Kino Eye: Chantal Ackerman and “the greatest film”
Every ten years the great and good around the film magazine Sight and Sound come together to list the one hundred greatest films ever made. Personally, I find this sort of exercise rather pointless. I mention it only because the number one slot has just gone to Chantal Ackerman for her film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce 1080, Bruxelles , made in 1975. Previous winners have all been men. Ackerman, who died in 2015, was a Belgian daughter of Holocaust survivors. She was a feminist whose work never embraced the mainstream, and was influenced early in her career by Jean-Luc Godard. In...