Why the greatest film of all time is a study of domestic chores
In short: In 2022, critics named Chantal Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman the greatest film ever made. By focusing on the real-time, repetitive labor of a housewife, Akerman transformed mundane domesticity into a profound cinematic experience, challenging how we perceive time, gender, and the hidden traumas within our daily lives.
Chantal Akerman was a Belgian filmmaker and artist whose work fundamentally altered the landscape of experimental and narrative cinema. Born in 1950 to Holocaust survivors, she was deeply influenced by structuralist film, particularly the work of Michael Snow, which taught her to view time as the most critical element of the medium. Her breakthrough came in 1975 with Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film that captures the rigid, repetitive routine of a middle-aged widow. By presenting these domestic chores in real time, Akerman created a cinematic language that prioritized patience and observation over traditional plot development.
Akerman’s approach was deeply personal and often political. She frequently used the kitchen as a domestic theatre, a space that could simultaneously function as a site of connection and a self-confining prison. While often categorized within feminist and queer cinema, Akerman resisted such labels, preferring to see film as a generative field that allowed her to escape the boundaries of fixed identity. She was particularly interested in the intersection of private and public life, using her camera to reveal the construction of the female subject while simultaneously acting as an irritant to conventional, essentialist portrayals of women.
Her final years were marked by a return to the maternal, culminating in her 2015 documentary No Home Movie, which captured conversations with her mother shortly before her death in 2014. This work, like much of her career, explored the weight of memory and the passage of time. Akerman died by suicide in 2015 at the age of 65. Today, her influence is evident in the work of directors like Kelly Reichardt and Sofia Coppola, who continue to draw upon her commitment to real-time observation and her ability to find profound human resonance in the ordinary, everyday movements of life.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Chantal Akerman
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