JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES
Director: Chantal Akerman Run Time: 202 min. Release Year: 1976 Language: French
Starring: Delphine Seyrig, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jan Decorte, Yves Bical
A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow—whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.