Experts have compiled a list of the best films of all time: the leader of the rating will surprise you

The world's leading film magazines often conduct polls among film critics, directors and their readers to find out which films they consider to be the best. One of the most authoritative and influential is the survey conducted once every ten years by the British Film Institute (BFI) magazine Sight and Sound. But the result of this year's survey shocked everyone. The edition told in more detail with the BBC.

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Surprise Winner

The result of this year's survey was simply dumbfounded by its results. Even for many sophisticated moviegoers, not to mention the average viewer, a modest picture with a long title "Jeanne Dilman, Quay Commerce 23, Brussels 1080" was completely unknown.

However, this film managed to get ahead of the films that have been at the top for decades. Among them are Citizen Kane by Orson Welles, Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock, Apocalypse of Our Day by Francis Ford Coppola and many others.

The film "Jeanne Dielman, Quay Commerce 23, Brussels 1080" was filmed in 1975 by 25-year-old Chantal Ackerman, a Belgian director.

Ackerman was born in 1950 in Brussels to Jewish immigrants from Poland. The mother and her relatives ended up in Auschwitz during the Second World War, only the mother returned from there.

A typical child of the 1960s, Ackerman began her career in cinema under the strong influence of the experimental avant-garde cinema of the time: Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas.

Nevertheless, "Jeanne Dielman" is completely devoid of any cinematic delights. The extremely long film (3,5 hours) was shot with an extremely simple, almost static camera. Most of the film takes place in the interior of a simple Brussels apartment, where an ordinary woman who has lost her husband lives with her teenage son.

The son is the whole reason for her existence. She spends her days shopping, cooking, cleaning the apartment and taking care of her son. To support the family's meager budget during the day, while her son is at school, she engages in prostitution, taking quite decent, respectable middle-class clients at home.

At the same time, Jeanne treats her occupation with the same indifferent mechanistic automatism as she treats the rest of her daily life.

The life of mother and son is stingy not only financially, but, at first glance, emotionally. They practically do not communicate, although they are reservedly benevolent to each other, there are no quarrels or quarrels between them. There is no TV in the house, only occasionally the radio is turned on.

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The visual palette of the film is also stingy. Long static close-ups, no music at all. The main character is almost all the time in the frame - for a long time and thoroughly engaged in her routine work.

And although the description seems that the film is very boring, in fact, watching all this does not get bored at all. In the cold dignity of this woman, one feels an incredibly hidden tension, the tension of an extremely compressed spring that is about to break.

None of this, however, happens. So far, seemingly completely insignificant at first glance, the episode - accidentally left on the stove and overcooked potatoes - does not lead one after another to equally insignificant failures in the usual impeccable automatism: slightly disheveled hair, an unbuttoned dressing gown button, a coffee maker that suddenly breaks, accidentally dropped brush for cleaning shoes.

The film acquires the magic of a bewitching hypnotic effect, it is absolutely impossible to take your eyes off it, despite the minimum of action. Tension builds: Zhanna unnaturally long, without raising her eyes, with an almost contorted face, stirs the minced meat, motionless, staring at one point, sits in an armchair.

Until a completely unexpected orgasm during a routine and at first habitually indifferent sex work leads to a bloody denouement, after which an unprecedented peace and tranquility can be seen in her face (in the last frame of the film).

Tribute to feminism

Jeanne Dielman is the first film by a female director to achieve such significant recognition.

Although, of course, in the history of cinema there is also the recognized master of the French new wave Agnès Varda (her film "Cleo from 5 to 7" is on the list in 14th place), and the winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes Jane Campion, and the first female Oscar winner Catherine Bigelow.

Immediately after the release of "Jeanne Dielman", in January 1976, the French newspaper Le Monde called the film "the first masterpiece of femininity in the history of cinema."

In the isolation of the harsh and meager life of Zhanna Dilman, there is no habitual soft compliance usually associated with femininity. There is not even the slightest sign of the militant activism of the feminist movement characteristic of the 60-70s of the last century.

Oddly enough, it was precisely this then revolutionary view of the life of a woman that turned out to be to the taste of the modern viewer.

The path of "Jeanne Dielman" to success was a long one. Unfortunately, Chantal Ackerman did not live to see him. She died in 2015 at the age of 65 - she committed suicide after a long depression.

However, even during her lifetime, in a previous British Film Institute poll in 2012, her hitherto almost forgotten film was unexpectedly ranked 35th on the list. And now an even more unexpected and all the more remarkable triumph.

"The success of Jeanne Diehlmann is a great reminder that there are many little-known and underappreciated gems lurking in the depths of world cinema," said Mike Williams, editor-in-chief of BFI's Sight and Sound magazine.

Hole in the wall

“Finally: a real shake-up, a hole in the wall, a challenge to the established canon, a shift in the seemingly unshakable practice of shuffling the same names in a slightly changing order at the top,” an influential and authoritative film critic for the Guardian commented with undisguised delight and enthusiasm. Peter Bradshaw.

And, indeed, in the 70 years of its existence, only three films have consistently come out on top in the Sight and Sound magazine poll. In the very first poll, in 1952, the winner was the neo-realist classic Bicycle Thieves (1948) by the Italian Vittorio de Sica, then for half a century in five polls in a row (from 1962 to 2002) Citizen Kane was the permanent leader ( 1941) by Orson Welles, until ten years ago (in 2012) it was replaced by Vertigo (1958) by Alfred Hitchcock.

And although it is impossible to argue with the fact that these films are in fact masterpieces, nevertheless, something new on the list is very pleasing. At the same time, Jeanne Dielman, although it pushed them off the pedestal, is not far off: Vertigo is in second place, Citizen Kane is in third.

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Further in the top ten are "Tokyo Tale" (1953) by Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, "In the Mood for Love" (2000) by Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai, "Space Odyssey 2001" (1968) by Stanley Kubrick, "Beautiful Work" (1999) by Frenchwoman Claire Denis, Mulholland Drive (2001) by David Lynch, Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov and Singing in the Rain (1952) by Gene Kelly.

The survey is conducted among a huge (over 1600 this year) pool of leading film critics from around the world.

In addition to the Critics' Poll, there is also a Top Film Directors Poll, which this year featured the likes of Martin Scorsese, Sofia Coppola, Bong Joon Ho, Mike Lee and many more.

The choice of directors is somewhat different from the choice of critics. In their combined opinion in 2022, the best film of all time is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Next on their list are Francis Ford Coppola's Citizen Kane and The Godfather. The fourth and fifth places were shared by the winner of the critics' selection "Jeanne Dielman, Quay Commerce 23, Brussels 1080" and "Tokyo Tale". Vertigo shares sixth place with Federico Fellini's Eight and a Half.

Rounding out the top ten are Andrey Tarkovsky's Mirror, In the Mood for Love, Ingmar Bergman's Persona, and Close Up by Iranian Abbas Kiarostami, who shared 7th-10th places.

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