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 20th 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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