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this is a collaborative post: concepts and words by Jamie Martinez and josh martinez.
I’m so excited to unveil my 200th post for be the future. It’s wild that I’ve been at this for more than four years. I couldn’t have done it without the love and support of my husband Jamie. I’m not exaggerating! Their insights and encouragement are a huge reason why I made it past my 20th post, much less my 200th.
For post number 100, Jamie and I wrote a fabulous essay on Born in Flames. To celebrate post number 200, Jamie and I co-wrote this essay about another favorite film. We hope you enjoy!
Every ten years, the British Film Institute (BFI) publishes a list of the Greatest Films of All Time. Before 2012 (and for the past 60 years), only three films have ever made it to #1. Bicycle Thieves (1948), Citizen Kane (1941), and Vertigo (1958) have all taken the top spot. In 2022, a film directed by a woman topped the list for the first time. That film is Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).
We’ll shorten the name to Jeanne Dielman for the rest of this essay. We’ll also italicize the text when we’re writing about the film as a whole and not the character.
Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman directed Jeanne Dielman when she was 24 years old. The film, more than 3 hours long, tells the story of three days in the life of widowed mother Jeanne Dielman. The film runs for long stretches of her routine as she cooks, cleans, and does sex work to pay for her son’s schooling. The dialogue throughout the film is minimal. What Jeanne Dielman may seem to lack in story it more than makes up for in its themes. It’s a film with plenty to say about power, individual agency, and the identity of a mother in post-war Belgium.
power and identity
Jeanne Dielman at a surface level is about a housewife who does sex work to pay the rent and take care of her son, Sylvain. Delphine Seyrig is a Lebanese-born French actress who plays Jeanne in the film. Seyrig is in every scene, often conveying depth of emotion without saying a word. The film introduces us to her evening routine not long after it begins. Jeanne greets her afternoon client and later cleans up after sex. She makes the house presentable and has dinner ready by the time her son returns home from school.
We’re present for almost every part of Jeanne’s life. We watch her peel potatoes for supper. We’re there while she scrubs the bathtub. When her son comes home after school, she chides him for reading his book during dinner. After the meal, mother and son leave the apartment to go on their nightly stroll. Once back, she converts the couch into his bed, fires up the heater, and sets out his pajamas. In the morning, she puts it all away and begins the day’s rituals again.
Akerman uses the plot and slow pacing of the film to ask questions we may otherwise take for granted. Because of these long takes, the viewer knows, for example, exactly how much time it took to prepare the night’s meal. We see her son Sylvain eat the meal quickly while seeking distractions. Their moments of dialogue happen around or after dinner. Jeanne reads a letter while Sylvain does homework. Watching these moments is important to how we understand Jeanne. We may see her daily routine as mundane, but they’re actions that women around the world perform every day. In Seyrig’s performance we see Jeanne’s passion and her motivation to keep going. At no point does Akerman or Seyrig imply that Jeanne is unfortunate or stuck in her life. About halfway through the film we see the routine start to unravel and break after an unseen encounter with a client. Even still, Jeanne is always a willing participant in her own life. She may perform sex work to survive but never seeks the audience’s pity.
Here it’s worth writing about how Akerman films the sex work itself. In the first encounter we see, Jeanne leads her client to the bedroom and closes the door. When we do see simulated intercourse later in the film, there’s no passion, only mechanics. The money she makes from these clients goes into a vase on the dining room table. The choices Akerman and Seyrig make here is not to de-sexualize the act itself, rather to show it as an act of labor. After the client leaves satisfied, the focus of Jeanne’s routine returns to Sylvain. Even when we see her leave the apartment, to shop or run errands, it’s for the benefit of their household. An offhand comment Sylvain makes suggests that it’s only the nightly walks that are for her sake alone.
To truly understand Jeanne Dielman is to learn the history of its director. Chantal Akerman was a woman, a feminist, and a Jew. Her films make clear her passion for telling stories about mothers, including her own. News From Home (#52, 1976) is another film of hers that earned a spot in the top 100. In that film, we watch long takes of locations in New York City. Akerman reads letters she received from her mother while the director was away in the states. Other feature films by Akerman also focused on or featured the role of the mother: The Meetings of Anna (1978), Golden Eighties (1986), and No Home Movie (2015).
Jeanne Dielman in 2022
The cultural gravitas of the Sight and Sound poll is significant to cinephiles. Before Sight and Sound chose Jeanne Dielman as its greatest film of all time, in 2012 the film tied for spot #36. Art house cinema-goers long saw Akerman’s film as an achievement. It’s possible the film never held mass audience appeal due to its run time and subject matter. What changed in the world, and within BFI, to propel Jeanne Dielman to the top of the Sight and Sound poll? The biggest difference may have been who gets to define “the greatest” film of all time.
Sight and Sound Magazine first published their Greatest Films list in 1952. Here’s how it works: each voter submits their top 10 films. The BFI then counts those votes to create that decade’s list. The ballots aren’t ranked: Jeanne Dielman in the #1 spot doesn’t mean most people voted for it as the greatest. Instead, it means that more people had it on their ballots than any other movie. In 1952, a body of 63 film critics selected The Bicycle Thief (1948) as the greatest film of all time. The number of voters grew over time. In 2012, 846 critics, programmers, and curators created their list. In 2022, votes came from 1639 film “critics, programmers, curators, archivists, and academics.” The voting body in 2022 contained more women and people of color from the film industry than ever before. It’s clear that this group’s tastes were somewhat different than that of past decades.
We’ve noted this is the first time a woman director made the top of the list. All told, the poll in 2022 featured 11 films in the top 100 directed by women. In the top 20 alone were 3 other films directed or co-directed by women. These were Beau Travail (#8, 1997), by Claire Denis; Cléo from 5 to 7 (#14, 1962), by Agnès Varda; Meshes of the Afternoon (#16, 1943), by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. The diverse voting body didn’t only benefit white, mostly-European women directors. For the first time in the poll’s history, seven films directed Black filmmakers also made the top 100. The 2012 list had only one, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (#66, 1973). Films from other Black directors joined this one, including Moonlight (#60, 2016), by Barry Jenkins and Get Out (#95, 2017), by Jordan Peele. Only one film made by a Black woman, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (#60, 1991), placed in the top 100 films. Films from countries rarely represented in these “best-of” lists also earned spots in 2022. Varsity’s Isaac Jackson wrote “a whopping 80% of new entries [to the list] come from non-white, non-male filmmakers.”
These changes, the pool of voters and the films they chose, didn’t happen by accident. The BFI shared how the pool of voters—and how we watch movies in general—changed in the years since 2012:
“[The 2022 poll results include] the more diverse group of contributors voting in the poll and the impact and increased influence of film commentators internationally via the internet. It may also be explained in part by the explosion of access to a wider selection of films, thanks to the proliferation of movies available to view on numerous streamers, boutique Blu-ray and DVD collections, the increase of TV channels dedicated to movies and curated film seasons, all of which have helped to create a more cine-literate contributor.”
Jeanne Dielman didn’t become a better film before the 2022 list came out. Neither did Citizen Kane (1941) or Vertigo (1958) become worse films by comparison. Those two are still #3 and #2, respectively, on the 2022 list.
critical reception
It comes as no surprise that there was a lot of internet discourse about Jeanne Dielman’s placement at the top. Gemma Gracewood for the film-centered social network Letterboxd shared the impact she noticed. The day the list released, “almost 5,000 people added the film to their watchlists…” For context, that’s “a whopping 3,400 percent increase on a normal Letterboxd day.”
American film scholar and critic B. Ruby Rich wrote about the film in the 1970s. Ahead of a screening of the film, she commented on the runtime and how it fits into the understanding of the character. “JEANNE DIELMAN may well be the first film to offer an audience the opportunity of learning a character purely experientially. There is no narration, personal history, conventional “action” or point-of-view fantasy. Rather we become ethnographers, taking our position invisibly behind the camera to scrutinize the life unfolding before us.”
Not everyone was jubilant by the shakeup in rankings. Writer and director Paul Schrader posted his thoughts to his Facebook. Christian Zilko describes Schrader’s feelings in his piece for IndieWire. Schrader said the film’s placement “feels off, as if someone had put their thumb on the scale. Which I suspect they did.” He affirmed his view by saying that Jeanne Dielman was one of his favorite films, but it wasn’t in his top 10. Of the people who complained about Jeanne Dielman at the top, most of their complaints amount to “It’s a good movie but it’s not my favorite.”
Schrader, like so many people online, seem to refuse to consider whose thumb was on the scale before this. Consider the smaller number of voters in previous years’ coming from spaces dominated by white men. What are all the ways this group has had their thumbs on every scale they could find? Are people upset that decision-makers finally noticed? Does it really feel like there are two thumbs on the scale now? Or are we finally starting to question why anyone should have their thumb on there?
our takeaways from Jeanne Dielman
The Sight and Sound poll came out in 2022. Jamie knew of Jeanne Dielman before 2022 but mostly by its notoriety as a long, slow film. josh learned about the film and its significance from Jamie after Sight and Sound Magazine named it #1. Even with that in mind, it took us nearly two years to watch it after the list came out. So why are we talking about this now, in 2024? Jamie had personal reasons for why this film still matters:
Admittedly the runtime and the slow pace of the film is what deterred me initially. Committing to a 3+ hour movie is one thing, but a 3+ hour movie with little dialogue takes preparation and intention. It wasn’t until after falling in love with films by other directors categorized as “slow cinema” like Andrei Tarkovsky and Tsai Ming-liang that I decided the commitment would likely result in a life-changing viewing experience.
After the film I knew it ranked among the best I’ve seen but I would be dishonest if I said it was the best movie I’ve seen. The way votes are collected and ranked likely have a lot to do with the placement, but so does the identity of those that voted for it.
As we think about the practice of inclusion in institutions, and explicitly understand who is being included for the first time, why is it surprising that the results would remain the same?
Here are some takeaways we’ve been discussing ever since the credits rolled.
Jeanne Dielman doesn’t work any other way. The length of the film itself, its near-tedium, is crucial to Akerman’s message. There’s no way it would have the same impact on a viewer if it lasted, say, 90 minutes. We in the audience may not have felt Jeanne’s existence with the same impact. Yet we stayed with Jeanne through a mere fraction of her offscreen life. Told any other way, could the story have given the attention that being a mother, thankless as it can be, deserves? Would we have given her that attention?
Art is subjective. One of the roles of art criticism is to surface that art for a wider audience. It’s why authors are often desperate for a review from a prestigious magazine or social group. The Sight and Sound poll has always made it clear that academic rigor is not its purpose. Jackson cites the introduction to the second S&S poll taken in 1962. Voters should not, “be influenced by academic orthodoxy into nominating films they might not have seen for 20 or 30 years.” These lists have always been about voters’ personal preferences. Our interpretation of art doesn’t change the art itself.
Every institution can undergo change. That doesn’t mean there won’t be backlash. Rather than trying to avoid backlash, we should instead acknowledge that it may come. If we stay true to our evolving values, we can weather these temporary critiques. We know that power is not finite, but it does dilute. BFI brought in new voters who had different tastes from the 2012 body. Everyone’s vote still counted, but it didn’t count as much. Another way of thinking about this is: more people got their say. How is that a bad thing? no institution is protected against change. We have to make sure that change is inclusive and not exclusionary.
end credits
Movies made by white cisgender men and praised by white cisgender men have long been the dominant voice in film circles. Many people can name their favorite male directors of significance. How many women receive the same recognition? Richard Brody of The New Yorker says, “Jeanne Dielman,” […] is a gauntlet thrown down by the Sight and Sound voters to the filmmakers of today.” It’s, “a dare to make movies with no regard for the box office, for trends, for popular appeal, to create films that risk being outside the present day because they already belong to the future of the art.”
Jamie is usually someone who has a lot of patience with films described as “slow cinema.” We found ourselves moved both by the visuals and the story itself. While it’s not a short film, its subtle acting and thought-provoking message make for a satisfying weekend watch.
At the time of publication, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is available to stream at the Internet Archive.
Just for fun, here are our (entirely subjective) top 10 Greatest Films of All Time: Sight and Sound, call us!
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Jamie
Jamie Martinez (pronouns: they/them) is a queer and non-binary working person. They work in talent acquisition for a paycheck, but their passions are queer film history, disco, and leftist politics.
josh
my name is josh martinez. i have always loved trying to understand systems, and the systems that built those systems. i spend a lot of time thinking about how to get there from here.
i'm the founder and principal consultant at Future Emergent.
say hello: josh[at]bethefuture.space
