Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles  

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"Calling Jeanne Dielman (1975) the best film ever is the equivalent of calling "4′33″" (1952) best musical composition, Fountain (1917) best artwork and La Disparition (1969) best novel. Anticinema, antimusic, anti-art, anti-novels; each of them has its place but not at the top of 'best ever' lists."--Sholem Stein


"Elle tue le phallus. Pas forcément le phallus d’ailleurs. Ça aurait pu se produire aussi avec une femme. Mais elle tue le plaisir. Elle jouit une première fois. Elle pense que ça ne se reproduira pas. Et elle jouit une seconde fois. Cette jouissance défait l’ordre de son monde. Jusque-là, le plaisir tenait dans la reconduction quotidienne des mêmes rituels. Si on touche à ça, si quelque chose surgit en dehors de la ritualisation de son existence, alors elle devient folle."--" Jean-Marc Lalanne in 2007 in Les inrocks, English translation in Memorializing and Decolonizing Practices in the Francophone Caribbean and Other Spaces edited by Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette


"One version of the origin story for Jeanne Dielman has been told repeatedly by Akerman. It goes something like this: Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965) inspired Akerman to make films and Michael Snow's Wavelength liberated her gaze."--Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 (2021) by Catherine Fowler


"isochrony [...] Works such as Jeanne Dielman, by Chantal Ackerman, Wavelength by Michael Snow, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach by Straub and Huillet, and Sleep by Andy Warhol consist almost entirely of scenes which unfold with all the deliberateness and leisureliness of actual events."--New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Beyond (2005) by Robert Stam

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Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is a film by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. It tells the story of a housewife, her son and the clients she receives during afternoons for sex work, one of which she kills after what seems an involuntary orgasm.

Contents

Plot

At 201 minutes, Jeanne Dielman examines a single mother's regimented schedule of cooking, cleaning and mothering over three days.

The mother, Jeanne Dielman (whose name is only derived from the title), also prostitutes herself to a male client daily (Henri Storck (first customer), Jacques Doniol - Valcroze (second customer), Yves Bical (third customer)) for her and her son's subsistence.

Like her other activities Jeanne's prostitution is rote and uneventful. The picture's third day witnesses Jeanne's routine benignly unravel with events like dropping a newly washed spoon and appearing at businesses before opening.

These alterations to Jeanne's existence climax when following coitus with the third client during which she orgasms Jeanne stabs the male customer in the neck with scissors.

Its plot is analyzed thoroughly in Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (2019) by Laura Mulvey.

Reception

In December 2022, it was ranked the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine's "Top 100 Greatest Films" list, becoming the fourth film to do so after Bicycle Thieves, Citizen Kane, and Vertigo.

Upon its release, the New York Times called Jeanne Dielman the "first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema." Chantal Akerman scholar Ivone Margulies asserts the picture is a filmic paradigm for uniting "feminism and anti-illusionism." The film was named the 19th greatest film of the 20th Century by the Village Voice.

Jeanne Dielman's static framing, extended duration takes and lack of reversal shots force the viewer to objectively experience its protagonist and her social role's oppression. Through exposure to "images between the images" Akerman forges new content that, resultantly, requires new form. Though the filmmaker's static frame and extended duration shots stem from structural cinema, their unique application to women's domestic work position Jeanne Dielman outside dominant patriarchal film languages and into one specifically "feminist." The picture inverts normal filmic expectations by removing drama from emotional intensity and attaching it to extended duration takes - takes, that is, connotative of boredom. Jeanne Dielman's temporal dilation equalizes its exposition and drama to transform "knowledge of an object" - Jeanne's oppression - into a "vision" of it.

Cast

See also




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