The greatest film of all time: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

[Celerity]

For the first time in 70 years the Sight and Sound poll has been topped by a film directed by a woman – and one that takes a consciously, radically feminist approach to cinema. Things will never be the same.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/greatest-film-all-time-jeanne-dielman-23-quai-du-commerce-1080-bruxelles



1 December 2022

Such a sudden shake-up at the top of Sight and Sound’s ten-yearly poll! Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) heads the 2022 list. No other film made by a woman has ever even reached the top ten. In the first instance, this is unsurprising: women film directors have always, obviously, been few and far between; equally obviously, the contributing critics have been predominantly male. It was when Sight and Sound expanded the critics’ pool in 2012 that Jeanne Dielman first entered the list, at number 35; its rise to the top now is a triumph for women’s cinema.

But perhaps the ultimate surprise goes even further: the film that collected the most votes in 2022 is made with a cinematic style and strategy closer to avant-garde than mainstream traditions and, furthermore, at just under three and a half hours, demands dedicated viewing. Although confrontational, idiosyncratic and extraordinary films have consistently appeared lower in the lists, the experimental tradition, to which Jeanne Dielman belongs, is – apart perhaps from the recent appearance of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) – absent. While it has brought this tradition to the top of the list, Jeanne Dielman is inescapably a woman’s film, consciously feminist in its turn to the avant garde. On the side of content, the film charts the breakdown of a bourgeois Belgian housewife, mother and part-time prostitute over the course of three days; on the side of form, it rigorously records her domestic routine in extended time and from a fixed camera position. In a film that, agonisingly, depicts women’s oppression, Akerman transforms cinema, itself so often an instrument of women’s oppression, into a liberating force.

All of us who have followed the Sight and Sound polls over the years – always a fascinating, if slow-moving, weathercock of cinematic taste – are now, no doubt, speculating about what this sudden change might signify. I have found myself wondering over the last few days, confronted with this turn-up for the poll’s history, how Jeanne Dielman might possibly sit alongside its three companion films. As we all know, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) dominated the list for 40 years, from 1962 to 2002, bracketed at one end, in 2012, by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and, at the other, in the first poll in 1952, by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948).

Vertigo had been gradually closing in on Citizen Kane for decades; Jeanne Dielman has appeared from nowhere. Does the new arrival throw some (speculative) light on the top-of-the-poll films? Clearly, Jeanne Dielman and Bicycle Thieves are both ‘movement’ films. The influence of the women’s movement was crucial for Akerman; De Sica’s films of the late 1940s are exemplary of neorealism, pioneering the use of non-professional actors and location shooting, and committed to depicting the social problems of post-World War II Italy.

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Chantal Akerman ... Credit: Marion Kalter