A feminist film has just been crowned "best film of all time"

A feminist and progressive wind is blowing on Sight and Sound’s influential top 100 films of all time list, which this year crowned Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman” at number one.

Are the lines moving in the world of cinema and movie-loving entertainment? For the first time, an administrator was elected in the first place from the influential classification of Sight and sound. This is Chantal Akerman, for her film Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brusselsreleased in 1975.

A feminist film with Delphine Seyrig

The British film magazine offers its own Top 100 Movies of All Time every decade since 1952. In other words, it took 70 years (and the passage of #MeToo) for the work of female filmmakers to finally be recognized and valued as it deserves.

If this list of awards is so amazing, it’s because with Jeanne Dielmann, Chantal Akerman has made a film in which it is particularly easy to see a great feminist reach. Over a period of more than 3 hours, the director films Delphine Seyrig in his daily life single mother And prostitutewhile performing it Houseworks, day after day. The film is distinguished by the fact of filming a reality which is then not considered as worthy of interest in cinema and society.

Female directors, racialized filmmakers and Polanski coming out

The fact that this film was crowned best film of all time is no accident. The 2022 poll was the largest since 1952 : to constitute it, it is not less than 1639 reviews, conservatives, programmers, writers and scholars who chose his ten best movies. For the first time a director has dethroned Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo was number one in 2012), as well as Orson Welles: Citizen Kane busy first place from 1962 to 2002.

After all, this wind of progress was not limited to first place. While only the top of 2012 counted two directors (Chantal Akerman and Claire Denis), they are now eleven (And four in the top 20 !), of which Céline Sciamma, Agnès Varda or even Jane Campion.

Alike, black filmmakers I am now Seven (versus only one in 2012) including Jordan Peele or Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) or Ousmane Sembène, Senegalese director.

In the end, ChinatownRoman Polanski’s only film in the charts in 2012, there is no more!