Director Chantal Akerman’s most famous for her feminist masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, wherein the seemingly unremarkable protagonist sells sex to provide for her son and herself. The prostitution is portrayed as just another part of her banal daily routine (the 201 minute long film really emphasizes routine), until an anomaly disrupts her life’s pattern, and her entire world is thrown into chaos.

Akerman was only 24 at the time of the film’s release, but her short, Saute ma Ville, or Blow up My Town, is in many ways the prelude to Jeanne Dielman, and she made that at the age of 18. Akerman actually dropped out of film school before completing a single term to work on it, selling stocks and working in an office to fund the twelve and a half minutes that eventually paved the way for her three hour plus opus.

As with Jeanne Dielman, intense, oppressive boredom and domestic isolation are the context for our heroine. Akerman herself stars as the principle, frenetically humming her way through a kind of manic episode. What starts as a routine evening at home descends into a frenzy; she tapes up the door to her cramped apartment, she smears and flings cleaning products with wild abandon, and she goes from shining her shoes to scrubbing her actual leg with the stiff-bristled brush.

Akerman credits her artistic awakening to a viewing of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou at the age of 15, and the French New Wave influence is obvious—themes of torturous, lonely bourgeois life told with intimacy and informality. Akerman however, adds a horrifying dimension of psychosis that both discomfits and fascinates.
 

 
Via Network Awesome