Born in 1932 in Beirut, Lebanon, Delphine Seyrig is the daughter of an archaeologist and a navigator with a passion for literature, whose love of books she inherited. During her childhood, she travelled to various countries, speaking English as well as French, before moving to Paris in 1952 to take classes in the dramatic arts. At twenty, she landed her first theatre role, but it was in the United States, in 1958, that she had her first film role, with the short film Pull My Daisy by Robert Frank, adapted from the third act of the play Beat Generation by Jack Kerouac. Back in France in 1960, she continued her acting career, both on stage and on screen. Her meeting with Alain Resnais was a decisive one. By giving her the role of “A” in Last Year in Marienbad (1961), the adaptation of an emblematic work from the Nouveau Roman movement, they both become popular figures. She embodied the image of a woman who is both mysterious and theatrical, becoming a key figure of New Wave cinema.

In 1963, she obtained the Volpi Cup for female interpretation at the Venice Mostra for her role in Muriel, again directed by Alain Resnais. She launched into auteur projects, acting in films by William Klein, Who are you, Polly Maggoo? and Mister Freedom, but also with Luis Buñuel, Joseph Losey, or Jacques Demy. She was nicknamed “the woman with the voice of a cello” by Michael Lonsdale, with whom she worked on India Song by Marguerite Duras, becoming her muse and starring in four of her films.

A woman of conviction, Delphine Seyrig demonstrated her political commitment publicly when she signed the Manifesto of the 343, a petition written by Simone de Beauvoir that was published on 5 April 1971 in the Nouvel Observateur, calling for the decriminalisation and legalisation of voluntary termination of pregnancy. From then on, her career took a more militant turn. She started to select women directors. She worked on several occasions with Ulrike Ottinger, the German avant-garde artist, and with Chantal Akerman, the Belgian director for whom she played Jeanne in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, considered to be Chantal Akerman’s feminist manifesto…

Marguerite Duras wrote of Delphine Seyrig, in a text published in Libération on 17 October 1990, two days after her death “what happens to others, whether good or bad, she shares it as I have never seen joy or misfortune shared before. Once, during this film, an injustice had been perpetrated against one of the technicians. It had absolutely nothing to do with her. She screamed. And she cried. ‘I know it’s none of my business, but I can’t, I can’t help it.’ The only obstacle to her freedom is the injustice that others are victims of.”

When she passed to the other side of the camera, she made political films with an impertinent tone – daring, but precise films. Under the name Insoumuses, with Carole Roussopoulos and Iona Wieder, she made S.C.U.M. Manifesto [1], in 1976, based on a text by Valérie Solanas [2], written in 1967. On screen, Delphine Seyrig dictates extracts from Solanas’ book to Carole Roussopoulos who types them up on a typewriter, placed on a kitchen table on which a television broadcasts the news from a national channel. During this sequence shot, the camera zooms occasionally on the screen – the TV news programme thus becomes a surprising illustration of Valérie Solanas’ virulent text, the woman who shot at Andy Warhol. The images of the day show heads of state and soldiers departing for war in Korea and Lebanon, reinforcing the feminist’s discourse, which revolts against male hegemony and the violence resulting from it.

Delphine Seyrig’s last film Sois Belle et Tais-Toi! is a compilation of interviews with actresses who evoke their relationship to cinema and directors. Shot in 1976, the twenty-four actresses describe conditions where the image of women remains clichéd and reactionary. Treated like an object, Jane Fonda tells the story of how she was asked to get her jaw broken by a dentist to emphasise her cheekbones. Thirty years later, this schema that is so blatantly brutal – violent and caricatured all at once – has become a norm. Most stars undergo the inevitable phase of aesthetic surgery in order to comply with on-screen norms.

With the strong desire to facilitate “an inventory of all the audiovisual documents on women’s rights, struggles, art, and creation, and to provide an outlet for communication and distribution” [3], she founded the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir in 1982, with Carole Roussopoulos and Ioana Wieder.

Patricia Maincent

[1] SCUM Manifesto is a feminist text written by New-Yorker Valérie Solanas in 1967, which recommends “to all women with a grain of citizenship in them, a sense of responsibility and a sense of humour, to overturn government, abolish money, and institute automation at all levels, and to wipe out the male gender.”
[2] Valérie Solanas, was born on 9 April 1936 in Ventor City (the United States) and died on 26 April 1988 in San Francisco. She was an American feminist intellectual, famous for her SCUM Manifesto. She was also famous for her attempt on Andy Warhol’s life.
[3] See: http://www.centre-simone-de-beauvoir.com/