Calamity Jane & Delphine Seyrig: A Story

In 1977 actress-activist Delphine Seyrig was interviewed by German director Katja Raganelli for a documentary portrait.¹ Reflecting on her screen career – from her feature debut in L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961), her collaborations with filmmakers Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman and Liliane de Kermadec, and her own directorial effort Sois belle et tais-toi! (Be Pretty and Shut Up!, 1981) – Seyrig established the moment of her feminist awakening as the late 1960s. As a young girl, Seyrig confessed, she had struggled to identify with women who could be “independent like a man.” These inimitable figures for Seyrig included Simone de Beauvoir and her own mother, Hermine de Saussure. “My mother would have liked me to have been less feminine and more exploring, more like boys are,” Seyrig recalled. “She thought I was very silly because I was coquettish… and the more she would tell me this, the more I would be feminine and want to put things in my hair. It’s a complicated process.” 

Two years on from this interview, Seyrig came across the book Calamity Jane’s Letters to her Daughter. This collection – a forthright account of maternal sacrifice and bereavement – was purportedly written by the gender-bending frontierswoman to a child she had been forced to give away. It moved Seyrig immensely, and she sought to adapt it into a film. Writing an initial synopsis of the project, Seyrig expressed her interest in exploring, among other themes, “the instinctive refusal to hold one sexual role rather than another and consequently isolation and misery.”

To shoot the film, Seyrig approached cinematographer Babette Mangolte, whom she had previously worked with on Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Together with Mangolte’s 16mm camera, the two followed a flimsy paper trail to Billings, Montana in 1983. Unfortunately, due to a lack of funding, the film never materialised. 30 years after Seyrig’s passing, Mangolte repurposed the research footage and other materials from this period to create the documentary homage Calamity Jane & Delphine Seyrig, A Story (2020). 

Born and raised in France, Mangolte relocated to New York in the early 1970s, drawn by the avant-garde scene. There she began documenting the performances of various dancers and notably shot Yvonne Rainer’s debut film Lives of Performers (1972). The same year, she served as cinematographer on Akerman’s La chambre (1972) and Hotel Monterey (1972), her earliest collaborations with the Belgian director. Since this time, Mangolte has been building a photographic archive centred on key figures in experimental theatre, dance and performance. “Ever since I was teenager, I have understood… that certain photographs acquire their value later, after they have been taken, because they reveal what no one was looking at, at the time,” she explained.² Mangolte’s first film as director, What Maisie Knew, was completed in 1975. In her subsequent features and non-narrative short films, she has often explored movement, perspective and the temporality of landscapes. 

Discussing her influences as a filmmaker in a 2008 interview, Mangolte said: “for me performance and the dancer’s body are more important to my own practice than the films I see. I am stimulated by what my senses make out of the world around me and above all I am sensitive to light and colour.”³ Such tactile inclinations are apparent in the prologue of the Calamity Jane & Delphine Seyrig: A Story, which opens on the redwoods of Sonoma County, California.  The conversation with feminist scholar JJ Wilson which follows cleverly scaffolds Mangolte’s exploration to come, signalling myths as both an obstacle to, and a vehicle of, truth; wondering at how the legacy of great women might be carried forward; and, most importantly, drawing a parallel between Seyrig and Calamity as “outliers” in their respective cultures.

In her trademark buckskin jacket, trousers and hat, Martha Jane Canary, or Calamity Jane as she is best known, is among the most prominent icons of the American West. Her reputation for defying gendered expectations of dress and pastime has contributed significantly to her entertainment appeal. Films like The Plainsman (Cecil B. DeMille, 1936) and Calamity Jane (David Butler, 1953) have depicted her as an intrepid, lovesick and sometimes queer-coded tomboy, lassoing her whip at the men that sass her. Her radicalism is undermined by her ridiculousness; she is too feminine to do a man’s job properly, too masculine to command the male attention she desperately craves. Inevitably, these representations also belie Calamity Jane’s lifetime of adversity. In Calamity: The Many Lives of Calamity Jane, Karen R. Jones writes: “surviving photographs offer a tantalizing glimpse into the fluid identities of Martha Canary/Calamity Jane as she navigated between the assured swagger of a woman dressed as a man in theatrical stance and the abjections of a poor, alcoholic drifter eking out an existence at the margins of social acceptability.”⁴ 

Over the decades, the legend of Calamity Jane has been continually repurposed, with dubious sources further obscuring her as a real personality. Indeed, Jean Hickok McCormick, whose claim forms the basis of Calamity Jane’s Letters to her Daughter, was one of several individuals to declare themselves a lost relative of Calamity Jane, only to be discredited. However, in spite of its fakery, McCormick’s story has retained intrigue and resonance, speaking perhaps to a collective desire for personal intimacy with public figures. 

In a letter to her son Duncan Youngerman, which is read aloud in Calamity Jane & Delphine Seyrig, A Story, Seyrig shared of her enthusiasm for the film she intended to direct and act in. She advised of a breakthrough following a conversation with Chantal Akerman: “I wanted to say so much with it, about my mother, myself, the contradictions between femininity and independence… I wanted to say everything – and therefore couldn’t even begin…. [Akerman] thought I should tell that story, period. It suddenly swept away all the complicated things that had stifled me gradually… and now I know what to do.” There’s something maddening in the fact that Seyrig never got the opportunity to tell this story in the way that she wanted. For Mangolte to pick up the pieces of this long dormant project and assemble them into a poignant tribute is a deeply loving act.

Calamity Jane & Delphine Seyrig: A Story (2020 USA/France 87 mins)

Prod Co: Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir Prod, Dir, Phot: Babette Mangolte Scr: Babette Mangolte, Delphine Seyrig Sound: Frédéric Commault

Cast: Delphine Seyrig

Endnotes