Sight and Sound finally got around to releasing their famous list of The 100 Greatest Films of All Time, a poll of critics that's been conducted every 10 years since 1952. This year, 1975's Jeanne Dielman took the top spot, rising from #35 in the 2012 poll, knocking my favourite movie, Vertigo, to second place. In one stroke, Sight and Sound has rendered itself irrelevant to anyone who understands cinema and the general movie going populace alike.
Are these sour grapes? Frankly, even when Vertigo won back in 2012, I questioned whether it deserved it. Vertigo is my favourite movie because I have a personal relationship with it. It doesn't surprise me that quite a few people don't appreciate or understand the significance of Vertigo. Meanwhile, I've never shown Citizen Kane to someone who didn't see what was great about it. Whether someone is a cinephile or only interested in popcorn flicks, it's clear as crystal from the way the 1941 film jumps through time and hits the ground running, its pacing, performances, and compositions are still so compulsively watchable it can't be denied.
Art is inherently subjective but I feel like there are ways to strive for objectivity. You can measure a film's relative greatness by its influence on other artists in the industry, by the techniques that the film popularised, by the people who worked on the film who subsequently produced highly regarded work. On all three of these counts, Citizen Kane is a clear winner. Vertigo's influence is obvious, too, to anyone who's paid attention to romance in almost any suspense film made after it. But Jeanne Dielman? In the lists I've seen of directors who've acknowledged its influence, the only prominent name is Gus Van Sant. When I watch the film, I mainly see the films it was influenced by.
The influence of Ozu is obvious. The unmoving camera and compositions using architecture and furniture to create layers of proscenia. There's even often the single red object, like the ones Ozu used to stand in for the seal typically seen as a signature in traditional Japanese painting. The film's tone also owes something to Tarkovsky and Bresson and Melville.
The essay by Laura Mulvey included with the Sight and Sound poll results this year predictably hails the film as "radically feminist". Mulvey has her own personal relationship with the film and in this age in which academics esteem their own creative readings of a text above the intentions of the artists, Jeanne Dielman is a perfect choice.
The almost three and a half hour film mostly consists of watching a woman--often identified in reviews as a housewife despite the fact that she's unmarried--going about the mundane activities of her day. It's like a Rorschach test. As we watch her going about her mindless chores--cooking dinner, doing the dishes, polishing her son's shoes--we're giving so little information that the mind, or the mind with the will to focus, compulsively starts to generate interpretations. The more active the mind, the more willing to impose an interpretation on the film, the more rewarding the experience. If art is a mirror, this is one that shows critics to themselves in the most flattering light. It shows anyone looking to have a good time at the movies the door. Or, for a great many, the inside of their eyelids. And, of course, the arduous task of watching the film in itself places a barrier between the critical clique and the rabble.
I don't believe a film has to be "accessible" to be great. I'm sure many people could say a Tarkovsky or Dreyer movie is just as boring. And Jeanne Dielman has its merits. Careful viewing of its title character reveals aspects of her personality that will be important for the salacious climax that finally shows up. The fact that the film spends an excessive amount of time establishing its clues make them seem more profound than they are. In reality, a control freak who starts making mistakes, who has an experience like the one she has in bed at the end of the film, doesn't necessarily take the action she takes. To say that one inevitably follows the other could almost be called misogynistic, even misanthropic. As a portrait of an individual, though, rather than a symbol, the film is an interesting image of a zealous desire for conformity.
Jeanne Dielman is not an everywoman. Anyone who takes her as a symbol of the lives of women anywhere isn't paying attention. This is a woman who sleeps in a room with wood the same colour as her hair, who wears clothes the same colour as her spotless walls. Neither she nor anyone around her engage in small talk that ever comes off as believably human. It's like watching a film about living mannequins. It's consciously stylised, again, clearly influenced by Ozu, but lacking Ozu's interest in human warmth. Mostly it feels like exactly what it is, a film made by an inexperienced, somewhat interesting filmmaker who has yet to establish her own voice from the collective of her influences.
As a film ranked anywhere in the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time, it's obviously a political choice. But politics are clearly a heavy influence on the list which includes also movies like Moonlight and Parasite but lacks a single Tarantino film, a filmmaker whose name has become a byword for great filmmaking. It lacks a single Steven Spielberg film, a John Huston film, a Roman Polanski film. If influence truly were the metric, obviously Star Wars should be on the list. So now we can toss this on the pile that includes the Oscars and much of the academic establishment, an institutionalised parody of a time when people used to have real belief in the merits of art, rather than zealous fixations on theory and politics.
Jeanne Dielman is available on The Criterion Channel.
"While all the critics find great meaning in the telephone book" - "Pixie", Ani DiFranco
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