Film Festival 09 - Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080
Bruxelles
Belgium/France 1975, 201m
Director: Chantal Akerman
Chantal Akerman was 25 when she made this avant-garde landmark,
shown here in a superb new 35mm print. It remains a potent
expression of the feminist, anti-bourgeois spirit of the 70s and an
astonishing appropriation of the tools of commercial cinema to
concentrate, with mesmerising effect, on the ordinary. We watch the
monotonous daily routine of a Brussels single mother, housewife -
and part-time prostitute - played by the sphinx-like Delphine
Seyrig. And we watch with mounting dread as cracks appear in her
apparently purposeful routine.
"Jeanne Dielman is immersion cinema, a brilliant example of
maximal minimalism that fuses viewer with subject so profoundly,
the marathon experience transcends simple spectatorship& its
statements about the human condition, about its fears and its
frailties and its veneer of convention over a cauldron of regret
and self-denial, are as universal and timeless as Greek tragedy." -
Stephen Garrett, Time Out NY
In French with English subtitles
