Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

NEW 35mm PRINT!  │ Chantal Akerman’s brilliant second feature — made with an all-female crew in 1975 when the Belgian-born director was 25 — is one of most important films of the 1970s and one of the key works of feminist cinema. French luminary Delphine Seyrig (Last Year at Marienbad, India Song) plays a Brussels widow and housewife who works as a prostitute on the side, entertaining gentlemen callers in the modest flat she shares with her sullen teenage son (Jan Decorte). In the film’s meticulous, radically minimalist but remarkably intense real-time chronicle of this woman’s highly ordered day-to-day routine, the mundane details of housework — peeling potatoes, for instance, or making a bed — are given dramatic/narrative weight equal to or greater than sex — or murder! Shot with great precision by Babette Mangolte, Ackerman’s sly film transforms the drudgery of “woman’s work” into hypnotic horror show — and turns the basic ingredients of the 1940s “women’s-film” weepie into a subversive, modernist masterwork. (Is it any surprise Todd Haynes is a huge fan?) Jeanne Dielman screens here in a newly struck 35mm print; it has only been seen (when it has been seen at all) in 16mm prints since debuting in North America more than three decades ago. (It also figured, playing on a small video monitor, in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s recent exhibition “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution”; one suspects few would have viewed it in its entirety in that context.)  “Jeanne Dielman plays like a slow-motion thriller . . . Akerman’s 1975 movie is still massively important . . . Don’t be spooked by the daunting length or the formalist mise-en-scène . . . Jeanne Dielman is immersion cinema, a brilliant example of maximal minimalism that fuses viewer with subject so profoundly, the marathon experience transcends simple spectatorship” (Stephen Garrett, Time Out New York) .  “A great movie . . . Akerman makes a spectacle unique in film history out of Seyrig’s daily chores. . . In affect, it resembles late Hitchcock, but what Hitch used to set the table, Akerman turns into virtually the entire film” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice). Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 201 mins.