A chamber drama; a revenge film; a structuralist experiment; a feminist deflation of the male-dominated sphere of narrative cinema; a daring test of viewer patience and the limits of a 35mm film roll; a canny exercise in the most rudimentary tenets of filmic suspense; a catalogue of the patterns and textures of 1970s Brussels; a thorough spatial study of a single apartment within that city; a touching tribute to the domestic labors of a mother; and an incidental step-by-step instructional video on home-cooking essentials—the inexhaustibility of Akerman's Jeanne Dielman is such that no cursory categorization of it suffices. Belatedly released in the United States on the currents of growing countercultural hype, the film, which charts several days in the life of a stay-at-home matriarch played by Delphine Seyrig, was positioned by Village Voice critic J. Hoberman at the time as an artistic apex within the structuralist strand of the avant-garde. Now, it can be seen as even more monumental in its film-historical significance; its formal rigor, while deeply indebted to the artisanal filmmaking that preceded it, also sends ripples across the history of international arthouse cinema, having affected artists as disparate as Béla Tarr and Jiayin Liu.