There is a funny entry at Wikipedia on the film “Jeanne Dielman”: “Since the 2010s, the film has been increasingly perceived as very important.” Since a survey by the British Film Institute 2022, it has been considered the best film of all time. The survey takes place every ten years; In the past, “Citizen Kane” and “Vertigo” led the list.
Chantal Akerman, the director of “Jeanne Dielman”, has no longer experienced this. She killed herself in 2015. She made the film in 1974 in an apartment in Brussels with Delphine Seyrig, a Grande Dame of French cinema. The film shows three and a half hours in long settings how Jeanne Dielman lives with her son in her apartment. Sometimes a man comes to visit with whom she goes into the bedroom. She buys, she cooks, she washes off, she makes the bed, she speaks to her son. You can see the living room table. A terrine is on it.
Before the film was increasingly perceived as significant, he received a prize at the Fårö Film Festival in 1975, Ingmar Bergman’s island. Even Bergman’s films look like spectacles alongside Chantal Akersman’s sound and unadorned observations. She made her first film in 1968 in the same kitchen in which she made her last, “No Home Movie”, about her mother.
Akerman made documentaries and created installations, and everything that invented it was radical, as they say. Everything was simple. In 1978 she made “Anna’s encounters” with Aurore Clément, one of her favorite actors. Anna is a film director who comes to a festival in Essen. She meets Helmut Griem in the hotel. In Bottrop he stands in front of his house and tells Anna his life story like on a theater stage.
In the nightly train from Cologne to Brussels, she meets Hanns Zischler, who tells her his life story in the course of the compartment. Anna’s mother is waiting at the train station in Brussels. A man, Daniel, is waiting in Paris, with whom she goes to a hotel room. This is the whole film.
More from Arne Willander
As usual only with Wim Wenders and Aki Kaurismäki there are no ones and no tricks in the Chantal Akerman cinema, just look. At Arte there are six films to see from her, including “Jeanne Dielman” and “Anna’s encounters”. They are the most beautiful films in the world below.