Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Ackerman, 1975)

The BFI’s screenings of JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 COMMERCE QUAY, 1080 BRUXELLES were all sold out. Luckily, we were both able to see it on a big screen elsewhere. In this podcast we discuss why this is a film to see on a big screen, how it remains a radical film, how the first scene sets a context, how Jeanne Dielman lives in a pimped world where the very same money she gets from men she gives to men. We discuss how the bare bones of the story could have been done as melodrama or noir and the significance of rendering it as ‘slow cinema’, including all that’s been left out of cinema previously (the various kinds of women’s work). We admire the three-day structure as well as the formal rigour and precision which creates Dielman’s world and Ackerman’s point-of-view on it; how the film puts into play elements that are never rendered explicit (is the son gay?). We also discuss Delphine Seyrig, the muse insoumise, in the light of her art-house and activist careers (the program for the Queen Sofia exhibition on her work and career is in the blogpost); the film itself in the context of Second Wave Feminism; how the film remains radical in that it is simultaneously a depiction of what Tate brothers bros think women should be, a refutation of those ideas, and women’s frustration/ explosion/ revenge in response. A film that is almost half a century old and feels continuously relevant