Meet the Worst "Best" Film of All Time

In its 2022 poll comprising over 1600 movie critics, Sight and Sound Magazine elected "Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles" (even the title is boring) as the greatest film of all time. It jumped over 30 positions since last decade and surpassed "Citizen Kane" and "Vertigo". We know the reason wasn't cinema, but let's talk about it some other day.

It's about a widowed housewife doing household chores... in real time. If you absolutely adore potatoes and everything revolving around the act of consuming potatoes, you'll have a blast.

In this video essay I go through the "plot" of "Jeanne Dielman" to find the strengths and weaknesses of this grueling 1975 Belgian film by Chantal Akerman. The framing is truly terrific and it's interesting to see how the film manipulates your expectations concerning what a film is supposed to show you. You get so used to long repetitive household actions that you get startled when they go slightly wrong. A good 45-minute short film bloated to not-so-good 201 minutes.

To better illustrate how unsuccessful this overlong exercise is, we'll compare it to another example of slow cinema that's obsessed with long takes featuring everyday rituals: "The Turin Horse" by Hungarian director Béla Tarr. You'll find out why it succeeds where "Jeanne Dielman" fails.

00:00 Jeanne Dielman
07:09 The Turin Horse (Spoilers)
08:15 End of spoilers
09:18 Why Jeanne Dielman doesn't work


Scheming Weasel (faster version) by Kevin MacLeod http://incompetech.com
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