JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1975) – Chantal Akerman

What happens when nothing happens?

What happens when, across three hours and twenty-one minutes, a woman makes meatloaf, peels potatoes, polishes shoes, turns on lamps, and welcomes a client before her son returns from school?

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman is not merely a film. It is a liturgy of repetition. A cinematic sculpture carved from routine. Akerman builds the film with such precision, such restraint, that what we witness is not drama but a kind of existential calligraphy — each gesture, each silence, traced again and again until the smallest deviation feels like a scream.

The camera never intrudes. It simply watches. And in this act of watchfulness, time becomes a weight. It settles over the viewer like dust on a windowsill. Slowly, the horror emerges — not from murder or betrayal or spectacle, but from the soft unraveling of a life bound too tightly by duty, silence, and invisibility.

Jeanne’s tragedy is not what happens in the end, but what we see happening all along: a woman crushed beneath the impossibility of perfection, trapped in a ritual of servitude that has erased her name, her spirit, her self.

Akerman, at 25, delivered not just a film, but a cinematic rebellion — against the patriarchy, against narrative convention, against speed and noise. She offered stillness as revolution. In doing so, she made Jeanne Dielman not just a film about a woman, but a film that becomes a woman — meticulous, compressed, tender, terrifying.

This is not cinema as escape. It is cinema as mirror.
A quiet masterpiece. A monument to the invisible.

Let it be enshrined.