Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman tells of the collapse of a bourgeois Belgian woman across three days: a woman who runs her household, raises a son and receives men for money in her own home. The film's title is her address. The camera looks from a fixed position and lets the housework last as long as housework really lasts; the film runs close to three and a half hours and Delphine Seyrig is in the lead. Akerman was twenty-five when she made it. Among her influences she counts Godard's Pierrot le Fou and the forty-five-minute zoom of Michael Snow's Wavelength. In the poll Sight and Sound ran in 2022, Jeanne Dielman went to the top of the list.