In the traditional and most influential list of the best films of all time organized by the British magazine Sight & Sound on the decade principle, this year there was a revolutionary change: in the first place - after The Bicycle Thief from 1952, Citizen Kane from 1962 to 2002, i Vertigo from 2012 - the achievement was found Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Brussels (1975). The change that was obviously forced in this sequence is clear: it is primarily gender, and only then poetic, primarily ideological, not avant-garde in nature. What does that tell us about the Akerman film itself, and what about the state of film criticism?
Jeanne Dielman consists of three days in the life of the title character (in a masterful performance Delphine seyrig) which already contains two main forms and the predominant space in which a woman (allegedly) appears in cinematography: she is a mother, but also a whore, whose range of movement is primarily located, or rather limited to her apartment.
The style of the film is deeply subordinated precisely to this reduction of women to the household, and what Akerman essentially intrigues is to show Jeanne in her routine, the continuity of which leads her to a kind of ritual organization of her existence, although it is not at all certain that this ritualization of performing daily chores had the staff to introduce some additional essential meaning.
If the routine gives the impression of normality, then the traces of sexuality are there to undermine, and in the end, through an unexpected eruption, completely disturb and tear the surface of the so-called stable life. The heroine works in her apartment - in which she rules as a mother and housewife - as a prostitute: the first two days Akerman "keeps silent" about what happens in the marriage room, but then on the third day we can see how Jeanne "makes love" and then how she uses scissors kills his client.
Jeanne Dielman is a meticulous attempt to represent, both in spatial and temporal terms, the 'ordinary' life of a woman: Akerman tries to fundamentally desublimate the female figure through a detailed representation of the banality of everyday routine in order to reject those fetishistic or voyeuristic-sadistic visual constants that glorify women or they reduce it to a passive object of enjoyment in controlling surveillance, but they always present it primarily as a spectacle, a topos meant to arouse and channel male desire and desire, or to deny his anxiety.
U Jeanne Dielman mise-en-scène works primarily through the pattern of repetition: the repetition of the main character's actions not only evokes the boredom of bourgeois existence, but also by exhausting the narrative momentum, the presented image almost turns into a materially tangible description of the 'state of affairs'.
This contains the exceptional eloquence of the film, which can at the same time be a socially oriented study of the conditions in which the most paradigmatic embodiment of women's problems as such was found - a woman from the middle class where oppression is not explicitly seen, but also an example of how formal asceticism in minimal shifts he looks for and finds a key opportunity to refine the entire directorial approach.
In a film in which hardly anything happens, in which absence itself becomes the main structural element of a kind of reverse suspense, why do we end up with a sexual act and a murder? But does cinema sooner or later have to make its narrative orientation known, to stage an absent moment that represents the point after which nothing can be the same?
Jeanne Dielman ends with a shot in which the heroine is sitting at the table, and her face does not clearly reflect what she is thinking after she - it seems, impulsively - killed her customer. The author's goal is precisely to bring both herself and the viewers in their desire to understand and identify with what they saw up to this point, the point where fate is written even though there is no definitive solution. And again, Akerman introduces his narrative into stasis: into a standstill that ensures ethical reevaluation of everything that led up to it and epistemological evaluation of everything that might follow.
But is that really enough? Jeanne Dielman - so no matter how the selection itself was organized, no matter how democratized the entire process was by massing the participants - to declare it the 'best film of all time'? The answer is more than eye-popping: of course not. Jeanne Dielman is 'great', but only as - a 'minor' film, only as a work of 'minority' discourse, as an oppositional achievement that argues with canonical classics and tries to articulate an alternative to the all-dominant male gaze (although the director's poetic statement can be characterized as a witty combination Bresson i Warhol).
It is commendable that the critics think progressively, but in the aesthetic field you will not compensate or correct what, unfortunately, is present on the social and gender level. One type of injustice is not corrected by another, which directly refutes everything that is film theory - especially starting with the turning point. Cahiers du cinema during the fifties - precisely determined in the most scrupulous analytical readings of the film text.
The inclusion of new names, which are there if not exclusively, then certainly primarily because of the ideological climate, is achievable only to the detriment of those authors who have gone through the strictest interpretative procedure: that is why there are no Rossellini, Antonioni, Eisenstein, Ophüls, Sirk i Leone, and not even in the top 100 Hawks, Feuillade, von Sternberg, Buñuel, Naruse, Vidor, McCarey, Bertolucci, Clouzot, Melville, Demy, Ray, Ôshima, Resnais, Schrader, von Trier, not to mention Carpenter, Haas, Roeg, Cronenberg, Herzog, Linklater...
That ideological reason is the dominant horizon of film interpretation is also visible in the place where this list represents the biggest intervention in the so far 'canonical' evaluation: 'desirable' female directors are strategically placed within the hierarchy (Akerman at 1, Denis at 7, Varda at 14, Deren at 16, Chytilová at 28, Sciamma at 30, Felt at 48, Campion on the 50th place), while those that tend towards 'male' poetics, such as Leni Riefenstahl i Kathryn Bigelow systematically suppressed, such as complex works Here goes Lupino i Larisa Šepitko, which were ambiguously dealing with the most relevant existential topics, ignorantly omitted.
Selection The Bicycle Thief 1952 can easily be explained by a mistaken but sincere belief in humanist values de Sicin's sentimentally manipulative realization. Since 1962, the leading axiological postulate in the creation of these lists was - partially motivated Welles's with the charisma of a genius - defined within the horizon of the author's politics, the basic theoretical lever that recognized film as an equal art of the XNUMXth century.
Triumph Vertigo from 2012 should be taken as the justified climax of such a serious and deep hermeneutic: the best film was declared to be the one that was the most studious, the most thoroughly studied, that confirmed all the stylistic brilliance within the numerous and diverse, but rigorous interpretative visions Hitchcock's mise-en-scène and its unsurpassed semantic richness. Data that is in the new survey Vertigo fell 'only' by one place (in 2012 a quarter of the participants voted for him, in this year only 13 percent), is at least a comforting indicator of a kind of contraindication: what can certainly be assumed is that the critics who voted for Hitchcock's masterpiece -deed, they certainly did not do it for ideological reasons, but rather despite or completely ignoring them.
Regardless of all the internal qualities of Chantal Akerman's film, the fact that Jeanne Dielman found the recent ones in the first place Sight & Sound list primarily points to the fact that this kind of Copernican turn was only possible when the author's politics were forcibly reduced to - politics.
Bonus video:
