The 50th anniversary of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels by Chantal Akerman is being celebrated with screenings by the British Film Institute. This film ranked first in the latest Sight & Sound magazine poll for the greatest films in cinema history. Remarkably, in the previous poll—or indeed in any similar poll worldwide—it had never been among the top ten films. Now, however, it has suddenly not only entered the list of selected films but claimed the top spot. This raises countless questions: how is it that a film, that appears to pale in comparison to the masterpieces of this art form—whether it’s Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Bergman’s Persona, Fellini’s 8½, or Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane—can be considered superior? Not only does it seem absurd to compare their artistic values, but such comparisons often feel like a joke. So how has Jeanne Dielman, based on ideological waves, reached this bizarre conclusion in the Sight & Sound poll?
Both the voters—myself included, as I participated without foreseeing the final results—and the organizers seem to have unwittingly succumbed to the current trend of elevating a female filmmaker. This effort ultimately led to a peculiar list of selections that reflects not so much “cinema” and its artistic merits, but rather a journalistic response to contemporary feminist trends and a deliberate push to highlight works by women or people of color. However, I believe it is self-evident that a film being made by a woman or a Black person is not, in itself, a “value.” A film is either good or bad, and it fundamentally should not matter whether its creator is male or female, white or Black. The current emphasis on such ideological evaluations in some global festivals and mainstream criticism—such as mandates for festivals to select 50% of their films from female directors—seems to aim at eradicating discrimination against women. However, it blatantly creates a reverse form of injustice, depriving deserving male filmmakers of recognition simply because they are not women. This prioritization of ideology over cinema is not only unappealing but potentially alarming.
The elevation of Jeanne Dielman seems more an act of homage to these transient ideologies than an acknowledgment of the film’s cinematic merits. I eagerly read Laura Mulvey’s extensive article on this film, featured in the same poll issue to analyse its merits. However, the multi-page essay—though written by an important critic—is nothing more than a detailed summary of the plot, interspersed with admiring remarks. There isn’t a single line of cinematic analysis to be found.
While books can be written about the complex world and cinematic language of Vertigo, Jeanne Dielman’s advocates resort to clichéd praise about its documentation of reality and the filmmaker’s neutral and observational camera. They fail to acknowledge the undeniable fact that the film is unbearably boring and tedious. One could easily discard half of it without affecting its function. In the first 35 minutes, a woman cooks in her home, performs her job as a sex worker, dotes on her son, and eventually leaves the house. For the next two and a half hours (until the final few minutes), essentially nothing else happens: the woman repeatedly turns lights on and off in the room and hallway, makes beds, cooks meals, brews coffee, checks her mailbox, and takes the elevator. Are we seriously not supposed to ask why all this repetition and wasted time is necessary? Of course, one could write that “the filmmaker masterfully observes and portrays the monotony of life and its cycles,” but what about brevity in cinema? Many great filmmakers in history have conveyed the tedium of life in a few simple shots lasting less than a minute. So why should we endure this endless depiction of schnitzel preparation? If these scenes were shortened (or removed entirely), what would the film lose? Whereas in Vertigo or even 8½—a modern, anti-narrative film—removing a single scene collapses the entire structure, in Jeanne Dielman, cutting or removing the first dishwashing scene (where the character is shown from behind) or the post office scene (where she fills out a form, again from behind) changes nothing. Nor does the overly long coffee-making scene. If anything, trimming these scenes would make the film more bearable.
In Béla Tarr’s seven-hour Sátántangó, despite the absence of conventional excitement, the film’s brilliance ensures the viewer remains captivated and engaged throughout its entire duration. Yet Jeanne Dielman’s 200 minutes are maddeningly frustrating due to their aimless repetition and unnecessarily long scenes. Compare it with Sohrab Shahid Saless’s Time of Maturity (Reifezeit), which shares the common theme of a sex worker and her child. Shahid Saless’s concise masterpiece in narrative and mise-en-scène is far superior to Akerman’s work. However, conformist critics neither feel the need to watch Shahid Saless’s film nor are given the opportunity to do so due to the constraints of the pre-defined system. As a result, Akerman’s film is hailed as the greatest in cinema history, while 90% of voters have likely never even heard of Shahid Saless.
The film is lauded for its stark realism, but it ironically suffers because of it: the realism is flawed because the characters are not real. They resemble machines performing predetermined actions and reciting scripted dialogue, only to disappear from the scene, lacking any life beyond the frame. A clear example is the son’s sudden bedtime question about how his father met his mother. Why hasn’t he asked this in all these years? The mother robotically recites lines as though reading from a script, and the scene ends.
One of the film’s potentially remarkable scenes could have occurred when the woman babysits her neighbour’s child. In this situation, the entry of a client and the child crying in the adjacent room during the act could have created an unforgettable moment, vividly depicting the woman’s conflict between her job and motherhood. Instead, the filmmaker bypasses this opportunity: when the doorbell rings, it’s not a client but the child’s mother, who mutters trivial comments about food. Instead, the filmmaker resorts to “potato suspense.” After sleeping with a client, the woman realizes her potatoes have burned, which leads to a series of nonsensical, lengthy scenes: she discovers she has no more potatoes, goes out to buy some (the camera lingers inexplicably as the shopkeeper goes into another room and sit there again and we don’t know why), and then returns home to peel and cook them. Later, when her son returns, we’re forced to wait again for the potatoes to cook. (The filmmaker repeats this purposeless suspense with a button at the end as well.)
Labelling Jeanne Dielman the greatest film in cinema history is so absurd to me that I believe even Chantal Akerman herself, if she were alive, would have considered it a joke. When we set aside ideological biases, this film—amidst countless masterpieces of cinema history, from Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba to Dreyer’s Ordet, from Mizoguchi’s magnificent works to the enigmatic brilliance of Welles’s The Trial (none of which are ‘trendy’)—is not the greatest, nor even among the top 100.
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