Chantal Akerman

The Museo Reina Sofía screens Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Chantal Akerman’s (Brussels, 1950 – Paris, 2015) classic and widely acclaimed film. The screening is presented by Laura Mulvey, an historian and feminist film theorist and author of the essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Film Narrative’, first published the same year as Akerman’s film was released.  

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a film about the life of a mother, housewife and widow — masterfully played by Delphine Seyrig — who turns to prostitution in Brussels to provide for her son. Shot with the analytical gaze of Babette Mangolte, the work challenges obvious readings as it does not denounce sexual exploitation or women’s domestic life as a prison. Rather, it centres on the time in someone’s life marked by routine collapse and how these moments reveal the chasms of existence. In parallel, it looks at film’s capacity to sidestep preconceptions and put forward a narrative with keys that the audience must learn to unravel. It was perhaps for this reason that it was selected in 2022 as the greatest film of all time by the British magazine Sight and Sound in a poll it holds every ten years based on the votes of more than 1,600 international critics, programmers and academics.    

This screening is in conjunction with the Chantal Akerman series assembled on the Filmin platform and based, to a large degree, on the retrospective on the film-maker organised by the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española in 2016.  

Laura Mulvey (Oxford, 1941) is a professor of Film Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975, originally published in Screen), a pivotal essay in feminist film analysis. She is also a film-maker and author of the books Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (Reaktion Books, 2019) and Visual and Other Pleasures: Language, Discourse, Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 1989).

Credits

Director:

Chantal Akerman

Production:

Paul Vecchiali, Liliane de Kermadec, Alain Dahan, Guy Cavagnac, Corinne Jénart e Evelyne Paul

Script:

Chantal Akerman

Cast:

Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze e Yves Bical

Photography:

Babette Mangolte

Sound:

Bénie Deswarte, Alain Marchall y Françoise Van Thienen

Editing:

Patricia Canino

Sound design and mixing:

Javier Umpierrez

Make-up:

Éliane Marcus