Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Jeanne, who lives with her teenage son, fills her empty life with an endless checklist of chores. She cooks, cleans, shops, and every afternoon, in the window of time it takes for the dinner potatoes to boil, she has sex for money with a gentleman caller. Three days in the repetitive existence of this middle-class widow in her forties are revealed through static, head-on compositions and unblinking blocks of real time.

A cornerstone of feminist cinema, the film was made with about 80 per cent women in the crew, including cinematographer Babette Mangolte and editor Patricia Canino. The film remains a frequent subject of scholarly and critical analysis on aspects ranging from women’s social experience and gendered identities to cinematic form and psychoanalytic film theory. For Akerman, who grew up in a devout Jewish household in Brussels where “life was organised by rituals”, it is above all a very personal film: “It came from what I saw as a kid − all those gestures of my mother. That’s why the film is so precise.”

Thanks to Collections CINEMATEK − @ Chantal Akerman Foundation.

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