Women Talking: Delphine Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up!

Anne Sinclair: “So, at the heart of it, your feminism consists of what precisely?”
Delphine Seyrig: “In my communication with other women, this is the first thing. Listen to other women, talk with them… I could not live if I didn’t have this.”¹

Delphine Seyrig’s stardom was celestial. Cerebral, sculpted as marble, her face flamed screens the world over, her hair bright with the heavenly tones of dawn and dusk. Her celebrity rose as she worked with seminal filmmakers of the European art cinema including Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, and Luis Buñuel. Her initials – D. S. – became synonymous with déesse, French for goddess.² Yet Seyrig’s second act, her later work as an activist and filmmaker, sought to unravel some of this mythology. “I’m not an apparition, I’m a woman,” she whispers to Jean-Pierre Léaud at the end of Truffaut’s Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968). Her famous “Medusa voice,” so “tender and ferocious,” would be used to refute and recalibrate how women were represented in cinema.³

The consequence of Seyrig’s political and creative collaborations with the feminist video collectives of France, Sois belle et tais-toi! (Be Pretty and Shut Up!, 1981) is a singular, if straightforward, work that aims to deconstruct the fantasy of the muse. Seyrig interviews 20 actresses in Paris and New York, including Maria Schneider, Jane Fonda, Jill Clayburgh, Rita Renoir, Barbara Steele and Anne Wiazemsky. Undoing our cultural desire for celebrity, the film probes how actresses are “idols of consumption,” produced by the industry as a set of signs that fascinate and promote imitation.⁴ In contrast to the often-gleaming footage of these iconic stars, the conversations are presented in low-fi montage as the women speak about their roles, their careers, their working conditions, their dreams. In their dialogue is critique, frustration, the urge to break and smash. Yet while Be Pretty and Shut Up! might be the product of complaint, there circulates a deeper sympathy for the roles which these women must play both on screen and off, for lives that bend to the timeworn rules of narrative as if to the law of gravity. Seyrig’s voice calls out with a scolding power: “Sois belle et tais-toi! Sois belle et tais-toi!” In the role of director, her injunction is uttered in auteur-ish imitation, crackling with mirth, exasperation, and violence.

Seyrig’s transformation into a radical filmmaker was a natural extension of the entanglement between her acting and activism. In June, following the protests and strikes of May 1968, Charles de Gaulle’s party – Union of Democrats for the Republic – won an historic majority in the elections held for the National Assembly. Seyrig wrote  to her husband: “today I am literally choking with tears in my goddamn throat because since the day before yesterday the goddamn fucking flics, Ah! are back in… I feel so subversive, I don’t know how I’m going to go about it, but I’m not going to just watch and read the papers! If you could see!”⁵ In the ’70s, her critique of patriarchal values expanded into a dynamic engagement with the politics of gender, race, and class. Seyrig began to attend meetings of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF), active in the collective mobilisation against structural oppression. She signed the Manifesto of 343 – presented by women who had illegal abortions – and took to the streets in support of the Mouvement des femmes noires (Black Women’s Movement). Her first independent video, Inês (1974), reenacted the torture of a female political prisoner in Brazil under the military dictatorship. 

After gracing the screen for close to 20 years, Seyrig began sustained collaborations with women filmmakers across Europe (the 1980s saw her appear in the films of Marguerite Duras, Ulrike Ottinger, Pomme Meffre and Liliane de Kermadec) as her artistic convictions found union with her political commitments. In 1976 she appeared with Chantal Akerman on the French television program Les rendez-vous du dimanche to promote the release of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). “What motivated you to accept this role that makes you look so plain, unglamorous, and un-star like?” asked the host of Seyrig. How could the enigmatic and elegant “la divine” roll up her sleeves to bread cutlets, to scrub out her soiled bath, to trudge with netted shopping bags in a felted blue housecoat?⁶ She told Cinématographe: “I’m part of a movement that is making the masks fall away.”⁷

This activity on screen was radical, yet grasping the camera herself was the ultimate “revelation,” it was “an enormous pleasure, an enormous revenge.”⁸ Seyrig’s development as a filmmaker was initiated by her collaboration with the Swiss video-artist and activist Carole Roussopoulos. Roussopoulos made more than 100 videos over her career, documenting life in Palestinian refugee camps (Hussein, le Néron d’Aman [Hussein, the Nero of Aman, 1970]), the Black Panther movement with Jean Genet (Genet parle d’Angela Davis [Angela Davis Is at Your Mercy, 1970]), the meetings of the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action (Le FHAR [FHAR, 1971]), the fight for abortion access in France (Y a qu’à pas baiser! [Just Don’t Fuck!, 1973]), and the activism of sex workers (Les Prostituées de Lyon parlent [The Prostitutes of Lyon Speak Out, 1976]). With her Sony Portapak camera, Roussopoulos developed an intuitive method of filming that foregrounded her commitment to collective resistance. She would allow her subjects to speak without interruption, and would show them her recordings to seek their consent and ensure their trust.

Roussopoulos taught video classes in Algeria and the Congo, in addition to workshops at the Université de Vincennes à Saint-Denis in Paris. She met Seyrig and the translator Ioana Wieder at a class held in her apartment.⁹ Together they formed “Les Insoumuses” – a playful merger of “disobedient” and “muses” – and collaborated with Nadja Ringart as “Les Muses s’amusent” (“Muses amuse themselves”).¹⁰ In 1982 the group founded the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Centre which collected feminist audiovisual art, establishing a film archive documenting global feminist struggle. Speaking alongside the philosopher on a televised panel, Seyrig remarked that their purpose was “to create a collection so that we don’t forget, and women can go and recognise themselves in models of nonconformist women.”¹¹

The video works of “Les Insoumuses” and “Les Muses s’amusent” are characterised by their irreverence and militancy. Maso et Miso vont en bateau (Maso and Miso Go Boating, 1975) is a vicious and ironic reconstruction of a televised panel featuring Françoise Giroud, the Secretary of State for Women, and a motley assemblage of men speaking on the UN’s “Year of the Woman.” Cut up with scissors and edited with tape, the video includes handwritten title cards that respond to blatant remarks of misogyny – “women are more pleasant to look at than listen to” – with HUH? WHAT? “It is with video that we will tell our story ourselves!” reads another. In SCUM Manifesto (1976) Seyrig translates the tract of Valerie Solanas while Roussopoulos types the words. A small television shows a bombing on the streets of Beirut, and women marching for peace in Northern Ireland. Seyrig’s voice, all smoke and velvet, intones: “there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” 

Listening, transcribing and editing were integral to the practice of these video collectives. Video was low cost, easily portable, and enabled a direct collaboration between those filming and those filmed. If for Seyrig the film camera was a dominating instrument of transformation and fantasy, the video camera could deconstruct and document, enabling a more subversive form of engagement with image and sound, subjects and makers. The medium could permit radical forms of speech: unscripted, critical, candid, drawn from the guts.

The economical production of Be Pretty and Shut Up! is delightfully rebellious, for despite the poor lighting and imperfect sound quality it is atmospherically resplendent, luxuriating in scenes of relaxed conversation and spontaneous cogitation. Jane Fonda is sprawled on a bed; Juliet Berto flops on a couch, boot-shod feet tucked underneath her; Viva reclines against a wall, eyes raised in mischievous contemplation. These women are at home, dressed in loose shirts, smoking and chatting. The telephone rings and their children are screaming. Slumped, diffident, disappointed; alive to the contradictions that make their professional lives possible. Spiritual weariness and professional strain are leveraged and reformulated to afford collaborative, conversational joy. These women are fulsome and funny in their answers, acerbic and angry. 

“I asked questions that I asked myself as an actress,” said Seyrig, “I tried to understand my life better, and how I’ve become what I am. And if that aligns with what other women feel, so much the better.”¹² The film’s thematic limitation of structural sexism insulates the discussions from a broader consideration of how race and class operate in the film industry. Yet it reflects how commercial film acts as a barometer for dominant narratives and social values, a measure of how the public perpetuates, produces and adjusts its own image. For her part, Seyrig abandons any well-worn role. Sitting next to Roussopoulos she remains unseen, only heard, asking her questions softly and holding out the microphone to her friends. 

Sois belle et tais-toi!/Be Pretty and Shut Up! (1981 France 111 mins)

Prod Co: Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir Prod, Dir: Delphine Seyrig Phot: Carole Roussopoulos Ed: Ioana Wieder, Carole Roussopoulos 

Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jill Clayburgh, Marie Dubois, Delia Salvi, Juliet Berto, Patti D’Arbanville, Maidie Norman, Louise Fletcher, Jane Fonda, Cindy Williams, Rita Renoir, Barbara Steele, Anne Wiazemsky, Jenny Agutter, Luce Guilbeault, Viva 

Endnotes