• Awards List of nominees for the Goya 2023

There are as many ways to interpret a list as there are not to.

The lists are entertaining, whimsical, documented, rigorous, or just plain arbitrary.

What's more, perhaps they are all at once.

And they are always there to move so much to the claim that -and more in these times- to indignation.

That

'Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles'

, by the Belgian director

Chantal Akerman

, has been chosen the best film of all time by a panel of experts made up of 1,600 critics, editors, filmmakers and programmers from all over the world (including the signatory) says a lot about almost everything: the obligation to renew the canons, of the changing forms of language (including cinematography), of the effective irruption of the woman's voice and even of common good sense in such a lewd and globally obtuse time.

Celebrate yourself.

There is hope.

The list that 'Sight & Sound' magazine draws up every decade with laudable generosity and dedication achieves that, together with

Vittorio de Sica

('Bicycle Thief', first in 1952),

Orson Welles

('Citizen Kane', maximum leader in 1962 , 1972, 1982, 1992 and 2002) and

Alfred Hitchcock

('Vertigo', in 2012) the veristic, naked, committed and wildly modern spelling of a filmmaker who, far from the general public, has determined the meaning of everything we understand for modern, contemporary or simply our cinema.

As you want.

'Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles' tells the seemingly unremarkable story of a woman played to the bone by

Delphine Seyrig

.

Nothing moves before the eyes of a stunned spectator who is invited to a strange daily ceremony where reality and fiction are confused.

Everything happens as it would in real life, which, as we know, is nothing more than a common fabulation and shot through with interests.

There are no artifices, rowdy gestures, fuss.

Things just happen until they show up like never before.

Little by little, the gaze penetrates each gesture composed on the screen like a merciless mirror where everything makes sense.

Dielman is a young widow, she reads in the plot, that in the morning she takes care of her son and at night she prostitutes herself.

And everything is done in a tragic and silent continuum that appeals to us as an earthquake would at the exact time and at the right moment in which it meets a tornado.

If you like, the film puts on the screen (or on the table, in the classic way) issues such as the meaning of work, the forms of power and the grammar of violence.

I'm sure by now you've heard of rape culture.

Well that.

Housework as something more than work, perhaps exploitation;

sex work as more than just sex, maybe, again,

rape

;

work without more as something more than simple work.

And from his hand, the loneliness that concerns us all and especially in the always despised field of the kitchen (cutting vegetables can be a political act).

And from his hand, the arbitrary ones, these yes, representations of bourgeois life disguised as respectability.

The film was shot in 1975 and draws on both the

more acidic

Buñuel or the

Varda

more painfully lyrical as a prelude to the bitter nightmares to come with Haneke.

And not only that, all the cinema that wants to be called today knows the importance of the time measured in waiting spaces.

The list is certainly correct.

How to understand the new revolution in Spanish cinema that comes to us with

Carla Simón, Isaki Lacuesta, Elena López Riera, Meritxell Colell, Neus Ballús

or

Sorogoyen

without

Akerman

?

For the rest, the voters, who this year have doubled in number compared to previous years, have not launched a revolution either.

There they follow, 'Vertigo', by Hitchcock, in second place, with 'Citizen Kane', by Orson Welles, 'Tokyo Tales', by

Yasuhiro Ozu

, and, another fuse jump, 'In the Mood for love', by

Wong Kay Wai

, in fifth place.

Or 'Mullholland Dr', by

David Lynch

, at number 8. If you are wondering about 'The Godfather', the most beloved by all, wait for number 12. The Japanese Ozu continues to be the most respected with two of his films (the aforementioned and 'Late Spring') in the top 20.

The most modern are 'Portrait of a woman on fire' (30), by

Céline Sciamma

, and '

.

And you have to go to position 84 to find the only contribution of Spanish cinematography: 'The spirit of the hive', by

Víctor Erice

.

Lists.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • cinema