Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, Bruxelles

Chantal Akerman's magnificent epic of experimental cinema offering a feminist perspective on recurrent events of everyday life. We are delighted to launch our 'Female Gaze' mini-season with this new classic brought to public attention through its winning the number 1 slot voted as Greatest Film of All Time in the 2022 Sight And Sound Poll! This is the first time that a film directed by a woman has ever been voted to the top spot. Sadly this is unsurprising: women film directors have always, obviously, been few and far between; equally obviously, the contributing critics have been predominantly male. It was when Sight and Sound expanded the critics’ pool in 2012 that Jeanne Dielman first entered the list, at number 35; its rise to the top now is a triumph for women’s cinema.

Hotly anticipated for over 12 months since its win, the film is finally available to watch on the big screen with new release from the BFI. 

Akerman's film is made with a cinematic style and strategy closer to avantgarde than mainstream traditions and, furthermore, at just under three and a half hours, demands dedicated viewing.

While it has brought this tradition to the top of the list, Jeanne Dielman is inescapably a woman’s film, consciously feminist in its turn to the avant garde. 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. This film is cinema history you have to experience in real time to understand why this gaze is radically different from your standard cinema.

With intermission and short introduction by Julia Andrews-Clifford, feminist artist and season curator.

This film is F-Rated. The F-Rating is applied to all films which are directed by women and/or written by women. Find out more about F-Rating.

Part of our Female Gaze mini-season celebrating International Women's Month with F-rated films that highlight women on screen and behind the camera.

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