There is something deeply subversive about watching a woman peel potatoes for five uninterrupted minutes. Or observing her methodically make the bed, prepare coffee, clean the kitchen table with precise, repetitive movements. In Jeanne Dielman (1975), Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman transformed domestic banality into a revolutionary manifesto, creating one of the most radical and influential works in cinema history.
Jeanne Dielman, the anatomy of a domestic insurrection
When Jeanne Dielman premiered at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, it provoked visceral reactions. Part of the critics walked out; another part immediately recognized they were witnessing something unprecedented. Akerman, then just 25 years old, had created a three-hour-and-twenty-minute film about a middle-aged widow (the luminous Delphine Seyrig) who maintains a rigorously organized domestic routine – including meetings with clients who visit her on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
What made the work revolutionary was not only its subject matter, but its radical language. Akerman rejected all conventional narrative codes: there is no soundtrack, no emotive close-ups, no dramatic editing. The camera is positioned at Jeanne’s eye level and observes, with almost ethnographic patience, every gesture of her routine. It is pure cinema. One that exists solely as a temporal experience, impossible to summarize or speed up.
“I wanted to film like a woman, not like someone imitating a man filming,” Akerman stated years later. This seemingly simple declaration conceals a profound aesthetic revolution. Dominant cinema had been built on what theorist Laura Mulvey would call the “male gaze.” It is a way of seeing and representing that transformed women into objects of contemplation or desire. Akerman developed a completely different visual syntax: a gaze that possesses nothing, judges nothing, hierarchizes nothing.
Time as a political tool
The genius of Jeanne Dielman lies in its understanding that time is a political category. By dedicating three hours to showing three days in the life of a housewife, Akerman was making a statement about which lives deserve to be represented in cinema and how that representation should occur. Each shot lasts exactly as long as it takes for the action shown to be completed. No more, no less. There is no narrative economy, no dramatic synthesis. There is only the real duration of lived experience.
This temporal choice functions as an act of resistance against the invisibility of domestic labor. Akerman forces the viewer to experience the temporal weight of tasks that sustain daily life but remain socially undervalued. Peeling potatoes ceases to be an automatic gesture and becomes a form of labor that demands time, energy, and attention. The daily repetition of these actions gains existential dimension.
The film also reveals the subtle violence of social structures through its microscopic observation. Jeanne maintains her routine with obsessive precision because any deviation could mean collapse – financial, social, psychological. Her life is built on a precarious balance between bourgeois respectability and discreet prostitution, between economic autonomy and structural dependency. Akerman shows this tension without explaining it, trusting the viewer’s intelligence to decipher the layers of meaning.
The aesthetic legacy of Jeanne Dielman
Fifty years later, the influence of Jeanne Dielman permeates contemporary cinema in ways we do not always immediately recognize. Kelly Reichardt, one of the main heirs of the tradition initiated by Akerman, developed in films such as Wendy and Lucy (2008) and First Cow (2019) a cinematic language that prioritizes observation over explanation. It is the everyday over the exceptional.
The cinema of Tsai Ming-liang, with his long fixed shots and lonely characters navigating urban modernity, is unthinkable without the precedent set by Akerman. Even filmmakers seemingly distant from the “contemplative” aesthetic incorporate the language. This is the case of Gus Van Sant in Elephant or Celine Sciamma in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. They incorporated elements of Akermanian language. The refusal of easy dramatics, the trust in the narrative power of unedited time, the attention to rituals that structure human experience.
The work also anticipated aesthetic debates that have only recently gained critical visibility. The appreciation of “slow cinema” as an alternative to contemporary media acceleration, the defense of narratives centered on “ordinary” characters versus Hollywood exceptionalism, the claim for cinematic temporality not subordinated to commercial rhythms. All of these issues find their founding manifesto in Jeanne Dielman.
Chantal Akerman, the visionary of Jeanne Dielman
Understanding Jeanne Dielman requires situating the work in the context of Chantal Akerman’s artistic trajectory, one of the most singular and influential filmmakers of the 20th century. Born in Brussels in 1950, daughter of Holocaust survivors, Akerman developed from an early age a keen sensitivity to the subtle forms of oppression and resistance that permeate everyday life.
Her artistic training combined influences from American experimental cinema – especially Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage – with the tradition of European realism. But Akerman did not settle for synthesizing influences; she created her own language that transcended established aesthetic categories. Her films are neither exactly experimental nor strictly narrative – they occupy a unique territory where avant-garde meets a peculiar form of humanism.
Throughout her career, the filmmaker developed a consistent reflection on issues of identity, memory, and belonging. In films such as News from Home (1977) and No Home Movie (2015, her last work), she explored the tensions between mobility and rootedness, public and private, art and life. Akerman died prematurely in 2015, at 65, leaving a filmography that continues to influence new generations of filmmakers.
Belated recognition
For decades, Jeanne Dielman remained a cult film. It was admired by cinephiles and studied in universities, but far from mainstream critical recognition. That changed dramatically in 2022, when the work was elected the greatest film of all time by the prestigious British magazine Sight & Sound, dethroning Citizen Kane after sixty years of dominance.
This recognition represents more than an individual critical reassessment. It signals a paradigmatic transformation in how the cinematic canon is constructed. The election of Jeanne Dielman reflects the growing influence of critics and scholars from diverse backgrounds, especially women and historically underrepresented groups in traditional film criticism.
The change also indicates a reevaluation of the criteria that define cinematic “greatness.” If Citizen Kane represented cinema as totalizing art – mastering technique, narrative, and performance spectacularly – Jeanne Dielman proposes an aesthetics of subtraction. After all, greatness emerges from the ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, the universal in the specific, the political in the personal.
Cinema for the future
Jeanne Dielman is not just a historic film worthy of museum preservation. It is a living work. The film continues to generate new interpretations and inspire new ways of making cinema.
For viewers willing to take on the challenge, the film offers a transformative experience. After all, it expands the possibilities of understanding what cinema can be and do. Jeanne Dielman proposes cinema as a tool for psychological, social, and existential investigation. It is an art capable of revealing dimensions of human experience that remain invisible to other forms of representation.
Fifty years later, Chantal Akerman’s silent revolution continues to echo. The film reminds us that the deepest transformations sometimes happen not through spectacle, but through attentive observation. Not through drama, but through patient contemplation of what has always been before our eyes, waiting to be truly seen.
