SCREENING AT THE KESWICK ALHAMBRA CINEMA (SCREEN 2)
Voted the best film of all time by Sight and Sound in 2022, Jeanne Dielman is a
lonely young widow, living with her son Sylvain following an immutable order:
while the boy is in school, she cares for their apartment, does chores, and
receives clients in the afternoon.
Jeanne Dielman is inescapably a woman’s
film, consciously feminist in its turn to the avant garde. On the side of
content, 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.
Laura Mulvey, BFI
