Awarded best film of all time by the magazine Sight and Sound last December, Jeanne Dielman comes out in theaters in a restored version this Wednesday.
Revealed on December 1, 2022 by the prestigious magazine Sight and Soundthe British equivalent of Cinema Notebooksthe traditional ranking of the 100 best films of all time has had the effect of a bomb. Citizen Kane by Orson Welles, unanimously considered for decades as the greatest film in the history of cinema, was dethroned by Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels.
Released in 1976, this Belgian film by Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) traces three days in the life of a woman, Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), a widowed mother who prostitutes herself to make ends meet. As minimalist as it is meticulously constructed, the film depicts her monotonous daily life punctuated by household chores, her dinners with her 17-year-old son and her clients. One day, the mess sets in…
Its release this Wednesday at the cinema in a restored version – planned for two years – will allow us to see this film again on the big screen to grasp all its modernity and all its importance. “All the filmmakers in vogue today, part of their heritage comes from Jeanne Dielman“, insists Loris Dru-Lumbroso, marketing manager of Capricci, the distribution company that stands out Jeanne Dielman.
“It’s a film that has been eminently precious for Agnès Varda, Gus Van Sant, Céline Sciamma, Alice Diop, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, Barry Jenkins… In the four corners of the world, it’s a film that has had its posterity, his legend, when he was not easy to see.”
“Perfection of the staging”
Through its cinematographic device, which consists in showing in almost real time certain innocuous everyday gestures, and its subject, a denunciation of the mental burden and the domestic alienation of women, Jeanne Dielman occupies a special place in the history of cinema. “For me, it’s the best film of all time,” smiles Céline Brouwez, head of Fondation Chantal Akerman. “He’s revolutionary, avant-garde. No one had talked about this subject before.”
Chantal Akerman was inspired by her mother. “I started from a few very precise images of my childhood: my mother whom I saw at the sink, my mother carrying packages”, she confided to Telerama in 1976. Surrounded by an essentially female team (an extremely rare occurrence at the time), Chantal Akerman redefines with Jeanne Dielman the subjects that a woman can seize in art.
“Chantal Akerman lays bare a certain violence of reality”, deciphers Corinne Maury, lecturer at the University of Toulouse-II, and author of a book on Jeanne Dielman. “Cinema is there to question what is happening in our lives. It is not there to display spectacle, it is there to invite us to watch what we do not want to watch: our daily life.”
Despite its seemingly off-putting pace and device, Jeanne Dielman is universal. It’s hard not to feel deep emotion watching this character condemned to tirelessly repeat his actions. “What touches me the most in the film is the idea of mixing the evocation of prostitution with that of her daily life, the fact that she mixes these two lives very mechanically”, confirms Louis Descombes, head of distribution at Capricci.
“What impresses me the most is the perfection of the staging, which is accompanied by the precision of the editing. Everything seems both perfectly natural and perfectly calculated”, enthuses Loris Dru-Lumbroso . “I feel a power in front of the film. It’s such a complete film, so monumental”, adds Céline Brouwez. A confidence that we find on the set of mask and feather, in 1976, when Chantal Akerman puts critics in their place. “She has a kind of quite amazing maturity,” agrees Corinne Maury.
Revalorization of female directors
Mainly confined to the kitchen, the bathroom and the living room of its heroine, the film provokes strong emotion as soon as it follows its heroine out of her apartment. “This is where the melancholy is strongest,” notes Loris Dru-Lumbroso. “She confronts other people. There is a very strong social barrier, all the time. Every time she goes somewhere, she has a hard time getting what she wants. There are these little moments of comfort, when she drinks a coffee alone.”
As the academic Alexandre Moussa notes on the site criticism, Jeanne Dielman also remains an important film, because it “offers a political cinema which does not impose models but produces thought, which continues to raise questions rather than giving answers”. “The strength of the film gives a greatness of reflection”, continues Corinne Maury. “When a film makes us think like this, it has life force.”
For this reason, Jeanne Dielman reconciles French and Anglo-Saxon film buffs. This is how in ten years, he went from 36th place in the ranking Sight and Sound to the first. In a decade, the ranking panel, which brings together more than 1,600 specialists in the 7th Art, has evolved a lot. The world, too. #MeToo has been there. The work of many invisible directors has been brought to light.
For some, this coronation would not be sincere, despite the obvious qualities of Jeanne Dielman. Paul Schrader, known for having written the screenplay for Taxi Driver, was indignant last December on Facebook, judging this choice as the “symbol of a woke and distorted revaluation” of the history of cinema. According to him, the choice to incense in this way Jeanne Dielmana film he also enjoys, throws “discredit” on Sight and Soundan institution of cinephilia since 1952.
“I don’t know if I did better…”
Richard Brody, critic of New Yorker, suggest the contrary that this coronation offers “a bolder vision of cinema”. In a context “where the majority of quality blockbusters are flopping and public interest in independent productions is waning”, Sight and Sound “challenges contemporary directors to make films without worrying about box office, trends, the taste of public opinion” to create works that will endure in the history of art.
When the best film of all time opposes the dominant forms of cinema, doesn’t it challenge the way we watch cinema? Like its heroine who gradually manages to escape her alienating daily life, the film calls for breaking out of the shackles. “It would be great to use it as a reference, so that it’s not always the same ones who are cited as references”, insists Céline Brouwez.
Chantal Akerman, who was only 25 when she left Jeanne Dielman, has lived her whole life wondering “how to do better”, she confided in 2009 in the DVD bonuses of her film. “And I don’t know if I’ve done better…” The public will soon be able to (re) get an idea: Capricci will soon be releasing his other films, which are “simpler gateways to access to his cinema”, notes Louis Descombes. “We are planning a two-part theatrical retrospective of Chantal Akerman’s films for 2024.”
