Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) lives in a small apartment in Brussels. She is a middle-aged widow, mother, homemaker, and part-time prostitute whose existence is dominated by routine – the preparation of meals, the running of errands, visits from her clients, and evenings with her teenage son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) – until the cracks start to show.
In December, Chantal Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece was voted the Greatest Film of All Time by 1600+ film critics, academics and curators in Sight & Sound magazine’s prestigious once-a-decade poll. A singular blend of feminism, modernism, and the avant-garde whose hypnotic rhythms and rigorous attention to detail make for a riveting, unforgettable experience, Jeanne Dielman is a reminder that Hollywood’s mode of storytelling is only one among many. This is not a difficult film but it is different from what we are usually spoon-fed by the commercial mainstream. Akerman concentrates us on the daily routines that constitute Jeanne’s life, often shared in real time (though the movie compresses three days into three hours). Time becomes the film’s principal aesthetic and core experience. In this, it cemented and built on the work of Andy Warhol and transformed our understanding of what cinema can do.
Jeanne Dielman came in at #4 in Sight & Sound’s poll of film directors. In 2012, it came in at #35.
Sunday’s screening in our new PANTHEON series will feature free refreshments and a short introduction by Alla Gadassik, Associate Professor, Media History & Theory, Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Who wants to see an avant-garde feminist masterpiece, other than feminists and the avant-garde? You should. Chantal Akerman’s 1975 movie is still massively important … Jeanne Dielman is immersion cinema, a brilliant example of maximal minimalism that fuses viewer with subject so profoundly, the marathon experience transcends simple spectatorship.
Stephen Garrett, Time Out New York
Severe yet majestic … Nothing can quite prepare the first-time viewer for the force of Ms. Akerman’s concentration, for the film’s overwhelming concreteness or the horrifying logic of its ending.
Dennis Lim, The New York Times
Jeanne Dielman is inescapably a woman’s film, consciously feminist in its turn to the avant garde. On the side of content, the film charts the breakdown of a bourgeois Belgian housewife, mother and part-time prostitute over the course of three days; on the side of form, it rigorously records her domestic routine in extended time and from a fixed camera position. In a film that, agonisingly, depicts women’s oppression, Akerman transforms cinema, itself so often an instrument of women’s oppression, into a liberating force.
Laura Mulvey, Sight & Sound
Chantal Akerman
Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte
Belgium/France
1975
In French with English subtitles
The Greatest Film Ever Made – Sight & Sound magazine, 2022
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Credits
Producer
Corinne Jénart, Evelyne Paul
Screenwriter
Chantal Akerman
Cinematography
Babette Mangolte
Editor
Patricia Canino
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
