What Is ‘Jeanne Dielman,’ Critics’ Pick For the Best Film Ever?

1600 movie critics had been polled for Sight & Sound’s once-a-decade listing of the best movies ever made, and when the votes had been counted an experimental Belgian movie titled Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — not Vertigo or Citizen Kane or Casablanca — was the best movie ever made.

Although lengthy celebrated by critics (clearly) together with students and teachers as a landmark feminist and avant-garde cinema, it’s simply the most obscure film to high the Sight & Sound listing in 70 years. Odds are, most informal readers who stumble throughout the Sight & Sound listing may have by no means seen it. Many have possible by no means even heard of it in any respect.

Jeanne Dielman was made in 1975 by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. The movie unfolds in a collection of lengthy takes — very lengthy, the movie clocks in at three hours and 20 minutes — and follows the title character (performed by Delphine Seyrig) as she goes about her each day routine of cooking and cleansing and, sure, prostitution.

Here is one typical scene, the place she prepares a meal step, by step, by step, by step.

Famed movie theorist Laura Mulvey had this to say Jeanne Dielman on Sight & Sound’s web site to commemorate its ascension to the high of the best movies ever ballot:

Jeanne Dielman is inescapably a lady’s movie, consciously feminist in its flip to the avant garde. On the aspect of content material, the movie charts the breakdown of a bourgeois Belgian housewife, mom and part-time prostitute over the course of three days; on the aspect of kind, it rigorously data her home routine in prolonged time and from a set digicam place. In a movie that, agonisingly, depicts ladies’s oppression, Akerman transforms cinema, itself so usually an instrument of ladies’s oppression, right into a liberating pressure.

Akerman, who was simply 25 when she made Jeanne Dielman, handed away in 2015. Here she is in an excerpt from a 2009 Criterion Collection interview the place she attributes her curiosity in making such an unorthodox movie to her upbringing in a world full of ladies and fading Jewish rituals:

If you’re involved in watching Jeanne Dielman, it’s obtainable on Criterion Blu-ray and DVD, and is presently streaming on The Criterion Channel. It can be obtainable to hire at many digital retailers, together with Amazon and Apple.