SYNOPSIS: A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow—whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.
| Jeanne Dielman | Delphine Seyrig |
| Sylvain Dielman | Jan Decorte |
| First caller | Henri Storck |
| Second caller | Jacques Doniol-Valcroze |
| Third caller | Yves Bical |
| Director | Chantal Akerman |
| Writer | Danae Maroulacou |
| Cinematography | Babette Mangolte |
| Producer | Evelyn Paul |
| Art director | Philippe Graff |
| Editing | Patricia Canino |
| Assistant directors | Serge Brodsky, Marianne de Muylder and Marilyn Watelet |
| Sound | Benie Deswarte and Francoise Van Thienen |
| Sound editing | Alain Marchal |
| Sound mixer | Jean Paul Loublier |
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET
By August 18, 2009
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, a mesmerizing study of stasis and Read more »
October 29, 2009
With fifty-six terrific entries and more than six hours of content, it was difficult to pick a winner of the Jeanne Dielman–Criterion Collection Cooking Video Contest, but Read more »
February 23, 2010
Babette Mangolte, the French-born, New York–residing artist best known to Criterion viewers for her work as cinematographer on so many of Chantal Akerman’s films Read more »
July 28, 2009
A traveling exhibition of installation works by Chantal Akerman, currently at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (its final stop in the United States, ending August 2 Read more »
September 03, 2009
In his Huffington Post review of our new release of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Mike Miley notes that “Akerman was twenty Read more »
