https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/movies/best-movies-since-2000.html#2021
Explore 25 years of NYT movie coverage, and find your next film from this collection of critics’ favorites from each year.
This item will be released April 10, 2025.
This edition of the Millennium Film Journal is marked, above all, by grief. We felt it painfully during our fall screening at Anthology Film Archives in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, and later as wildfires tore through Los Angeles, devastating members of our community directly and irrevocably. Loss is a part of human life, always, everywhere, but today there seems so much to mourn, as wars rage, ecosystems collapse, injustices multiply and worsen, and hopes of humanitarian justice founder.
Excerpted from Nicholas Gamso’s Introduction, MFJ 81 “Dedication” (Spring 2025).
Gunvor Nelson was a profound presence in my life – a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute first and then for decades a dear friend. Her films made you think about everything from the taste of a shiny green apple to the mortal coil. Whether using a light meter or working with the laboratory on the timing lights for a new film, Gunvor relished every aspect of her art, including the technology. I would sit with her for hours in front of a 16mm editing machine, knowing that I was learning from a brilliant, committed artist with the most lucid, precise advice.
“Before you shoot film, it is helpful to think through what style of editing would be most appropriate so that you will not leave out necessary liaisons or steps.”
Transitions were extremely important to Gunvor. She was always thinking about how to enter the front door of an image and how and when to get out. A shot was like an airport and the arrival and departure times of every single plane were critical. Otherwise there might be too much chaos on the tarmac!
“Surprising solutions can be had with the most deficient of material if you let it speak to you, if you learn what really is in the film. Sharp jumps in the editing can be, at the right places, most exhilarating.”
One of the most lasting suggestions Gunvor made to me was that a filmmaker should always return to their outtakes just before the completion of a film. These “mistakes” that were initially disregarded become extremely useful punctuation – like a period or an exclamation mark – that assists the completion of a visual thought.
Gunvor’s movies also made me think about being a woman in the most visceral ways. Here film “Schmeerguntz” (1965) captured the raw, messy ecstasy of being a mother, and her film “My Name is Oona” (1969) celebrated the fierce passion of her daughter Oona Nelson, inspiring me to shoot 16mm footage that spins, dances and, soars with my daughters Maya and Noa.
A few years ago, I traveled to Gunvor’s home in Kristinehamn, Sweden, to spend time with her as I was making my film “Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor” (2018). We often found ourselves in her lush garden just outside the back door. On our last day, we were standing in front of a patch of snapdragons when she decided she couldn’t resist being my teacher again. She noted that everyone shoots colorful, living flowers. It’s more interesting and sculptural, she explained, to film the dead ones.
I am reminded of Gunvor often – in dreams and in my consciousness as an artist. Like Cézanne, she was more intrigued by the shapes that surround an object than the object itself.
“Study negative space.”
Gunvor once explained to me that when you finish editing your film, you will feel ecstatic. Then, there will be a profound sense of loss. To be inside the making of a film is an incredibly consuming fusion of the intellectual and the artistic. No matter what is going on in your home or in the world beyond, you have your film, and that, sometimes, is enough.
Lynne Sachs
I arrived in Buenos Aires in the summer of 2008, ready to immerse myself in a city with a reputation for celebrating avant-garde films with the same intensity that Hollywood lauds mainstream movies. Within the first few days of landing in Buenos Aires, I started to hear about this extraordinary 80-year-old woman who lived at the vortex of all things experimental. She had not only spent a life-time making her own work, but was also supportive of other film artists whose 16mm prints she collected and exhibited in her home. Her name was Narcisa Hirsch.
From the moment we met, I knew that I wanted to spend as much time as I could with this woman who was so candid about everything surrounding film form and feminism, in equal measure. Clearly, she had a profound interest in unraveling the ontology of cinema and challenging the way that film as an art had been hijacked by the entertainment industry. She was always thinking about the camera’s ability to rearrange reality and the way it allows us to better understand how we think and move. She made it clear that she had her own perspective and it was clearly female.
One morning I went to Narcisa’s home in the neighborhood of San Telmo. Knowing how much she loved children, I brought my camera and my young daughters Maya and Noa. She immediately explained to us that painting on an easel had “died” in the late 1960s. Consequently, she’d made and documented far more radical feminist performances, what people were starting to call “Happenings”. She created Marabunta (“swarm of ants”) collaboratively in the Buenos Aires theater where Antonioni’s Blow Up was premiering. In Munecos she gave away 500 baby dolls on the streets of London and New York City. Narcisa vividly described her first witnessing of Michael Snow’s Wavelength, fully aware of how influential this seminal 16mm film would be to her film Taller, a starkly structuralist, yet personal, survey of her own studio space. She showed us her visualization of Steve Reich’s Come Out which she integrated into a filmed document of the sound piece as it plays on a portable record player. In her mind, purchasing films by artists she respected was the best way to support the work she loved. She proudly swung open a closet which contained the work of Carolee Schneemann, Su Friedrich, Stan Brakhage and so many others.
Narcisa was exquisitely aware of what she was doing. She committed herself to filming her daily life both in the city and on her farm in Patagonia — close ups of leaves and water, her feet, a fly, her shadow in the sand as she carries her film camera, cherries on skin, a fly, a mouth luxuriating at the taste of fruit, a baby on the grass, a breast, and a belly in the sunlight. As long as she was world famous for 50 people, she was happy.
Lynne Sachs
https://www.festivalfilministes.com/edition-2025-ff
https://www.festivalfilministes.com/2025-filministes-pour-emporter
https://www.tenk.ca/en/documentaires/festival-filministes-2025/contractions
For its 8th edition the Festival Filministes is once again offering a program entirely dedicated to cinema and the art of under-represented people, both in front of and behind the camera.
This year’s resonate with current political events, portraying singular and collective struggles and bring to the screen singular and collective struggles, resilient and committed communities, and solidarity networks that reflect the multiplicity of feminist positions. For us, feminism is about solidarity with all, and in the current unsettling political and social climate, we want to emphasize the importance of put forward marginalized voices and reiterate our support for the LGBTQI2SA+, racialized, Black and Aboriginal communities.
If the worrying rise of far-right rhetoric proves one thing, it’s that we need more than ever spaces to come together, to discuss and reflect on what unites us and makes us stronger.
That’s why the Festival Filministes invites you to a celebration of feminist cinema through a program a rich program of powerful, moving and hopeful films.
Tënk Canada is a solidarity cooperative based in Tiohtiá:ke / Montreal dedicated to the promotion of creative documentary cinema. Through curation and cultural mediation, Tënk’s mandate is to make this film genre more accessible and to encourage the discovery of socially important documentaries that sometimes struggle to reach their audience.
Contractions is a much-needed film in the current political climate, as the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. Offering an intimate look at abortion rights, this experimental short exposes the poignant testimonies of people directly connected to a clinic in Memphis, Tennessee. As we observe the slow march of women and their allies to the clinic, the voices of an obstetrician and a reproductive rights activist echo the disastrous consequences of ending women’s right to a safe, legal abortion in the United States. In the film, it’s the strength of community that shines through, as these people can no longer make decisions for their own bodies.
https://membership.uniondocs.org/programs/practice-thing-lynne-sachs
“Practice Thing” is a generative ritual to encourage playing around, applying your skills, and getting unstuck in your creative endeavors with a quick helpful nudge from those who are inspiring us at UnionDocs.
March 22, 2025
We’ve assembled a godsmackin’ troika of the most superhumanly gifted women makers of our time, a truly fortuitous curatorial coup that coincides with Sachs‘ visit to the Bay Area. She is showing a ½ hr. cut from her her new feature project, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, and fielding questions about her intentions and trajectories with this current long-form. AND: Old ATA comrade (relocated to Berlin) Sylvia Schedelbauer finally peeps back up with her 24-min. multi-layered portrait of her mother, also settled in Berlin (from Japan), an astounding feat of family-archive excavation (mostly from S8 color!) that is ever-so-meticulously ordered into a profoundly resonant, and revelatory montage. The third component of this collective debut comes from Kamila Kuc, the formerly London-based cine-artiste who has now moved to the Coast, Her Plot of Blue Sky.This jaw-dropping, never-before-seen penetration of Moroccan women’s society and sub-culture (Amazigh)–in fact enabling the women to use cameras(!)–gives voice to a huge marginalized population who are accustomed to being shuttled from forced marriage to prostitution to institutionalized old age dead-ends, by an oppressively patriarchal Arab state. $14
Other Cinema is a long-standing bastion of experimental film, video, and performance in San Francisco’s Mission District. We are inspired and sustained by the ongoing practice of fine-art filmmaking, as well as engaged essay and documentary forms. But OC also embraces marginalized genres like “orphan” industrial films, home movies, ethnography, and exploitation, as media-archeological core-samples, and blows against consensus reality and the sterility of museum culture.
Whether avant-garde or engagé, our emphasis is on the radical subjectivities and sub-cultural sensibilities that find expression in what used to be called “underground cinema”.
Our calendars are curated on a semi-annual basis, mostly comprised of polymorphous group shows–several pieces, in different moving-image and intermedia formats–organized around a common theme. Almost always the artist herself appears in person, bringing new work to a energized microcinema audience opting for the provocative images and ideas only available in a non-commercial and non-academic salon environment.
Conceived and stewarded by Craig Baldwin, with a whole lotta help from ATA Gallery, Steve Polta, Christine Metropoulos, and others in a core collective whose commitment has created a space for contemporary cinematic expression and exchange.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/framework/
Framework explores a variety of topics in film, media, art, politics, and cultural studies. The journal publishes valuable and innovative work with a wide international range and promotes theoretical and avant-garde approaches from its contributors.
“This is a very special double issue devoted to the work of MM Serra: Film-Makers’ Co-operative Executive Director Emeritus, teacher, mentor, and artist. That list of titles and roles hardly indicates the extraordinary breadth of MM’s work, art and interests, her long friendships, rich artist networks, and commitment to diversity, to outsiders, to the flourishing edges. Framework’s celebratory double issue includes testimonials, art pieces, memoirs, biographies, and conversations from friends and colleagues, stitching together a multi-perspectival, layered collage of MM’s life work.”
—Drake Stutesman and Susan Potter
Introduction
MM Serra is a powerhouse New York City cinema visionary and a beloved friend since the late 1980s. As Executive Director of the Film-Makers’ Coopera- tive, Serra (as I have always called her) asked me to join the Cooperative’s board of directors in 1997, soon after I moved to town with my partner filmmaker, Mark Street, and our daughters, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs. Over the course of the next 17 years, we worked together on innumerable projects including: a 2006 anti-war exhibition (fig. 1) and DVD entitled For Life Against the War . . . Again (US, 2007), currently distributed by the FMC (fig. 2 and 3 For Life Against the War . . . Again photos); a PS1/ MoMA children’s film series entitled “Cinema of the Unusual,” curated by Maya and Noa (fig. 4 and 5 “Cinema of the Unusual” with Maya and Noa Street-Sachs photos) in 2008 and 2009; and many FMC benefits at locations like the then crumbling nineteenth-century synagogue at the Angel Orensanz Foundation in the East Village (fig. 6 and 7 Film-Makers’ Cooperative Benefit photos) and other venues around town. Together in the Coop office on Leonard Street or later on Park Avenue South, we toiled over grant applications, usually meeting their deadlines with only minutes to spare. In 2009, I co-edited the 51st issue of Millennium Film Journal (fig. 8, 9, and 10 Millennium Film Journal photos) which featured writing on the then burgeoning genre of experimental documentary and included Serra’s essay on her film Chop Off (US, 2008).
Tuesday, March 25 2025 at 7:00 PM
This program of shorts organized by Kathy Brew – including works by several artists affiliated with the29.art, with support from Women Make Movies – examines issues of conformity among women, challenges gender stereotypes, and advocates for female agency. The works, presented chronologically, span from 1989 to 2024, and underscore the fact that a woman’s right to control her own body remains critical in these dangerous times.
Kathy High I NEED YOUR FULL COOPERATION 1989, 5-min excerpt, digital
“An experimental documentary about the history of women’s treatment by the U.S. medical system, juxtaposing feminist examinations of medical practices, narratives of patient treatments, and archival footage.” –VIDEO DATA BANK
Kathy Brew MIXED MESSAGES 1990, 20 min, digital
An experimental video collage that incorporates found footage, documentary, animation, and a dream narrative in a work that examines gender-stereotyping in popular culture, concluding with a post-modern version of the Pandora myth.
Aline Mare S’ALINE’S SOLUTION 1991, 9 min, digital
A voice for the pain, an acknowledgment of the courage involved in choosing to have an abortion. An emblematic statement about an issue that remains central and vital in these dangerous times: a woman’s right to choose.
Jacqueline Frank CHOICE THOUGHTS: REFLECTIONS ON THE BIRTH CONTROL WAR 1996, 10 min, digital
“A mix of rare archival footage and sound bites from religious and political leaders, this piece looks at 100 years of the fight for birth control and legalized abortion, illuminating how access to birth control became seen as a human right and how this dialogue continues around present-day issues of choice.” –WOMEN MAKE MOVIES
Queen Elizabeth (aka Liz Canner) & Murphy Brown (aka Lara Pellegrinelli) WHY WE MARCH: SIGNS OF PROTEST AND HOPE, VOICES FROM THE WOMEN’S MARCH AFTER TRUMP WAS ELECTED IN 2016 2017, 9 min, digital
Six short pieces with women of varying ages, from young girls to older women, speaking about the right to make their own decisions about their bodies in a time when such rights are eroding.
Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater, and Mike Attie ABORTION HELPLINE, THIS IS LISA 2019, 13 min, digital
“At the Philadelphia abortion helpline, counselors field nonstop calls from women and teens who are seeking to end a pregnancy but can’t afford to, illustrating how economic stigma and cruel laws determine who has access to abortion in America.” –WOMEN MAKE MOVIES
Lynne Sachs CONTRACTIONS 2024, 12 min, digital
In the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade, this film takes us to Memphis, Tennessee, where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic.
Total running time: ca. 85 min.
https://kinotuskanac.hr/en/cycle/kratki-utorak
https://kinotuskanac.hr/en/movie/epistolarno-pismo-jeanu-vigou
Program:
E•pis•to•lar•no: pismo Jeanu Vigou / E•pis•to•lar•y: letter to Jean Vigo (Lynne Sachs), 2021, 5′
Od Hetty za Nancy / From Hetty to Nancy (Deborah Stratman), 1997, 44′
Dear Aki (Nina Kurtela), 2021, 14’40”
A program of the Croatian Film Association that screens domestic and foreign short feature, documentary, experimental and animated films once a month. It was launched in 2006 under the name Experimental Tuesday, and since 2010 has been called Short Tuesday.
Freedom in a Letter | January 28, 2025 at 7:00 PM, Histrionski dom Cultural Center (Ilica 90)
This year’s first Short Tuesday addresses us in the form of a film letter to invite us to reflect on authority and rebellion, on history and landscape, travel and subjective perspective, on identity constructions and unexpected linguistic-spatial synchronicities.
A letter as a direct expression of connection and a kind of invitation to dialogue, is at the same time a reflection of the need for communication and closeness, as well as (physical) distance. In the case of the three authors – Lynne Sachs, Deborah Stratman and Nina Kurtela – the letter becomes an elastic cinematographic form for exploring intersubjectivity and mediation, but also film language: a form that expands the field of creative freedom. Combined with archival footage or documentary views of the landscape, the letters in these films skilfully bridge time and space, providing links between seemingly incompatible perspectives, events, thoughts.
Freedom in the letter, which paraphrases (more precisely, turns the negation into an affirmative) words that Ingeborg Bachmann addressed to Paul Celan in one of the many letters they exchanged, is one of the possible epistolary cinematographic exchanges between the one who writes, she who films and us who listen and watch – between “I” and “you”.
with love,
Short Tuesday
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/10301
Fri, Feb 21 2025, 4:00 p.m.
Introduced by Lynne Sachs
MoMA, Floor T2/T1, Theater 2
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2
Now in its 24th year, MoMA’s annual Doc Fortnight festival presents adventurous new nonfiction and hybrid fiction cinema from around the world. Featuring 14 world premieres and 19 North American or US premieres from 28 countries, Doc Fortnight 2025 celebrates new work by Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens, Lila Avilés, Radu Jude, Mariano Llinas, Errol Morris, Stanley Nelson, Ben Rivers, Amy Sillman, Cauleen Smith, Elisabeth Subrin, Lou Ye, Jasmila Žbanić, and many others.
A beacon for innovative storytelling, Doc Fortnight 2025 opens on February 20 with the world premiere of Stanley Nelson’s We Want the Funk!, a syncopated history of a worldwide cultural phenomenon featuring explosive performances by James Brown, Parliament Funkadelic, Fela Kuti, and more. Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Middletown, a documentary fresh from Sundance about a group of muckraking high school students who uncovered a toxic waste scandal in upstate New York in the early 1990s, is the festival’s centerpiece screening. Doc Fortnight 2025 closes with the world premiere of Errol Morris’s Chaos: The Manson Murders, which posits new theories, and discredits old ones, about the notoriously savage slayings.
This year’s featured documentaries range from stories of influential figures like Andy Warhol, John Lilly, B. F. Skinner, Henry Fonda, and Emerik Blum, to portraits of places as varied as zoos and wildlife refuges in Argentina , the city of Wuhan during the outbreak of COVID, and a Milanese hospital for gender transition and infertility assistance.
As Doc Fortnight 2025 so vividly illustrates, contemporary filmmakers are confronting some of the most complex issues of our time. Sam Abbas’s Europe’s New Faces, with music by Bertrand Bonello, puts a human face on the humanitarian crisis of African and Middle Eastern refugees and asylum seekers adrift both in the Mediterranean sea and in the legal limbo of the EU’s broken immigration system. Lesla Diak’s Dad’s Lullaby observes a soldier with PTSD returning from the Ukrainian front. Altyazi Fasikul, a filmmaking collective in Turkey, recounts stories of journalistic and artistic repression under the Erdogan regime in Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship. Daniela Meressa Rusnoková’s Grey Zone and Lynne Sachs’s Contractions are anguished portraits of women facing pregnancy complications and societal threats to their bodily autonomy, respectively. And Cauleen Smith’s Volcano Manifesto, presented as a trilogy for the first time, is but one of several contemporary works in Doc Fortnight that investigate themes of exile, liberation, the erasure of Indigenous societies and cultures, and the legacy of colonialism.
In addition to We Want the Funk!, Doc Fortnight 2025 celebrates music in other creatively diverse and thrilling ways, from Ephraim Asili’s Isis and Osiris, about the jazz legend Alice Coltrane’s experimentations with harp, to Lila Avilés’s Músicas, a new featurette by the director of Totem about an orchestral band of women musicians from 60 different indigenous Mexican communities. Philippe Parreno’s La Quinta del Sordo, which will be bracketed by a live cello performance, imagines an “invisible space”: the house outside Madrid, now destroyed, where Francisco Goya created his “Black Paintings” between 1819 and 1824.
Šedá zóna (Grey Zone). 2024. Slovakia. Directed by Daniela Meressa Rusnoková. North American premiere. In Slovak; English subtitles. 75 min.
In Grey Zone, the Slovakian filmmaker and photographer Daniela Meressa Rusnoková transmutes the unspokenly common and often traumatic reality of premature birth into a deeply poetic work of art. Interweaving her own experiences of fear, shame, despair, and hope with those of other mothers in similarly anguished circumstances, Rusnoková offers a complex, even wrenching meditation on a woman’s right to privacy and bodily autonomy, and on the pervasive fear and neglect in society of children born prematurely or with special needs or disabilities.
preceded by
Contractions. 2024. USA. Directed by Lynne Sachs. 12 min.
Fourteen women and their male allies, their backs to the camera, stand in full force outside a Memphis health clinic that can no longer provide abortion services following the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. On the soundtrack, an expert obstetrician-gynecologist and an anonymous activist bear witness to the fearsome uncertainties and dangers that lie ahead.
https://patriciakusumaningtyas.com/
One of the most underappreciated roles in our society is the labor behind housework and caregiving. There are lots to do to maintain the upkeep of our households — laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, etc — but these menial tasks keep the household together and, most importantly, keep us alive and put food on the table.
Filmmakers often focus on what’s exciting and entertaining instead of the mundane, which keeps these tasks invisible in pop culture; even filmmakers interested in the charm of daily life would ignore this type of labor. However, housework and caregiving have been explored, particularly, among women filmmakers, who know the internal lives of this hidden labor. Chantal Akerman’s three-hour Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles and Lynne Sachs’ & Lizzie Olesker’s short film The Washing Society, albeit portraying two different kinds of housework, both share a common thread: these films are making the invisible visible.
The Washing Society tells a story about laundromat workers in New York City through vignettes of fiction, nonfiction, and performance art; the film is guided by the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen strike, where hundreds of washerwomen — mostly of African-American descent — went on strike after being underpaid by their bosses. The Washing Society continues this legacy by interviewing two laundry workers and a former laundry worker who went on strike in the 1960s. The film also tells its story through three characters — two women who represent the mostly immigrant, mostly Chinese or Spanish-speaking laundry workers in New York City, and one woman representing the ghosts of the 1881 strike. When we drop off our laundry at the laundromat, we come back with a fresh load of clothing without thinking all the work that is put behind them. Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker focuses the camera on these narrow storefronts, rows and rows of washing machines, and the Sisyphean task of folding and washing clothes to bring forth that invisible labor that people don’t often think of.
My screening of The Washing Society was followed by a Q&A with feminist Marxist theorist Silvia Federici. Sachs has mentioned about how her work has been based on Federici’s work on Wages Against Housework. In her seminal essay, Federici argued that domestic labor is a form of production used to sustain other forms of work in a capitalist society. However, it is very convenient to make this form of labor invisible. A tenet of its invisibility is to mask this labor into a “labor of love” — that things such as washing clothes are marked as a care, therefore taking out the value of the work performed and expecting that careworkers are doing it based on willingness and kindness. Whereas, the reality is that these workers are indeedworkers and should be valued as such. Federici’s shaping of The Washing Society reminded me of another film, and is a helpful framework to understand it in a Marxist perspective: Jeanne Dielman.
Directed by Chantal Akerman (who has an interest of portraying domestic work on film), Jeanne Dielman is a story about a housewife who has lost her husband, therefore resorting to sex work to support herself and her teenage son. The film focuses on the minutiae of Jeanne Dielman’s day-to-day tasks; running errands is no longer a generally glossed-over issue in this film as we watch Jeanne cook meals, wash the dishes, grocery shop, and do the things we would consider as menial. While The Washing Society raises awareness to this invisible labor by employing narrative and performance art techniques, Akerman forces the audience to watch this invisible labor. The music is very sparse, the camera movement static, the pace moves slowly, making its audience truly see and listen to the details of Jeanne Dielman’s actions. The invisible, then, becomes hypervisible.
Through this hypervisibility there is a visual code that guides Jeanne Dielman’s actions. Once we focus on these mundane everyday scenes, we realize how repetitive it all gets. Folding clothes, chopping vegetables, boiling water. It’s almost like Sisyphus, rolling his boulder to the top of the mountain only to find it down on the ground again. Once the housework is done for the day, there will always be new loads to wash, more mouths to feed. Some would argue that this repetition is a type of performance art — as housework becomes hypervisible, we are exposed to the rhythm of this repetition and we are seeing it as a form of art in this context, rather than a task. The Washing Society continues this by actually transforming laundry work as performance art. In a few scenes, we see the two fictional laundromat workers rhythmically tapping on laundry machines and dancing on top of them. It is a form of ownership of their own labor — in a world where their customers and bosses do not see the value of their work, they make themselves visible.
What sets Jeanne Dielman apart from the women in The Washing Society is the solitary nature of her labor. Where laundromat workers work in groups and can form unions and negotiate against their bosses, Jeanne Dielman navigates through housework on her own. She is rarely seen communicating with people other than her son — we only see her communicate with her friends through mail, or through more laborious requests by her neighbor. She has no space to talk about these things, as the labor she performs at home is timed to a T.
However, what unites the two films are the internal space of the labor of housework. The internal spaces and thoughts of careworkers and houseworkers are often ignored, as people often impose that they’re thinking of care when they are approaching they work. The reality is definitely far from that — in a system where they work endless, repetitive tasks, they are constantly thinking. This thinking is then menifested in a form of action. The 1881 washerwomen of Atlanta forms a union and strikes for better wages. The fictional laundromat workers in The Washing Society expresses this stifled rage through performance. Jeanne Dielman, however, spends more time with her thoughts since her work is extremely solitary, and expresses them in a more pessimistic way.
What makes Jeanne Dielman’s labor more dire is that her labor isn’t valued in a tangible way. While laundromat workers are able to count their wages and identify wage theft, there is no way for Jeanne Dielman to price the value of her housework. In Capital, Marx took account the labor of housework, and including housework to be valued based on the family breadwinner’s labor-value (although this line of thought has been criticized by scholars like Silvia Federici, who argued to put a direct labor-value of housework itself). However, what happens when this breadwinner is taken out of the equation? Jeanne Dielman has to find a line of work that doesn’t interfere with her housework. In the film, she resorts to sex work, entertaining male guests in her home while her son is away at school. In the dialogue of both forms of labor that Jeanne Dielman performs, we can clearly see how both sex work and housework is tied to patriarchy — it is a form of work that is often invisible, and is dictated by the labor-value of the men who sustain the housewife/sex worker. It is not hard to see how these forms of labor are inherently exploitative to working women like Jeanne Dielman.
When we reflect on working women in patriarcy-dictated forms of labor, we have to also look at how it evolves in the future. Near the end of The Washing Society, Lynne Sachs narrates that most of the laundromats she filmed has closed, due to the rise of instant laundry apps that will pick up your laundry, wash them in an undisclosed location (where workers are completely hidden from their bosses and customers), and bring them back to you. Sachs and Olesker argues (in line with Silvia Federici) that technology has not liberated us. Instead of making work easier, work will eventually increase, and workers’ labor will be more and more alienated. If Jeanne Dielman lives in 2021, indeed, it will be easier for her to find jobs through remote work, but this work will fail to recognize how her housework will be much more laborious. COVID-19 has moved a significant amount of workforce online, and has led more bosses to assume that working from home allows workers more free time. The labor of housework was invisible from family breadwinners, and now is made invisible to bosses as well.
With the far-reaching consequences of technology to housework, we should also think about international solidarity. The rut of technologizing housework will fall to migrant workers and workers from colonized countries, as supply chain technology and transportation has eased the access of cheap labor from around the globe. This exploitation of colonized countries also lies in sex work: sex work has long become a justification for colonialism, and day after day men and women from colonized countries have been forced to enter this inherently exploitative line of work. Historian Gerda Lerner mentions how sex work is “the first form of trade, making them seen as less than human,” and that this is “the beginning of women’s subordination at the hands of men.” This exploitation still continues today through avenues like sex tourism and sex trafficking, which targets the poorest of working class women around the globe. This shows that patriarchy and capitalism definitely works hand in hand with colonialism, and that patriarchy and sexual exploitation are tools to further the empire of capitalism and imperialism.
Both Jeanne Dielman and The Washing Society brings forth these invisible strings in the lives of working women: hidden labor in housework and sex work and the exploitation that comes with it. Jeanne Dielman’s work may be solitary, but as I watched her do her menial tasks I am reminded of the hidden labor in the lives of the women I know. She experiences all of it alone, but her rage is universal, and makes me think about the power that working women around the world hold. These power materializes in labor unions, strikes, and revolutions. Working women around the world constantly continue to uphold the spirit of the women before them who also does this hidden labor, in worse circumstances of the progression of technology and the further alienation of their labor. It is up to us to fight for their rights and make the invisible visible.
The Washing Society and Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles are both available to watch through the Criterion Channel. Besides of watching both films, I also urge you to take action to support the working women in your community. Here are some current efforts in NYC (DM me if you want me to include more efforts):
