Reincarnations of a Rebel Muse

The daughter of a French father and Swiss mother, Seyrig spent the first ten years of her life in Beirut and eventually studied acting, first in France and then at the Actors Studio in New York. There, she fell in with a bohemian crowd and landed her first small film role as the long-suffering wife of a conductor played by artist Larry Rivers in Pull My Daisy (1959), the thirty-minute Beat milestone written by Jack Kerouac and directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie.

It was also in New York that Seyrig met Alain Resnais, who cast her in Last Year at Marienbad (1961) as a woman known only as A, married to M (Sacha Pitoëff) but being pursued by X (Giorgio Albertazzi). “Amid the film’s ghoulish extravagance, its baroque interiors and funereal organ score”—composed, by the way, by Seyrig’s brother, Francis—“its scatty editing rhythms and angular, black-and-white tableaux, Seyrig emerges as an object of extraordinary fascination,” wrote Loayza a few years ago. “Her downward gaze and fluttering eyelashes pull you into her mystery, and when you finally lock eyes with her, she might look at you as if she knows your most intimate secrets—or as if you don’t exist. Marienbad made her a star—la divine to the critics, muse to a cohort of auteurs—while her short, slicked-back coiffure and fetching Chanel costumes unleashed a novel look that would captivate the demoiselles of a new generation.”

For James Quandt, Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963) is “Resnais’s greatest film.” Seyrig plays Hélène, a widowed antique dealer visited by a former lover, with what Quandt describes as “restive intensity.” Both the Metrograph and HFA series skip over two films Seyrig made with William Klein, Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966) and Mr. Freedom (1969), and her brief but arresting appearances in Losey’s Accident (1967), Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses (1968), and Buñuel’s The Milky Way (1969), but the HFA is screening Seyrig’s first collaboration with Marguerite Duras, La musica (1967).

The Metrograph and HFA series both feature two films from 1970 set in fantastic worlds, Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin and Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness. In Donkey Skin, Catherine Deneuve plays a princess fleeing a marriage proposal from her own father, the king (Jean Marais), and Seyrig springs to her aide as a sprightly fairy godmother.

Writing about seven of “the most fashionable cult horror films” for i-D, Kristen Yoonsoo Kim suggests that Seyrig’s lesbian vampire in Daughters rivals Deneuve’s in Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983). As the Countess Elizabeth Báthory with an eye on a pair of newlyweds, Seyrig “shimmers in a silver sheath dress and shows white, white teeth in her red, red mouth and waves a feather boa like the fronds of a poison anemone to attract the young couple into her coils in a distant echo of Dracula’s victim-enveloping cloak,” writes Kim Newman for Electric Sheep.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) “gives us Buñuel the anarchist in the relaxed guise of a host executing one subversive parlor trick after another,” wrote Charles Taylor for Salon in 2000. “The acting, in the submerged stylization essential to drawing-room comedy, is flawless.” The cast features Bulle Ogier, Stéphane Audran, Fernando Rey, and of course, “the delightful Delphine Seyrig, with her crooked smile, turning her usual effortless charm to a thoroughly unspontaneous sunniness that has been bred in the bone.”

Seyrig first saw a film by Chantal Akerman when she served on a jury that awarded a prize to Hotel Monterrey (1972). The two were determined to work together, and Seyrig helped raise funds for Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a formally rigorous but almost mysteriously engaging three-and-a-half-hour chronicle of three days in the life of a housewife on the verge. “To watch Jeanne Dielman,” wrote Loayza last year, “is to enter a new wavelength that positions viewers as witnesses to the full psychic and material scope of one woman’s quotidian life.”

In a single remarkable year, 1975, Seyrig starred in Jeanne Dielman; India Song; Guy Gilles’s The Garden That Tilts, costarring Seyrig’s partner, Sami Frey, and featuring a musical performance from Jeanne Moreau; and Liliane de Kermadec’s Aloïse, the story of Aloïse Corbaz, a governess in the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II who became romantically obsessed with the Kaiser and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was sent to a Swiss asylum in 1918, where she remained until she died in 1964. As a patient, she painted, and her work would be championed by Jean Dubuffet. Isabelle Huppert plays the young Aloïse, with Seyrig taking over the role to portray the outsider artist in her later years.

It was also in 1975 that Seyrig cofounded the feminist collective Les Insoumuses, the Defiant Muses, with Swiss documentarian Carole Roussopoulos and translator Ioana Wieder. Roussopoulos had been conducting video workshops, and among the many Les Insoumuses productions is Maso and Miso Go Boating (1975), an intervention into a French television special in which a panel of men discuss 1975 as the UN-declared “year of the woman.”

Seyrig’s only solo outing as a director is Be Pretty and Shut Up (1981), which draws on a series of interviews she conducted with French and American actresses, including Jane Fonda, Jill Clayburgh, Juliet Berto, Ellen Burstyn, Maria Schneider, Louise Fletcher, Barbara Steele, and Anne Wiazemsky. “Their most damning indictment of the male-dominated world of movies is simply that it doesn’t reflect their experiences, their personal, off-camera realities,” notes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody.

In 1983, Seyrig approached cinematographer and editor Babette Mangolte, who had shot Jeanne Dielman, with a project that would never be completed, a feature based on the letters frontierswoman, sharpshooter, and storyteller Martha Jane Canary sent to her absent daughter. Metrograph will screen Calamity Jane & Delphine Seyrig: A Story (2019), Mangolte’s homage to the feminist spirit of the undertaking, on February 1.

Ulrike Ottinger directed Seyrig in three features, including Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984). As Laia Garcia-Furtado writes in Vogue, Seyrig appears “in a dramatic black-and-white power suit and pearls galore that is absolute perfection” as Dr. Mabuse, international media magnate. She carried on working right up until cancer took her in 1990—she was only fifty-eight—and one of her most significant turns in her later years is her performance as Jeanne Schwartz, a Holocaust survivor who runs a shop in a mall in Chantal Akerman’s Golden Eighties (1986).

“This ode to the musicals of Vincente Minnelli and Jacques Demy is practically a soap opera compared to the quiet, sober Jeanne Dielman,” writes Loayza. “The musical centerpiece of Golden Eighties, in which Jeanne is finally alone with her thoughts as she opens the store in the wee hours of the morning, collapses the goddess’s impeccable façade.” Jeanne, a reasonably happy wife and mother, has recently met an old lover and wonders what might have been. “Despite the twinkling musical artifice,” writes Loayza, “I can’t think of a scene in Seyrig’s filmography in which she is so emotionally naked and forthcoming—and in which she so plainly fulfills her desire to be heard and known.”