‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ Tops Sight And Sound Best Picture Poll, Marking A First For Female Directors

Bruce Haring
·1 min read

Move over, Citizen Kane. There’s a new best film ever, according to the most recent Sight & Sound poll.

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (usually shortened to Jeanne Dielman), a 1975 drama, is now atop Sight and Sound’s ten-year poll of critics asked to name the best film of all-time. The 2022 win by Akerman marks the first time a woman director has topped the list, which previously has never even had a woman in its top ten.

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Sight and Sound’s poll is considered a bellwether of changing cinematic tastes. The naming of Jeanne Dielman is a triumph for feminist and avant garde perspectives in filmmaking, and can perhaps be owed to the poll expanding its critics’ pool in 2012, marking the first time that Jeanne Dielman entered the list, coming in at number 35. Now, it stands atop the 2022 list.

The film is not an easy sit, coming in at three-and-a-half hours. The film charts the breakdown of a bourgeois Belgian housewife, mother, and part-time prostitute over the course of three days.

Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) dominated the Sight and Sound list for 40 years, from 1962 to 2002, bracketed at one end, in 2012, by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and in the first poll in 1952, by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948).

Akerman died at age 65 on October 5, 2015, reportedly by suicide.

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