REBELLIOUS MUSE: DELPHINE SEYRIG AS ACTOR, DIRECTOR AND ACTIVIST

Delphine Seyrig (1932–1990) never achieved a level of stardom comparative to many of her contemporaries, but her screen immortality was ensured through several iconic roles that foregrounded a fascinatingly enigmatic, elusive presence. The trademark opacity of her most famous performances, however, belies the richness, variety and forcefulness of her career, and the artistic dexterity which allowed her to transform the influences of mentors such as Tania Balachova, Jean Dasté, Michel Saint-Denis and Lee Strasberg into a seamless practice. Her first major film role – a truly iconic performance in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) – saw a return to France after time in New York and an immersion in the most exciting film and theatre of the era. Films with François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Luis Buñuel and Joseph Losey followed over the next decade, while her theatre career flourished as a favoured collaborator on French productions of new plays by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. However, a growing dissatisfaction with the patriarchal, often blatantly misogynistic nature of the material she performed, alongside a recognition of her place within an industry and culture which mythologised male genius at the expense of female voices, led to a conscious shift in career path. The 1970s saw the formation, with pioneering video artist Carole Roussopoulos, of the feminist film collective Les Insoumuses (a pun which supplies the title of our season). To augment her increasingly activist political work, she began sustained artistic collaborations with Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras and Ulrike Ottinger which, alongside the projects she directed herself (such as 1981’s pointedly titled Be Pretty and Shut Up!), sought to articulate the feminist struggle in all its complexity and urgency. Her choice of roles – after 1976, all but one of which were for female directors – focused on projects which investigated the parallels (or interrogated the complicity) between performance as a professional vocation and the societal performance of femininity. This season highlights her early, foundational work with Resnais and her collaborations with Duras – India Song (1975) and Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977) – as well her own ventures into filmmaking.

Wednesday 18 June

7:00pm LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD

Alain Resnais (1961) 94 mins – PG

In a vast baroque mansion, a man tries to convince a woman (a coolly enigmatic Seyrig) that they had an affair the year before. Rejecting chronology, Resnais’ mingling of memory and imagination, past and present, is one of the cinema’s most haunting and erotic modernist “poems”. The cryptic screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Francis Seyrig’s (Delphine’s brother) organ music, Sacha Vierny’s precise, luminous images, Seyrig’s extraordinary presence and composure, and the tracking shots down endless corridors, are all mysteriously unforgettable, providing one of the truly singular experiences the cinema has to offer.

8:55pm MURIEL OU LE TEMPS D’UN RETOUR

Alain Resnais (1963) 115 mins – Unclassified 15+

Seyrig, in one of her greatest roles, invites her lover from 20 years earlier to stay with her and her stepson. Resnais’ deeply philosophical follow-up to Last Year at Marienbad, scripted by Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol, is haunted by the recent past (the conflict in Algeria, World War II) and features rhythmic dialogue and overlapping sound, visionary use of colour and a fragmented, prismatic narrative that gives resonance to a group of characters traumatised by social, personal and historical memory. Features a brilliant ethereal modernist score by Hans Werner Henze, and burnished colour cinematography by Sacha Vierny.

CTEQ ANNOTATION
Muriel ou Le temps d’un retour
by David Ehrenstein

Wednesday 25 June

7:00pm INDIA SONG

Marguerite Duras (1975) 120 mins – Unclassified 15+

Constructed, in Duras’ words, “like a poem”, this is the writer-director’s most haunting and famous film and is, along with Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman…, one of two iconic works of feminist cinema Seyrig completed in 1975. In 1930s Calcutta, the elegant wife (Seyrig) of the French ambassador yearns for love but is bored with the men around her as well as her oppressive bourgeois surroundings. Representing ’70s (post)modern cinema at its finest, the film’s languorous visuals and multilayered voiceover are seemingly dissociated but make for an unforgettable, hypnotic and intense experience. With Michael Lonsdale and Claude Mann.

CTEQ ANNOTATION
The Ghosts of Parties Past: Exorcising India Song
by David Melville

9:15pm BAXTER, VERA BAXTER

Marguerite Duras (1977) 95 mins – Unclassified 15+

A woman (Claudine Gabay) languishes in a sprawling villa where she is visited by several guests. In a truly formidable performance, Seyrig’s unnamed visitor acts as Duras’ envoy, her role and dialogue representing the author’s own disruptive feminism and compassionate existentialism. Drawing on elements from her earlier play Suzanna Adler, and adapted from a then-unpublished novel, this “harsh take on bourgeois conformity and prostitution” (Ivone Margulies) is accompanied by Carlos D’Alessio’s hypnotic score. With Noëlle Châtelet and Gérard Depardieu.

CTEQ ANNOTATION
Chamber Music for Solo Voices and Distant Party: Baxter, Vera Baxter
by Rolland Man

Wednesday 2 July

7:00pm BE PRETTY AND SHUT UP!

Delphine Seyrig (1981) 111 mins – Unclassified 15+

Through a series of candid interviews with 24 actresses from across Europe and the US – including Jane Fonda, Louise Fletcher, Maria Schneider, Maidie Norman, Anne Wiazemsky, Jenny Agutter, Barbara Steele and Juliet Berto – Seyrig composes a radical and revelatory portrait of direct and subtle misogyny impacting professional and personal lives. Filmed on portable video by Carole Roussopoulos, its lo-fi aesthetic aligns with the film’s activist roots. These layered testimonies range from the analytical to the emotional and are collectively assembled into an incisive, absorbing and, at times, shocking dossier on the film industry.

CTEQ ANNOTATION
Women Talking: Delphine Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up!
by Isabella Gullifer-Laurie

9:05pm CALAMITY JANE & DELPHINE SEYRIG: A STORY

Babette Mangolte (2020) 87 mins – Unclassified 15+

In the early ’80s, Seyrig travelled to the US to research a planned film about Calamity Jane. Expanding on her work as original cinematographer, Mangolte weaves the surviving footage into a revived project investigating Calamity’s personal archives, letters to her daughter and other efforts to preserve her memories. The final assemblage is a cinematic palimpsest that tenderly unearths buried stories across generations.

Preceded by SCUM Manifesto Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig (1976) 27 mins – Unclassified 15+. This explicit work of radical feminist activism takes the form of a staged reading of Valerie Solanas’ groundbreaking publication, layered with news reports detailing global conflicts.

CTEQ ANNOTATION
Calamity Jane & Delphine Seyrig: A Story
by Grace Boschetti