My name is Giovanna Zapperi. I am Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez. I co-curated the exhibition Musas insumisas. And I also co-curated the show Musas insumisas.
Why is Delphine Seyrig at the centre of the exhibition? It is because somehow she emblematizes a position which is at the centre of this network of questions that have to do with visual culture in general, with the history of cinema, with the question of the performance of gender, as an actress, but also with the question of activism and how to deal… to use the camera as something that acts within the activism and not as something that is only there to document, from an external point of view, but as something that participates in the struggle.
Well, Delphine Seyrig is one of the most renowned French actresses of the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, but more specifically she still resonates in some cinephile memories as an actress of some quite pioneering New Wave French cinema.
There is one film which is quite crucial in her career, which is Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad. This film is crucial in different ways; the most obvious one is that she became famous through this film, so this allowed her to work as an actress and have a career as an actress. But on the other hand, this is really the film that marked her career in terms of a certain female figure that she played; this character of a woman who is kind of fetishized by Alain Resnais’ gaze, and who is a mysterious, seductive, sophisticated woman — she was very much throughout her career in the ‘60s… this role stuck to her and this became very soon a problem because, of course, Last Year in Marienbad is quite a striking film in its way of, on one side, being extremely avant-garde in terms of formal experiment, and on the other hand, of being extremely conservative in terms of its sexual politics.
So from this contradiction of the film, she tried to expand her ability as an actress to revise this figure of the sophisticated, bourgeois, mysterious woman throughout the 1960s. So this is how she started to be very much aware of the role that women play, that actresses play, within the film industry and within the cultural imagery related to gender. So throughout the ‘60s she tried to displace this kind of figure; we can see a certain irony in the character she plays of Madame Tabard in François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, or on a very different level in William Klein’s Mr. Freedom, where it kind of becomes excessive, or in the Les Lèvres rouges, so it also becomes proto-queer in a way, in the way she pushes this fetishized femininity in something that is excessive.
And then of course in the 1970s the encounter with the feminist movement and the encounter with women film-makers such as Chantal Akerman, but also Marguerite Duras, Liliane de Kermadec, was really a turning point for her because this is what allowed her to make sense of the contradictions in which she felt entrapped as an actress, but also to provide her a critical vocabulary to think about those issues she had already reflected upon in the 1960s and to give it a different meaning.
She discovered video through Carole Roussopoulos, who was a video-maker and a militant feminist who was also one of the first women in France to own, to possess, a video camera. She bought it several months after Jean Luc-Godard bought the first Sony Portapak, and Carole was giving courses in several ateliers, either at her place or in the University of Vincennes, for example, and Delphine Seyrig, together with her friend Ioana Wieder, once came to one of these ateliers and this is where their friendship and sisterhood and collective producing of videos began.
And the camera was very much a collective tool. It was a tool that was there in order to listen to the person that is speaking and, in that way of listening to the person speaking, also giving that person a voice that doesn’t necessarily have it, so women, minorities, migrant women, these were all issues that they were interested in.
And it also was a means to self-organise. So, for example, they formed, the three women together, with other women, different collectives — one of them was Les Insoumuses — but there existed other video collectives at the same time, which are also featured, for example, in the exhibition.
And another very important aspect is how inherent was the necessity to immediately go into transnational alliances. So, also regarding the fact that we are dealing with feminists that come from mostly privileged positions — they are white — but these women have been very early on, both Delphine, Carole, Ioana, and many others, have been actually very early on aware of their position and of privilege and they used it for very activist causes. And this goes, again, as much to Carole Roussopoulos and her connections with Black Panther movements or with Jean Genet, with whom she visited Jordan in the time of the Black September and filmed that, as well as later on when, for example, the Centre audiovisual Simone de Beauvoir produced a film in 1985 that comes from the conference of NGOs in Nairobi during the United National Conference of Women.
So it’s a very unique and really important document of early transnational feminism. So all this is actually showing us that there have been white feminisms that were very early on concerned with the Other, with the Third World, but also with migrant women, with sexual workers and with all kinds of counter-normativity issues that they were pursuing in their work.
It’s hard to talk about an impact, but what we can say is that the significance of Les Insoumises’ activism in the 1970s has been overlooked by the historiography of both the feminist movement in France and by the historiography of the history of cinema, generally speaking. So this exhibition is also, for us, a way to bring back this legacy within the present moment.
The way the feminist movement in France has been historicised, especially from the ‘80s on, was very much focused on the theoretical contributions, but the question for us is also to try and write a different history of the feminist movement, especially in France. A history which is much more based on the practices, on the visual practices, on the use of media, which was perhaps less intellectual, less theory-oriented, but that really created new ways to use media, as new ways of imagining being together and solidarity among women. So our attempt is also to provide a revised — partial, of course — look into that moment from an aspect that is so crucial but that has been overlooked. It is very important to introduce this perspective. Also, if you want to look at the connections between politics and image-making, politics, feminism and the whole realm of the history of cinema, that these are not separate.
