Delphine Seyrig

This visual essay, produced in 2023, builds upon rare radio interviews that Chantal Akerman gave in 1975 and 1977, in which she reflects on her films and her ascendance to critical success.

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We thought we'd seen, read, and heard everything there was to see about the Cannes Film Festival, from the glitz and gossip to the scandals and censorship. And yet, Emmanuel Barnault's "Morceaux de Cannes" (Pieces of Cannes), by this leading expert on Italian and French cinema, convinces us otherwise. The third largest event in the world (after the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup) reveals its secrets only sparingly, as this film attests. The result of passionate research in the INA archives, these 52 minutes, without interviews or voice-over narration, string together rare and sometimes previously unseen footage. Taken together, they tell a surprising, original, and heartwarming story of the Festival. On the beach, on a street corner, in a restaurant, or in the privacy of a hotel room, these forgotten archives summon the greatest filmmakers, actors, and actresses of the last seventy years, from Jean Cocteau to David Lynch, for an anthology of the Festival's history.

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If Jean Rochefort remains so dear to our hearts, it is because this extraordinary actor alone embodies a cinema and a France imbued with freedom and carelessness. Through his films, archives and the testimony of those close to him, we discover a complex man, a sad clown saved by his taste for words and for fun.

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Delphine Seyrig decided to work on a film project about Calamity Jane to reveal Jane’s sensibility and insight about life in those letters to her daughter. The reading of those letters permits a self-reflection about feminism and motherhood.

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In the 70s, actress Delphine Seyrig and director Carole Roussopoulos, both militant feminists, were the pioneers of video activism in France. They documented the demonstrations of French feminists and used the new technologies to counter the poor representation of women in the public media.

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Underscored by French film legend Delphine Seyrig’s evocative recitation of a Henri Michaux poem, Maureen Fazendeiro’s film is a mysterious, multi-textured portrait of eclipse spectators in Portugal.

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My aim is to create a highly compressed museum of cinema, consisting of some of the most notoriously engaging, difficult, and lengthy works of film history—those nearly invisible works that explore the limit conditions of film. Works that have become invisible precisely because of their status as “classics.” The experiment is to see just what comes to light when these works are compressed into a familiar yet brief span of time, where one might hold the whole film in memory at once, or refresh one’s memory in a Proustian rush of images, or simply experience that energy of delusion.

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Documentary on famous writer Marguerite Duras and her paradoxical relation to the seventh art by her former film editor.

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A film where anything can happen - the hero and the heroine changes their faces, age, look, names, and so on. The only same thing: The love between man and woman... in an archetypical love story cut from 500 classics from all around the world.

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Found footage using Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman.

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Delphine Seyrig, an extraordinary woman and actress, died on October 15, 1990. From "Last Year at Marienbad" by Alain Resnais to "India Song" by Marguerite Duras, she played in 34 films for cinema, 13 films for television and 33 plays. Jacqueline Veuve, filmmaker and friend of Delphine Seyrig, wanted to break the silence that has fallen on her memory by making a documentary that traces with emotion and subjectivity the life of the mythical actress, the fierce feminist but also the simple friend.

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What makes European cinema so special? Find out in Paul Joyce’s feature-length documentary, Pictures of Europe, which examines the differences between American independent and Hollywood movies and films from European directors. Featuring luminary iconoclasts from European cinema such as Agnes Varda, Bernardo Bertolucci and Pedro Almodovar, as well as American counterpoints from Paul Schrader, and those who have crossed back and forth, such as Paul Verhoeven

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A group of cosmopolitan women passengers aboard the Trans-Siberian/Mongolian Railway are taken prisoner by Ulan Iga, a warrior princess.

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Two worlds are involved. The internal world, closed, virtually isolated, with just one tenuous, uncertain link with the other world - the telephone. The other, external world exists only to pass from one sealed-off place to another. Call each other? - you lose your voice before you get an answer: your head spins with non-existent voices. Telephone and answering machines are scheming devices. Just waiting in vain.

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Of Doubt and Grace: A spell-binding reading by Delphine SEYRIG of extracts of Carole NAGGAR's text "Cité du Sang". An adaptation filmed in Benares and Calcutta; the body structured in gestures and time. When reality becomes fiction... or the reverse.

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Pride is the first of the seven deadly sins. The introduction is made through early allegorical forms and figures (triumphal procession, dance of death, Baroque tragedy etc.) The triumphal procession of the giant haystack as a symbol of human vanities becomes a military parade of abrupt, functional and arrogant gestures. The most diverse musical fragments and rhythms intone the montage of details in the staged triumphal procession, juxtaposed with documentary images, including marches, ticker-tape parades and military review.

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This short film about the links between the experience of madness ans pictorial expression, comprises a conversation between the actress Delphine Seyrig and Mary Barnes, painter and co-author of Mary Barnes, "Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness."

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One year after the death of Simone de Beauvoir (14 april 1986) Delphine Seyrig pays homage by visiting her grave. which she finds still covered with flowers and letters from all over the world.

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Black comedy about a couple who become convinced that their best friends are aliens and that the Earth’s days are numbered.

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In a lively shopping center, proprietors and customers are bustling, including three women vying for a man's heart with song and dance.

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Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world's most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Valie Export (Lust), Laurence Gavron (Envy), and Ulrike Ottinger (Pride). Each filmmaker had the liberty of choosing a sin to interpret as they wished. The final film reflected this diversity, including traditional narrative fiction, experimental video, a musical, a radical documentary, and was delivered in multiple formats from 16, super 16, video and 35mm.

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A filmed adaptation of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s play, based on Sylvia Plath’s intense correspondence with her mother Aurelia, from the time the poet was in university until her suicide. Delphine Seyrig and her niece Coralie Seyrig recite Sylvia and Aurelia’s letters to the audience directly.

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This afterword to India Song (Duras' celebrated 1975 film) is organized in several parts. It begins with an interview to Marguerite Duras by Dominique Noguez, an expert in her work; the interview links the film to the two movies whom it's related to: The Ravishment of Lol V. Stein and The Vice-Consul. Several themes are tackled: childhood, autobiographical traces, relationships between differents characters and different films and more. India Song's main actors — Delphine Seyrig and Michael Lonsdale, who played Anne-Marie Stretter and the French vice-consul — join the conversation and talk about their roles and their craft. Marguerite Duras then evokes her memories of the shooting with the composer Carlos D'Alessio and her camera operato Bruno Nuytten. The conversations are punctuated by clips of the film.

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The final installment in Ulrike Ottinger’s Berlin Trilogy (following TICKET OF NO RETURN and FREAK ORLANDO) casts Delphine Seyrig as the nefarious Fritz Lang supervillain Dr. Mabuse, here the head of a powerful media empire that seeks to create headlines by manufacturing (and then publicly destroying) its own celebrity: the wealthy, handsome playboy Dorian Gray.

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Delphine Seyrig plays a middle-aged woman coping with an ungovernable present and holding out hopes of escaping to a more pleasant past. She leaves her current residence to retreat to her provincial French hometown. Here she dreams of locating and rekindling an old love. Seyrig is less inscrutable here than in her debut feature-film appearance Last Year in Marienbad (61), though the character is just as complex and difficult to please. Grain of Sand was released in France in 1983 as Le Grain de Sable.

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After separating from the father of her son, a young French woman tries to find lodging and a fresh start in L.A. for herself and her son.

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Five more-or-less distinct sections, all featuring "Freak" Orlando, a woman played by the late Magdalena Montezuma, who appears in various guises and deformities throughout.

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One of Shaw's "pleasant plays", The Man of Destiny is a one-act lighthearted comedy of egos and social hypocrisy. Set in 1796 in northern Italy, it features a battle of wits between Napoleon Bonaparte and a mysterious, daring woman who has stolen his documents. Can she really challenge the strategic mind of a general still celebrating a famous victory?

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The film is a series of interviews with various well-known film actresses, including Jenny Agutter, Maria Schneider, and Jane Fonda. The title, which is borrowed from a 1958 film with the same name by Marc Allegret, refers to the sense the actresses have of what is expected of them by the film industry.

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Story of three "flights": a little boy, a girl, and a mother who escapes the real world and recreates the world through dreams and photographs.

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Ten years after their first meeting, John Marcher and May Bartram meet again in the magnificent Weatherend estate, but, as the first time, John's certainty of being doomed to a tragic fate hinders the feelings they have for each other.

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A middle-aged disabled man unknowingly begins a lonely hearts correspondence with his own unmarried sister, who takes care of him. As he writes more and more to her, he begins to fall in love, and she, knowing that it is her brother who is writing, discovers a new, tender side to him. But trouble looms when he asks to meet her in person.

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While the Easter holidays are over, a young woman named Cécile and her brother Pierre return to the family home. There they meet their grandfather Léon, an old communist militant who has shaken Lenin's hand.

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Barbara is a forty-year-old woman of Polish origin living in Budapest. She is a biologist, a wife and a mother. The death of her woman friend opens her eyes to the fact that she is lonely, unable to find her place.

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A filmed adaptation of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s play, based on Sylvia Plath’s intense correspondence with her mother Aurelia, from the time the poet was in university until her suicide. Delphine Seyrig and her niece Coralie Seyrig recite Sylvia and Aurelia’s letters to the audience directly.

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The film is a series of interviews with various well-known film actresses, including Jenny Agutter, Maria Schneider, and Jane Fonda. The title, which is borrowed from a 1958 film with the same name by Marc Allegret, refers to the sense the actresses have of what is expected of them by the film industry.

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Inês Etienne Romeu was an opponent to the Brazilian's dictatorship. She was kidnapped, tortured and raped in jail, where she stayed for almost 100 days. She was later sentenced to life imprisonment. She stayed ten years in prison, from 1971 to 1979. Delphine Seyrig directed this film in 1974, when Inês was still in prison, protesting against this imprisonment and in support to Inês.

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