative of how Seyrig interprets the narrative text of a script as the physical form of the spatio-temporal chronotope is determinative of what kind of narrative can emerge from the embodied forms of an actual environment.

Surveying several of Seyrig’s most iconic performances of desirable characters lends insight into her method.  Turning back to Jeanne Dielman now, we should note how in those previous roles Seyrig’s gestures and movements responded to the spaces that surrounded her….  Seyrig brings this minute attention to the mise en scène that surrounds her to the character of Jeanne Dielman.  However, in order for Akerman’s vision of Jeanne as a non-seductive presence to succeed, Seyrig will have to find new shapes for her body, ones that continue to draw our attention ….

The close attention to gesture and to the movement of the body in space have the potential of taking us away from the narrative progression, to a world of movement, space and bodies. … [W]hen playing Jeanne, Seyrig firmly avoids creating … pleasurable and inviting shapes with her body; instead, her abiding posture is that of standing with her feet together. …

Most strikingly, while as ‘A’, Francesca, Fabienne and the Countess, Seyrig’s gestures were able to flow, extended by her costumes and graceful poses, as Jeanne, her movements—largely standing, walking, bending—are strictly regimented, and her gestures are designed with as much economy as possible.  This template is perfected on the first day, so that we notice its gradual derangement on days two and three.

— Fowler (2021, pp. 67-9)

In materially ‘doing the things’, in carrying out the actual actions of peeling potatoes and washing dishes, carrying these banal, quotidian gestures of domesticity through to their end point, Delphine Seyrig collaborates with Chantal Akerman as co-auteure of Jeanne Dielman to sculpt on film a visible record of invisible time.

The completely unforeseen elevation of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to the canonical, crowning position as ‘The Greatest Film of All Time’ until at least 2032 does not displease me as it has enraged so many others.

I think there’s something in the argument that Akerman’s death in 2015, so soon after the previous Sight and Sound poll, when her film first entered the rankings at No. 35, had something to do with Jeanne Dielman’s dramatic rise in critical opinion.

Remember that it took Hitchcock’s death in 1980 to provoke a widespread critical reappraisal of Vertigo in the 1982 poll, starting its slow climb up the rankings as a potential challenger to Citizen Kane.

Akerman’s death in 2015 as much as the #MeToo campaign in 2017 has certainly helped to put feminist issues and this quintessential feminist experiment in the material affordances of the cinematic art-form top of mind.

But those rusted-on partisans of narrative cinema, with its exploitative, consumptive male gaze and its juvenile fixation on ‘content’, unsophisticated thinkers who deride Jeanne Dielman’s current pre-eminence as another contemptible example of élitest wokery, are wrong in their obtuse, reactionary objections and fundamentally misunderstand what the film’s elevation means both politically and æsthetically.

I am not arguing for Jeanne Dielman as a feminist film; I am arguing for it as an experimental film, as a flâneurial film, as a fundamental æsthetic investigation of the material sensemaking affordances of the cinematic art-form, and thus film’s native capacity to produce rotation and repetition, to take us out of ourselves, out of the prison of our habits, to induce an altered state, a vision of a broader, higher, new life through the Joycean confrontation with ‘the reality of experience’—the transcendent, marvellous poetry of life that lies invisible but ever-present in the banal, quotidian prose of our visible material structures and circumstances.

In our deranged conscious identification with anthropocentric ‘stories’ in which mankind is the romantic, action-taking hero of the cosmos, we have been blind, as a species, for too long to the unconscious, feminine experience of the embodied structures of life that surround us daily.

In 1973 I worked on a script [« Elle vogue vers l’Amérique », the precursor to Jeanne Dielman] with a friend of mine, but it was too explanatory—it didn’t come from within myself. I got money to do it, but after awhile [sic] I realized it was not good. One night, the whole film came to me in one second. I suppose it came from my memories of all the women in my childhood, from my unconscious. I sat down and wrote it with no hesitation, no doubts. The same was true when I made the film. I did it like a bulldozer. You can feel it in the film. I knew exactly what to shoot and where to put the camera.

— Chantal Akerman, as cited in Kinder (1977, p. 3)

When I saw Delphine Seyrig checking her do on the cover of the Winter 2023 issue of Sight and Sound and knew we had a new winner, I felt another profound ‘oui’ from the cosmos that, as a writer, a filmmaker, a flâneur, I am on the right track in my literary, my cinematographic, my videographic, my audiographic experiments.

‘C’était presque écrit comme un Nouveau Roman : chaque geste, chaque, geste, chaque geste — [Jeanne Dielman] was almost written like a New Novel: every gesture, every motion, every action,’ Akerman told The Criterion Collection shortly before her death.

The Robbe-Grilletian re-investigation, from first principles, of the material structures of postmodern life that surround us daily which I have been undertaking in The Spleen of Melbourne project and its fictional offshoot, the nouvelles démeublées noires of The Melbourne Flâneur, is the way forward to ‘finding something new’—realizing the Baudelairean ambition ‘pour trouver du nouveau!’—a new common mythos in literature and film that can unite us all.

We discover the content that will mythically sustain our souls, as a globalized civilization, in the future by committing ourselves to a fundamental investigation, without pre-conception, of the actual forms of life that surround us now.

And, moreover, for the degraded and dead English language, utterly incapable of yielding further sense without massive renovation and renouvelation, the re-investigation of new sensemaking forms and structures, verbal and visual, that already exist in our actuality will come, as the diasporic Francophone Akerman demonstrates, not from the moribund Anglosphere, but by turning our eyes and ears to the structures of sense being made of brute reality in the French-speaking world.

To support me in my flâneurial investigations, I encourage you to purchase the soundtrack of “Two Madonnas” below.