Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Lucid, lively and extremely knowledgeable. Sight & Sound Catherine Fowlers study positions Jeanne Dielman as a contrary classic, its contrariness arising from director Chantal Akermans decision to frame an unliberated housewife through a kind of slow looking. By choosing to stay with Jeanne in the kitchen, the film both differences the canon and diverges from Akermans liberated early films, which involved the rejection of domestic space, married life and the heterosexual script. Fowler draws on original footage, scripts, unmade and unseen projects, interviews and other documents to painstakingly piece together the making of the film, discovering an alternative origin story which centers upon female alliances, forged through a combination of shared film culture and lived sexism. Those viewers who take up Akermans invitation to spend time with Jeanne will find their expectations of cinema are changed. Because more than any other film before or since, it reminds us that we give our time to a film; and in making us look both harder and for longer it asks us to feel time slipping away, for ourselves as much as for its protagonist. See more