JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES

<![CDATA[<i>]]>Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles<![CDATA[</i>]]> is Chantal Akerman's 1975 experiment in film form, an astonishing work of subtextual feminism which has to count as one of the seminal films of the 1970s. As esteemed critic Manny Farber noted, Akerman's portrait of the daily household routines and self-imposed patterns of a Belgian single mother successfully merged such diverse generic movements as the matriarchal passion play, the architectural ethnography, and the non-narrative examinations of filmed space pioneered by Michael Snow and Andy Warhol into one cohesive precis. Because Akerman's scenario and her realization of it are so provocatively heterogeneous, and because the interpretations of the film's place in the canon of great cinema are so varied (and also because Akerman's editing rhythms and pacing are as methodical and unhurried as Stanley Kubrick's), some have called it the \"domestic 2001.\"