Delphine Seyrig, Rebel Muse
Born in Beirut to a French Alsatian father and Swiss mother, raised for a time in New York City, and trained as an actress in France, the born-cosmopolitan Delphine Seyrig would be launched to international arthouse celebrity via her role in Alain Resnais’s 1961 "Last Year at Marienbad". In the years to come, she would emerge as an outspoken feminist icon and strong-minded curator of her iconoclastic international career, carefully choosing her own collaborators (including female filmmakers Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman) and also directing films herself, with Carole Roussopoulos, under the collective name Les Insoumuses (Defiant Muses), producing works exploring the possibilities created by newly emergent video technology as a tool for emancipation and political activism. “The theater and films,” Seyrig once said, “are very far from women’s consciousness about themselves”—and few have done more than she, in the course of her career, to close that gap.
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Daughters of Darkness
Directed by Harry Kümel | 87 mins | 1971
Profoundly inspired by the spirit of Belgian Surrealist and Symbolist painting, Kümel’s darkly poetic horror film begins with a young newlywed couple waylaid at a grand hotel en route to England, where they fall under the spell of the elegant Hungarian Cou... -
Maso and Miso Go Boating
Directed by Nadja Ringart, Ioana Wieder, Carole Roussopoulos, and Delphine Seyrig | 55 mins | 1975
1975 has been declared Year of the Woman by the United Nations, prompting popular television Bernard Pivot to host then-Secretary of State for the Condition of Women Françoise Giroud on his program,... -
Be Pretty and Shut Up
Directed by Delphine Seyrig | 112 mins | 1981
In Hollywood and Paris, Seyrig sits down to talk to some of the most famous actresses in the world—including Juliet Berto, Ellen Burstyn, Jane Fonda, Shirley MacLaine, Jill Clayburgh, Louise Fletcher, Maria Schneider, Barbara Steele, Viva, Anne Wiazem... -
Scum Manifesto
Directed by Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig | 29 mins | 1976
A crucial piece of early feminist video art from the Les Insoumuses collective that documents a staged reading of would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas’s notorious misandrist call-to-arms of the same name—the acronym sta...
