Back in 1976, Le Monde hailed Belgian film-maker Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as “the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of cinema”. Such praise was far from universal. During its premiere at Cannes the year before, the French novelist and director Marguerite Duras is said to have stood up, declared “This woman’s crazy”, and stormed out. The sound of audience members groaning or beating a retreat was commonplace. For a long time, the film was unavailable on video or DVD. It became more invoked than seen, subject to gossip and notoriety: an exemplar of punitive arthouse cinema—three hours long, nothing much happening, something (maybe) to do with feminism. Small wonder that, as recently as 2010, Marion Schmid, author of a monograph on Akerman, claimed: “Her name rarely figures in recent histories of French and European cinema.”
How times have changed. Three years ago, and seven years after Akerman’s death in 2015, Jeanne Dielman topped Sight and Sound’s Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time list—a striking accolade, given that no female-directed film had even appeared in that august magazine’s top 10 list since it began publication in 1952. Akerman’s work has been cited by directors such as Todd Haynes, Sofia Coppola, Greta Gerwig and, here in the UK, Tacita Dean and Joanna Hogg. Her books have been translated into English. Tote bags celebrating her films are sold at independent cinemas. Now the BFI is staging a major, near-complete retrospective of her formidable output as well as releasing two hefty Blu-ray boxsets. We are reaching Peak Akerman. What happened?
Jeanne Dielman tells the story of a widowed housewife (played by Last Year at Marienbad’s Delphine Seyrig) who lives in a modest Brussels apartment with her teenage son. Her time is taken up with preparing food, cleaning, darning. She is fastidious about detail. Routine and repetition are everything. Even in her interactions with clients—she is a prostitute, and they visit her during the afternoons. All of this is shown, often in excruciatingly long takes, with stilled camerawork and with Seyrig in the centre of the frame. It’s not unlike watching an old episode of Delia Smith’s cooking show; the domestic rituals recall English sitcoms such as Ever Decreasing Circles. Then, over the course of three days, cracks appear. She drops a brush, overcooks the potatoes. There is an act of frenzied violence.
Over the course of three days, cracks appear...
Is Akerman paying such fastidious attention to Jeanne’s housekeeping in order to highlight the enormous labour that women are expected—invisibly and unremunerated—to perform? This, after all, was the period when grassroots organisations such as Wages for Housework were portraying the kitchen as a factory floor. Or is Jeanne anaesthetised, a kind of Stepford Wife, her only hope to go off-script? 1975 also saw the release of Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, a celebrated video piece that both mocks and chafes against the limited social spaces available for women to flourish. Viewing Jeanne Dielman in 2025, it occurs to me that it is less about women than about identity—specifically, the performance of identity. In today’s language, Jeanne suffers from an anxiety disorder that is not reducible to gender.
What makes the film so challenging is its length, and how it shows up the sped-up rhythms and narrative shortcuts that we take for granted in most movies. Akerman was unapologetic about this. Interviewed in 2009, she reflected: “The way cinema was done [historically] was mostly to escape time. When people say, ‘Oh, I had a good evening—I didn’t see the time passing by’, well! They were robbed of two hours of their life!” Jeanne Dielman anticipates the “slow” or “durational” cinema of modern masters such as Pedro Costa and Wang Bing.
Akerman didn’t like being called a feminist or a lesbian filmmaker. She resisted -isms and labels of all sorts. She could be combative, unruly, what Lauren Elkin has called an “art monster”. Part of her appeal lies in her independence. She dropped out of film school to make Saute ma ville (1968), which she financed by selling $3 shares on the diamond exchange in Antwerp. She funded La Chambre (1972) by working in a gay porn theatre near New York’s Times Square and pocketing half the entrance fees. Fifty years after Jeanne Dielman came out, Akerman’s fierce resolve, her indifference to what regular filmgoers—even women filmgoers—expect, her aesthetics of alienation: these have lost none of their power to shock.
