DVD of the Week: Jeanne Dielman

Amazingly, the 1975 film “Jeanne Dielman” (or, by its full title, “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”), which I discuss in this clip, is the work of a twenty-four-year-old director. Chantal Akerman had started making films at age eighteen. (Happily, she is still working, and still making exceptionally beautiful and original films—her most recent one, “Almayer’s Folly,” was recently screened several times in New York). “Jeanne Dielman” is her second dramatic feature; and it’s a signal act of modernism that fuses—or, rather, deconstructs—the classical melodrama with feminist ideology, personal history, documentary curiosity, video-art-like installations, and an extraordinarily straightforward, Gordian-knot-cutting way with character-based empathy. It’s the kind of radical artistic simplification that embodies and conveys an amazingly complex web of ideas. As such, it’s one of the most influential—and one of the most surprisingly beautiful—films of the post-‘68 era.