In 1977, Delphine Seyrig took the camera to question twenty-four of her colleagues. The documentary, bearing a feminist and political discourse, comes out in a restored version.
by Murielle Joudet
There were the beautiful images, those where Delphine Seyrig appeared (dead in 1990), an actress with one of the most beautiful and demanding filmographies that French cinema has counted. Marguerite Duras, Jacques Demy, François Truffaut, Chantal Akerman, Alain Resnais, Joseph Losey: Delphine Seyrig has gone through what the cinema offered more free, films inside which he was left to file her playful and reflexive presence . This is how the Critique Jean-Marc Lalanne approaches in a work to be published on February 17, Delphine Seyrig. In constructions (Capricci, 184 pages, 17 euros), portrait of an actress who spends her time demantibulating femininity to reveal her artifact nature.
This deconstruction work, the actress also accomplished it as an activist with the Insumuses, a collective working for feminist films. In 1977, Seyrig realized Be beautiful and shut up, which emerged in restored version: the actress disappears in the Hors-Champ to better think about her job, lift the beautiful cinema images to bring up a line of real women, disgusted , tired.
For almost two hours, the director goes to interview twenty-four of her colleagues actresses and/or filmmakers. Let us quote the best known: Jane Fonda, Jill Clayburgh, Ellen Burstyn, Juliet Berto, Anne Wiazemsky, Maria Schneider. “Colleagues”, precisely, the word is not obvious, as the acting profession isolates, imposes the default competition for you. This is precisely what moves in this documentary: it is a refuge where female experience has time to coagulate in political speech.
The assembly of Seyrig solidarizes all these testimonies to make it a disastrous inventory of the cinema industry. All of them describe it as a matter of men where they try to make a career in a sawfall. All admit that they would not have followed this path if they were born man: we choose the profession of actress to avoid the arduousness of the woman’s profession.
formal and political gesture
Be beautiful and shut up is, unchecked, a formal and political gesture which makes a carbonist counterchamp, clandestine limit, compulsory glamor and fictions of junk. Here, all these women readily offer what the cinema films so little: cleansing faces, defeats, those of exhausted, disillusioned workers, who prefer intellectualizing rather than smile. At first glance, one might think that the film industry is contaminated by feminist movements of the 1970s.
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