Tag Archives: Delphine Seyrig

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

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The BFI’s screenings of JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES were all sold out. Luckily, we were both able to see it on a big screen elsewhere. In this podcast we discuss why this is a film to see on a big screen, how it remains a radical film, how the first scene sets a context, how Jeanne Dielman lives in a pimped world where the very same money she gets from men she gives to men. We discuss how the bare bones of the story could have been done as melodrama or noir and the significance of rendering it as ‘slow cinema’, including all that’s been left out of cinema previously (the various kinds of women’s work). We admire the three-day structure as well as the formal rigour and precision which creates Dielman’s world and Akerman’s point-of-view on it; how the film puts into play elements that are never rendered explicit (is the son gay?). We also discuss Delphine Seyrig, the muse insoumise, in the light of her art-house and activist careers (the program for the Queen Sofia exhibition on her work and career is in the blogpost); the film itself in the context of Second Wave Feminism; how the film remains radical in that it is simultaneously a depiction of what Tate brothers bros think women should be, a refutation of those ideas,  and women’s frustration/ explosion/ revenge in response. A film that is almost half a century old and feels continuously relevant. We also discuss the 2022 Sight and Sound poll where the film was voted the ‘Best Film of All Time’ ….and much more in the podcast below:

The podcast may also be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The Defiant Muses programme and José’s observations on it may be seen here:

New publications:

blu-ray boxed set:

Les lèvres rouges/ Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kümel, Belgium, 1971).

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There was a whole Delphine Seyrig strand at Ritrovato. I’d already seen most of them. But this was a marvellous discovery. Lesbianism is almost a feature of horror films of a certain vintage but rarely as elegantly combined as here: a classic. Seyrig plays a Hungarian Countess, Elizabeth Báthory, made up to recall Dietrich, who arrives to a hotel ,in Ostend, out of season and mostly empty, with her maid Ilona(Andrea Rau), styled to resemble Louise Brooks. The porter tells the Countess  they met forty years earlier but she looks still the same. She tells him it was probably her mother, though the audience is quickly made aware that there’s a legend about her namesake drinking the blood of virgins to keep young, one dating from the middle ages, and that police are currently carrying a whole bunch of dead bodies to the morgue. At the hotel they find a pair of newly-weds – Stefan (John Chirlton) and Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) who can’t keep their hands off each other. He’s from an aristocratic family and is delaying introducing his bride to mother, probably because mother is shown to be a man eating orchids. The Countess is set on seducing Valerie, and part of the seduction is showing her what a violent, brutish, sexist pig her husband is. How will it end? A sexy, stylish film, beautifully shot, dark but with vibrant accents, Seyrig often dressed in Nazi colours, with elements of Surrealism and Expressionism and a focus on transgressive desire that is mostly conveyed through Syrig’s soft, low voice and precise diction. It was so striking that the young woman next to me kept taking her phone out to film particular scenes. When I got annoyed and finally said, ‘really’? She said, ‘yes, really’. I like to think it’s the film that drove her to it but she might just have been a pig.

 

José Arroyo

 

 

´Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France in the 70s and 80s´at the Queen Sofia, Madrid.

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Images from the great ‘Delphine Seyrig Defiant Muses ‘exhibition. The greatness of the exhibition is in conveying a range of feminist practices, collective and social, international, ranging from issues on abortion to sex work to trans performances of classic American plays, to the liberation of video as form, to the value even of unproduced feminist film projects (Calamity Jane). And a range of relationships between women (Duras, Ulrike Ottinger, Agnès Varda, Simone de Beauvoir and so many more whose names don´t mean as much to me. I was delighted to see Jean Genet speaking up for Angela Davis and the Black Panthers as part of the work produced by Seyrig and the feminist collectives she was a part of.

 

Here is the program: defiant muses 1

defiant 2

defiant 3

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defiant 5

defiant 6

 

Plus some more images and text I thought some of you might find interesting:

 

 

The English title refers partly to the Insoumuses, the women’s video collective collective consisting of Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig, and Ioana Wieder. And the Insoumuses itself referenced the Insoumises, which Kate Lister’s wonderful book, Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts: A History of Sex for Sale, informs us is the name for unregistered sex workers in Paris: ‘The French system of regulation was clearly successful in gathering data, but it was a a failure, nonetheless. The restrictions were so severe, and the compulsory gynaecological examinations so unpopular, that many women simply did not register. Unregistered sex workers , or insoumises, sold sex on the street, in bars, in hotels or in unregistered brothels known as maisons de rendez-vous. The police regularly raided addresses they suspected of operating illegaly and had powers to arrest women suspected of being insoumise. If caught, women would be automatically registered and forcibly examined for sings of disease. Once registered, it was very difficult to become unregistered. (p.201).

José Arroyo