Chan­tal Aker­man’s Jeanne Diel­man, 23 quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles is a three-and-a-half hour film in which noth­ing hap­pens. That, in any case, will be the descrip­tion offered by many who will view it for the first time in the com­ing months. Their curios­i­ty will have been piqued by its tri­umph in the just-released results of Sight and Sound mag­a­zine’s crit­ics poll to deter­mine the great­est films of all time. Con­duct­ed just once per decade since 1952, it has only seen two oth­er top-spot upsets in that time: when Cit­i­zen Kane dis­placed Bicy­cle Thieves in 1962, and when Ver­ti­go dis­placed Cit­i­zen Kane half a cen­tu­ry lat­er.

The top ten on this year’s Sight and Sound crit­ics poll is as fol­lows:

1. Jeanne Diel­man 23, quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles (Chan­tal Aker­man, 1975)
2. Ver­ti­go (Alfred Hitch­cock, 1958)
3. Cit­i­zen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
4. Tokyo Sto­ry (Yasu­jirō Ozu, 1953)
5. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stan­ley Kubrick, 1968)
7. Beau tra­vail (Claire Denis, 1998)
8. Mul­hol­land Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
9. Man with a Movie Cam­era (Dzi­ga Ver­tov, 1929)
10. Sin­gin’ in the Rain (Gene Kel­ly and Stan­ley Donen, 1952)

Since 1992, the mag­a­zine has also run a sep­a­rate poll that col­lects the votes of not crit­ics but film direc­tors, which this year placed 2001 at num­ber one. Its top ten also includes such selec­tions as Fed­eri­co Fellini’s 8½, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mir­ror, and Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up.

The direc­tors ranked Jeanne Diel­man at a respectable num­ber four, tied with Tokyo Sto­ry. “On the side of con­tent, the film charts the break­down of a bour­geois Bel­gian house­wife, moth­er and part-time pros­ti­tute over the course of three days,” writes film the­o­rist Lau­ra Mul­vey on Sight and Sound’s page for the film.

“On the side of form, it rig­or­ous­ly records her domes­tic rou­tine in extend­ed time and from a fixed cam­era posi­tion.” As you may already imag­ine, these ele­ments — as well as the fact that the title char­ac­ter is played by no less grand a movie star than Del­phine Seyrig — make for a sin­gu­lar view­ing expe­ri­ence.

That title isn’t with­out a cer­tain irony, giv­en how much of the film Aker­man devotes to straight­for­ward depic­tions of a mid­dle-aged woman per­form­ing house­hold chores — tak­ing us far indeed from the domain of, say, Jer­ry Bruck­heimer. “Shot in sta­t­ic, long takes, the film’s pace and tone may first seem slow or dull,” writes Adam Cook in the IndieWire video essay “Chan­tal Aker­man’s Jeanne Diel­man Is a True Action Movie,” but “in observ­ing these house­hold tasks free of periph­ery, they take on a dra­matur­gy of their own.” Only with time and rep­e­ti­tion do “the nuances in Del­phine Seyrig’s expres­sions con­vey vast­ly dif­fer­ent con­no­ta­tions” and “the small­est details take on nar­ra­tive pow­er and sig­nif­i­cance.”

“Her life is orga­nized to allow no gaps in the day,” Aker­man told a tele­vi­sion chat-show audi­ence in 1975, when Jeanne Diel­man had just come out. But “her very struc­tured uni­verse starts to unrav­el,” and “her sub­con­scious express­es itself through a series of lit­tle slip-ups.” In a 2009 inter­view for the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, Aker­man drew con­nec­tions between her char­ac­ter’s reg­i­men­ta­tion and the strict Jew­ish rit­u­als she her­self observed in child­hood: “Know­ing every moment of every day, what she must do the next moment, brings a sort of peace.” When the rou­tine is dis­rupt­ed, “a sus­pense builds, because I think that deep down, we know that some­thing’s going to hap­pen.” On this emo­tion­al lev­el, Jeanne Diel­man is more con­ven­tion­al than it may seem. And to those who can immerse them­selves in it, it feels like the only film in which any­thing does hap­pen.

See the Sight and Sound poll results here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

100 Over­looked Films Direct­ed by Women: See Selec­tions from Sight & Sound Magazine’s New List

103 Essen­tial Films By Female Film­mak­ers: Clue­less, Lost in Trans­la­tion, Ishtar and More

The Ten Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 358 Film­mak­ers

The Ten Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Cen­tu­ry (So Far) Named by 177 Film Crit­ics

The Top 100 Amer­i­can Films of All Time, Accord­ing to 62 Inter­na­tion­al Film Crit­ics

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In lit­er­a­ture, graph­ic descrip­tions of men­ace and dis­mem­ber­ment by mon­sters are as old as Beowulf and much, much old­er still, though it wasn’t until Horace Walpole’s 18th cen­tu­ry nov­el The Cas­tle of Otran­to inspired the goth­ic romance nov­el that hor­ror-qua-hor­ror came into fash­ion. With­out Wal­pole, and bet­ter-known goth­ic inno­va­tors like Mary Shel­ley and Bram Stok­er, we’d like­ly nev­er have had Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Love­craft, or Stephen King. But nowa­days when we think of hor­ror, we usu­al­ly think of film—and all of its var­i­ous con­tem­po­rary sub­gen­res, includ­ing creepy psy­cho­log­i­cal twists on good-old-fash­ion mon­ster movies, like The Babadook.

But from whence came the hor­ror film? Was it 1931, a ban­ner hor­ror year in which audi­ences saw both Boris Karloff in James Whale’s Franken­stein and Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s Drac­u­la? Cer­tain­ly clas­sic films by mas­ters of the genre, but they did not orig­i­nate the hor­ror movie. There is, of course, F.W. Murnau’s ter­ri­fy­ing silent Nos­fer­atu from 1922 (and the real life hor­ror of its deceased director’s miss­ing head).

And what about Ger­man expres­sion­ism? “A case can be made,” argued Roger Ebert, that Robert Weine’s 1920 The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari “was the first true hor­ror film”—a “sub­jec­tive psy­cho­log­i­cal fan­ta­sy” in which “unspeak­able hor­ror becomes pos­si­ble.” Per­haps. But even before Weine’s still-effec­tive­ly-dis­ori­ent­ing cin­e­mat­ic work dis­turbed audi­ences world­wide, there was Paul Wegener’s first, 1915 ver­sion of The Golem, a char­ac­ter, writes Penn State’s Kevin Jack Hagopi­an, that served as “one of the most sig­nif­i­cant ances­tors to the cin­e­mat­ic Franken­stein of James Whale and Boris Karloff.“ Even ear­li­er, in 1910, Thomas Edi­son pro­duced an adap­ta­tion of Mary Shelley’s mon­ster sto­ry.

So how far back do we have to go to find the first hor­ror movie? Almost as far back as the very ori­gins of film, it seems—to 1896, when French spe­cial-effects genius Georges Méliès made the three plus minute short above, Le Manoir du Dia­ble (The Haunt­ed Cas­tle, or the Manor of the Dev­il). Méliès, known for his silent sci-fi fan­ta­sy A Trip to the Moon—and for the trib­ute paid to him in Mar­tin Scorsese’s Hugo—used his inno­v­a­tive meth­ods to tell a sto­ry, writes Mau­rice Bab­bis at Emer­son Uni­ver­si­ty jour­nal Latent Image, of “a large bat that flies into a room and trans­forms into Mephistophe­les. He then stands over a caul­dron and con­jures up a girl along with some phan­toms and skele­tons and witch­es, but then one of them pulls out a cru­ci­fix and the demon dis­ap­pears.” Not much of a sto­ry, grant­ed, and it’s not par­tic­u­lar­ly scary, but it is an excel­lent exam­ple of a tech­nique Méliès sup­pos­ed­ly dis­cov­ered that very year. Accord­ing to Earlycinema.com,

In the Autumn of 1896, an event occurred which has since passed into film folk­lore and changed the way Méliès looked at film­mak­ing. Whilst film­ing a sim­ple street scene, Méliès cam­era jammed and it took him a few sec­onds to rec­ti­fy the prob­lem. Think­ing no more about the inci­dent, Méliès processed the film and was struck by the effect such a inci­dent had on the scene — objects sud­den­ly appeared, dis­ap­peared or were trans­formed into oth­er objects.

Thus was born The Haunt­ed Cas­tle, tech­ni­cal­ly the first hor­ror film, and one of the first movies—likely the very first—to delib­er­ate­ly use spe­cial effects to fright­en its view­ers.

The Haunt­ed Cas­tle has been added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Names the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films: Kubrick, Hitch­cock, Tourneur & More

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

Watch 10 Clas­sic Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Fritz Lang’s M to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

For many Open Cul­ture read­ers, the Hal­loween sea­son offers an oppor­tu­ni­ty — not to say an excuse — to re-expe­ri­ence clas­sic hor­ror films: F.W. Mur­nau’s Nos­fer­atu from 1922, for instance, or even George Méliès The Haunt­ed Cas­tle, which launched the whole form in 1896. This year, may we sug­gest a home screen­ing of the for­mi­da­ble work of vin­tage cin­e­ma that is 1968’s The Astro Zom­bies? Writ­ten, pro­duced, and direct­ed by Ted Mikels — auteur of The Corpse Grinders and Blood Orgy of the She-Dev­ils — it fea­tures not just “a mad astro-sci­en­tist” played by John Car­ra­dine and “two gore-crazed, solar-pow­ered killer robot zom­bies,” but “a bloody trail of girl-next-door vic­tims; Chi­nese com­mu­nist spies; dead­ly Mex­i­can secret agents led by the insane­ly volup­tuous Tura Satana” and an “intre­pid CIA agent” on the case of it all.

You can watch The Astro Zom­bies for free, and new­ly remas­tered in HD to boot, at Kino Cult, the new stream­ing site from film and video dis­trib­u­tor Kino Lor­ber. Pull up the front page and you’ll be treat­ed to a wealth of tit­il­lat­ing view­ing options of a vari­ety of eras and sub­gen­res: “Dri­ve-in favorites” like Ape and Beware! The Blob; “gold­en age exploita­tion” like Reefer Mad­ness and She Shoul­da Said ‘No’!; and even clas­sics like Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis and Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Fear and Desire.

True cult-film enthu­si­asts, of course, may well go straight to the avail­able selec­tions, thought­ful­ly grouped togeth­er, from “Mas­ter of Ital­ian Hor­ror” Mario Bava and pro­lif­ic Span­ish “B‑movie” king­pin Jesús Fran­co. Those look­ing to throw a fright night might con­sid­er Kino Cult’s offer­ings filed under “hard­boiled hor­ror”: Kill­bil­lies, The House with 100 Eyes, Bun­ny: The Killer Thing.

Few of these pic­tures skimp on the grotesque; few­er still skimp on the humor, a nec­es­sary ingre­di­ent in even the most har­row­ing hor­ror movies. Far from a pile of cyn­i­cal hack­work, Kino Cult’s library has clear­ly been curat­ed with an eye toward films that, although for the most part pro­duced inex­pen­sive­ly and with unre­lent­ing intent to pro­voke vis­cer­al reac­tions in their audi­ences, are hard­ly with­out inter­est to seri­ous cinephiles. The site even includes an “art­sploita­tion” sec­tion con­tain­ing such taboo-breach­ing works as Cur­tis Burz’s Sum­mer House. Among its gen­er­al recent addi­tions you’ll also find Dog­tooth by Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos, per­haps the most dar­ing high-pro­file provo­ca­teur cur­rent­ly at work in the medi­um. Since Kino Cult has made all these films and more avail­able to stream at no charge, none of us, no mat­ter our par­tic­u­lar cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties, has an excuse to pass this Hal­loween un-enter­tained — and more to the point, undis­turbed. Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Hor­ror Film, George Méliès’ The Haunt­ed Cas­tle (1896)

Watch Nos­fer­atu, the Sem­i­nal Vam­pire Film, Free Online (1922)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films

Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies: Full of Hor­ror & Sus­pense

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

What Scares Us, and How Does this Man­i­fest in Film? A Hal­loween Pret­ty Much Pop Cul­ture Pod­cast (#66)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

It did­n’t take long after the inven­tion of cin­e­ma for its sheer pow­er of spec­ta­cle to become clear. Arguably, it was appar­ent even in the pio­neer­ing work of the Lumière broth­ers, though they attempt­ed only to cap­ture images famil­iar from every­day life at the time. But in a decade or two emerged auteurs like Fritz Lang, who, hav­ing grown up with cin­e­ma itself, pos­sessed high­ly devel­oped instincts for how to use it to cap­ti­vate large and var­i­ous audi­ences. Released in 1927, Lang’s Metrop­o­lis showed movie­go­ers an elab­o­rate vision, both fear­some and allur­ing, of the indus­tri­al dystopia that could lay ahead. But it also had danc­ing girls!

Or rather, it had a danc­ing girl who’s actu­al­ly a robot — a Maschi­nen­men­sch, accord­ing to the script — built by the film’s vil­lain in an attempt to besmirch the hero­ine who would lib­er­ate the tit­u­lar city’s down­trod­den work­ers. (Both the real woman and her mechan­i­cal imper­son­ator are skill­ful­ly played by Brigitte Helm.)

In the video above, you can see the scan­dalous and cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive spec­ta­cle-with­in-a-spec­ta­cle that is Metrop­o­lis’ dance scene col­orized, upscaled to 4K res­o­lu­tion at 60 frames per sec­ond, and new­ly sound­tracked with a track called “Lemme See About It” by Max McFer­ren. This is rec­og­niz­ably Metrop­o­lis, but it’s also a Metrop­o­lis none of us has ever seen before.

The pro­duc­tion also com­bines visu­al mate­r­i­al from dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the film, quite a few of which have been edit­ed and re-edit­ed, lost and recov­ered over near­ly the past cen­tu­ry. (The run­ning times of the offi­cial­ly released cuts alone range from 83 to 153 min­utes.) Cer­tain dif­fer­ences in qual­i­ty between one shot and the next make this obvi­ous, though the con­sis­ten­cy of the over­all col­oriza­tion eas­es the sud­den tran­si­tions between them. A Metrop­o­lis fan could­n’t help but feel some curios­i­ty about how the whole pic­ture would play with all of these enhance­ments, not that it would resem­ble any­thing Lang could orig­i­nal­ly have envi­sioned. But then, no sin­gle cut exists that defin­i­tive­ly reflects his inten­tions — and besides, he’d sure­ly approve of how the film’s dance sequence has been made to cap­ti­vate us once again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Metrop­o­lis: Watch Fritz Lang’s 1927 Mas­ter­piece

Watch Metrop­o­lis’ Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Inno­v­a­tive Dance Scene, Restored as Fritz Lang Intend­ed It to Be Seen (1927)

If Fritz Lang’s Icon­ic Film Metrop­o­lis Had a Kraftwerk Sound­track

One of the Great­est Dances Sequences Ever Cap­tured on Film Gets Restored in Col­or by AI: Watch the Clas­sic Scene from Stormy Weath­er

The Icon­ic Dance Scene from Hel­lza­pop­pin’ Pre­sent­ed in Liv­ing Col­or with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (1941)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.