Every ten years since 1952, Sight and Sound has issued its 100 Great­est Films of All Time list, which it com­piles by can­vass­ing opin­ions from a selec­tion of over 1,500 inter­na­tion­al film crit­ics. And for most of those eight decades, top of that list sat Cit­i­zen Kane.

But in 2012, Jeanne Diel­man, 23 Com­merce Quay, 1080 Brus­sels broke into the top 50, and became the first film direct­ed by a woman to do so. Ten years lat­er, in 2022, it ascend­ed to the sum­mit to dethrone Kane and was offi­cial­ly declared the great­est film ever made. 

It was always a lit­tle unfair to sad­dle Cit­i­zen Kane with the great­est­fil­mo­fall­time tag, it’s far more instruc­tive to think of it as the first ful­ly realised film of the new medium.

For the first four decades of the 20^th cen­tu­ry, tech­nol­o­gy and the lan­guage of cin­e­ma adapt­ed in tan­dem, the one respond­ing to the oth­er. But by the time Orson Welles came to make Cit­i­zen Kane in 1940, faster film stock, lighter cam­era equip­ment and pur­pose-built sound stages meant that he was able to explore the exploit the lan­guage and gram­mar of film in a way that nobody pre­vi­ous­ly had been able to. 

What’s so exhil­a­rat­ing about Kane is that Welles explores every con­ceiv­able facet of the lan­guage of cin­e­ma in the one film. From dis­guised match dis­solves, whip-pans and in-cam­era trick­ery to cam­eras that ran on tracks from under­neath the sound stage, and a sound design that has only ever been matched since by the lone fig­ures of Robert Alt­man and David Lynch.

It’s not hard to see why, in this of all times, crit­ics might be drawn to a film like Jeanne Diel­man. It is essen­tial­ly the anti-Kane film, in that it’s anti-nar­ra­tive, a‑cinematic, un-French and very much a repost to the oth­er­wise dom­i­nant male gaze. It would be nei­ther unfair nor inac­cu­rate to describe it as the arche­typ­al me-too film.

The film fol­lows a bour­geois, mid­dle aged wid­ow over the course of three days as she method­i­cal­ly goes about her dai­ly chores. Prepar­ing the evening meal for her teenage son, clean­ing the house, and sex­u­al­ly ser­vic­ing the male client that arrives each after­noon, and whose mon­ey she relies on to be able to pay the rent. On the sec­ond day, she starts to unrav­el, and on the third she had a breakdown.

Almost every scene is filmed in one long take, on a sin­gle cam­era that sits at waist height, with almost no edit­ing and absolute­ly no trick­ery what­so­ev­er. And what we see her doing, in a defi­ant­ly anti-nar­ra­tive vein, are all the things that con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive cin­e­ma leaves out. 

So when, for instance, she sits down at the kitchen table and begins to peel the first of four pota­toes, you just know the cam­era is going to sit there duti­ful­ly record­ing her as she method­i­cal­ly pro­ceeds to peel all four of them, one after the oth­er. In one long and tri­umphant­ly undra­mat­ic sin­gle take.

In oth­er words, it’s cov­er­ing the same ter­rain, themes and sub­ject mat­ter as the won­der­ful Agnes War­da, but it does so by com­bin­ing the stric­tures and anti-tech­niques that Andy Warhol had pio­neered in the 60s, with the sto­ries told in Polanski’s The Ten­ant and Bunuel’s Belle De Jour.

All of which might have been okay over a crisp 90 min­utes. But it’s t h r e e  and a h a l f hours long. I know in my ear­ly twen­ties, I’d have proud­ly sat all the way through this sort of thing, before loud­ly bor­ing my friends about it over end­less pints. But at this stage of my life, I have to con­fess, I found it so mes­mer­i­cal­ly dull that it quick­ly became torturous. 

There are, hap­pi­ly, an ever-larg­er num­ber of films direct­ed by women that deserve to be loud­ly cel­e­brat­ed: Debra Granik’s Leave no Trace (2018) and Winter’s Bone (2010), Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009) and The Pow­er of the Dog (2021), Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002) and You Were Nev­er Real­ly There (2017), Kel­ly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cut­off (2010), Char­lotte Wells’ After­sun (2022) (reviewed by me here), Sami­ra Makhmalbaf’s The Apple (1998), Sal­ly Pot­ter ‘s Orlan­do (1992), Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Lina Wertmuller’s Blood Feud, (1978).

All of which rep­re­sent a won­der­ful con­tin­u­a­tion of the explo­ration and exper­i­men­ta­tion that Welles had begun with Cit­i­zen Kane, which was and is a giant of a film. Jeanne Diel­man is not.

Watch the 2 trail­ers below, and decide which of the two films you’d be most excit­ed about sit­ting through.

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