Chantal Akerman

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

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 as 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.

Film Info

  • France, Belgium
  • 1975
  • 201 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • French
  • Spine #484

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New 2K digital restoration, undertaken by the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique and supervised by director Chantal Akerman and cinematographer Babette Mangolte, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Autour de “Jeanne Dielman,” a documentary—shot by actor Sami Frey and edited by Agnès Ravez and Akerman—made during the filming of Jeanne Dielman
  • Interviews from 2009 with Akerman and Mangolte
  • Excerpt from “Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman,” a 1997 episode of the French television program Cinéma de notre temps
  • Interview from 2007 with Akerman’s mother, Natalia
  • Excerpt from a 1976 television interview featuring Akerman and actor Delphine Seyrig
  • Saute ma ville (1968), Akerman’s first film, with an introduction by the director
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar Ivone Margulies

    New cover by Steve Chow

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978

Blu-ray Box Set

3 Discs

$69.95

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New 2K digital restoration, undertaken by the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique and supervised by director Chantal Akerman and cinematographer Babette Mangolte, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Autour de “Jeanne Dielman,” a documentary—shot by actor Sami Frey and edited by Agnès Ravez and Akerman—made during the filming of Jeanne Dielman
  • Interviews from 2009 with Akerman and Mangolte
  • Excerpt from “Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman,” a 1997 episode of the French television program Cinéma de notre temps
  • Interview from 2007 with Akerman’s mother, Natalia
  • Excerpt from a 1976 television interview featuring Akerman and actor Delphine Seyrig
  • Saute ma ville (1968), Akerman’s first film, with an introduction by the director
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar Ivone Margulies

    New cover by Steve Chow
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Cast
Delphine Seyrig
Jeanne Dielman
Jan Decorte
Sylvain Dielman
Henri Storck
First client
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
Second client
Yves Bical
Third client
Credits
Director
Chantal Akerman
Written by
Chantal Akerman
Cinematographer
Babette Mangolte
Producer
Evelyne Paul
Producer
Corinne Jénart
Art director
Philippe Graff
Editor
Patricia Canino
Assistant director
Marilyn Watelet
Assistant director
Serge Brodsky
Assistant director
Marianne De Muylder
Sound
Bénie Deswarte
Sound
Françoise Van Thienen
Sound editor
Alain Marchal
Sound mixer
Jean-Paul Loublier
Script supervisor
Danae Maroulacou

Current

The Routine Pleasures of Jeanne Dielman
The Routine Pleasures of Jeanne Dielman
Chantal Akerman’s audacious narrative features and intimate documentaries forever changed the way we experience the rhythms of everyday life on-screen. In her most widely acclaimed masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, …
Chantal Akerman, 1968–1978: The Weight of Being
Chantal Akerman, 1968–1978: The Weight of Being

In the first ten years of her extraordinary career, the Belgian filmmaker used the raw materials of quotidian, marginal lives to spark a radical reinvention of cinema.

By Beatrice Loayza

A Matter of Time: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
A Matter of Time: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, a mesmerizing study of stasis and containment, time and domestic anxiety. Stretching its title character’s daily household routine in long, stark takes, Akerma…

By Ivone Margulies

Nina Menkes’s Top 10
Nina Menkes’s Top 10

The director of Queen of Diamonds shares a list of favorite films, including uncompromising classics of world cinema that reveal the mysteries of the human condition.

An Enigma Made Flesh: Delphine Seyrig in Golden Eighties

Performances

An Enigma Made Flesh: Delphine Seyrig in Golden Eighties

In her last significant film role, the art-house icon reveals an emotional vulnerability previously hidden by her ethereal persona.

By Beatrice Loayza

Lili Horvát’s Top 10
Lili Horvát’s Top 10

The director of Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time chooses a selection of masterpieces that shaped her desire to become a filmmaker.

The Art of the Chore: Roberta Cantow’s Feminist Classic Clotheslines

Deep Dives

The Art of the Chore: Roberta Cantow’s Feminist Classic Clotheslines

A domestic ritual inspires feelings of resentment, nostalgia, and aesthetic passion in this short documentary from 1981.

By Neyat Yohannes

Explore

Chantal Akerman

Director, Writer

Chantal Akerman
Chantal Akerman

One of the boldest cinematic visionaries of the past quarter century, the film-school dropout Chantal Akerman took a profoundly personal and aesthetically idiosyncratic approach to the form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and religion. Influenced by the structural cinema she was exposed to when she came to New York from her native Belgium in 1970, at age twenty (work by artists like Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, and Andy Warhol), Akerman made her mark in the decade that followed, playing with long takes and formal repetition in her films, which include the architectural meditation Hotel Monterey (1972), the obsessive portrait of estrangement Je tu il elle (1975), the autobiographical New York elegy News from Home (1976), and the austere antiromance Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978). Her greatest achievement, however, is her epic 1975 experiment Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a hypnotic study of a middle-aged widow’s stifling routine widely considered one of the great feminist films. Such later Akerman films as the Proust adaptation La captive (2000) and the documentary on Mexican-to-U.S. immigration From the Other Side (2002) retain her daring, vital voice.