Sight and Sound, Summer 2025

Jaws and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The length of their titles – one an evocative flash of teeth, the other a woman’s name and address in full – tells a story in itself. Between those two films, both released in 1975, all the rest of cinema sits, a spectrum between aggression and exhilaration on the one hand, duration and repetition on the other. One reinvented Hollywood in its image, spawning five decades of summer blockbusters; the other, a challenge to preconceived notions of the ‘cinematic’, is now crowned Greatest Film of All Time by Sight and Sound’s poll. These two titles alone would make 1975 worthy of the title this issue bestows on it, ‘The year that changed cinema forever’ – add classics by Andrei Tarkovsky, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ousmane Sembène, Marguerite Duras, Stanley Kubrick and Agnès Varda, among others, and the reasons seem overwhelming.