It’s a film some people say is like watching paint dry, others say it will change your life.
This month 1600 film critics and academics voted Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels the greatest film of all time, knocking Vertigo from the top slot.
The 1975 film by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman is a three hour, 21-minute-long film following the daily routine of a widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner, and turning the occasional trick.
Otago University film and media professor Catherine Fowler has been studying the film for 30 years and tells Kim Kill she’s over the moon the film was recognised.
The Sight and Sound poll, which only takes place every ten years, creates a kind of canon for the decade to come, Fowler says.
“Previously, so we’re talking the past 50 years, the canon had been very stable, it had not moved.”
Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Tokyo Story and 2001 A Space Odessey have always shuffled around in the top spot.
“Our view of cinema is changed when we sit through [Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels],” Fowler says.
The film is not only legend but sitting and watching it in totality makes you feel like you’ve lived through something, she says.
“Unlike films like Citizen Kane or Vertigo, it doesn’t try and please us in the usual way.
“Jeanne is placed in the centre of the frame, and we don’t get any of the help that we would normally get with any of these other classic films, so if you think about the way that in Hitchcock he points things out for us, we get close ups, we know what’s significant.
“In Orson Welles we get these distorted camera angles that express things about Citizen Kane, in Jeanne Dielman, the only expressive element is Jeanne herself, so we have to pay attention to her if we’re going to stay engaged with the film and if we’re going to get any meaning out of the film.”
Prof Catherine Fowler Photo: supplied
It is a film that changed the act of viewing, and turned it into an ethical act, Fowler says.
Chantal Akerman made over 40 films in her life, she says, but Jeanne Dielman became “a bit of an albatross around her neck” and was typecast as a feminist.
“This meant she couldn’t get funding by the wide variety of films that she wanted to make.”
The film has quite a violent ending, which Fowler says tells us that Akerman’s “attack on the role of women” in the 1970s operates on a symbolic level as well as an ideological and economic one.
“We shouldn’t forget that in 1975 itself actually, outside of Jeanne’s window even, women were marching for wages for housework, so the home was a hotbed for political movements.
“The fact that this is not just about the housewife, but it inserts the housewife in a more symbolic frame, which is about female sexuality as well, adds even more to the film.”
