\nThe film, written and directed by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (then just 24), used a predominately female crew. It chronicles three days in the life of the eponymous Belgian middle-class widow, played by Delphine Seyrig who is rarely off the screen. Jeanne cares for a teenage son who is almost mute in his engagement with his mother. \n
\nThere is little dialogue and little plot. All the sound is diegetic – that is, inherent in the scene and not overlaid from without. Over a bum-numbing length of 3 hours 21 minutes, we have a series of wide-angle shots of the rooms in her flat with the camera held in a fixed position for very long periods of time as Jeanne cooks, washes and cleans in a life of quotidian routine of domesticity.\n
\nSounds exciting? This feminist work is a vision of oppression and alienation presented in the starkest of terms. It is highly original and, in its own way, ground-breaking. But the best film of all time? Not in a hundred years.\n
\nFootnote: Following a period of hospitalisation for depression, Chantal Akerman committed suicide aged 65.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every ten years, the prestigious magazine “Sight And Sound” conducts a poll to nominate the top 100 films of all time and, in 2022, the No 1 was “Jeanne Dielman”. In spite of over 60 years of serious film-viewing, I’d never even heard of this work but, when the British Film Institute screened all 100 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28515"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28516,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28515\/revisions\/28516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}