Galatea’s Revenge: Actresses Talk Back

In Romy: Anatomy of a Face (1967), Syberberg follows the twenty-seven-year-old Romy Schneider on a ski holiday in Austria, intercutting these alpine episodes with a range of other materials, including archival footage and glimpses of the shoot of La voleuse (1966), a film scripted by Marguerite Duras in which Schneider stars opposite Michel Piccoli as a woman who kidnaps a child she had previously put up for adoption. An early, made-for-television work by a director best known for the monumental Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977), Romy is modest in scale, drawing close to a star who was in the midst of reinventing herself as a performer of great psychological complexity after coming to fame in the midfifties for her repeated portrayal of Sissi, Empress of Austria, in costume dramas. “I was the princess for seven years, but one day I didn’t want to be her anymore,” says Schneider. She hisses that she hates the “star system,” a term she contemptuously relays in English, and says she has lost ambition. Often, she appears moody, diffident. The face she presents is seemingly clear of makeup and subtly traversed by internal turbulence, contrasting sharply with the frozen glamour of the magazine spreads from which Syberberg samples. The veil has been lifted. Yet it would be wrong to presume that Romy delivers unvarnished truth in place of mediatized falsity. Schneider cannily takes advantage of the offstage ambiance to cement the new star image she was constructing at the time, serving up all the anomie and vulnerability expected of a serious modern actress.

Of all the films in the program, Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up! (filmed in the midseventies and released in 1981) most clearly indicts the Pygmalion paradigm. What had in Romy: Anatomy of a Face registered as a simmering recalcitrance toward industry norms here comes to a boil, heated up by the white-hot flame of feminist consciousness. Fresh from her turn as the murderous title character of Chantal Akerman’s landmark Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Seyrig embraced the flexible medium of video, working with Carole Roussopoulos and Ioana Wieder as part of the collective Les Insoumuses—a group whose name is an untranslatable play on the notion of being muses who are insoumises, which is to say, disobedient or rebellious. In this tape, which borrows its name from a 1958 Marc Allégret comedy, Seyrig speaks with twenty-four actresses in Paris and Los Angeles about their experiences in the industry, including Juliette Berto, Ellen Burstyn, Jane Fonda, Maria Schneider, and Anne Wiazemsky. The paradigm here is that of the consciousness-raising group, a staple format of second-wave feminism in which women were encouraged to speak openly about their experiences, not out of a spirit of individual confession, but to arrive at an understanding of how what seems personal is in fact a shared product of structural conditions. Be Pretty and Shut Up! uses montage to create a choral ensemble in which women voice a common experience of alienation, from themselves and from other women. Many speak of inescapable stereotypes, limited opportunity, and competition, notably doing so from the heart of a decade in which immense transformations were underway, both in the cinema and in society at large. The irreverence that informs other tapes by the Insoumuses, such as Maso and Miso Go Boating (1976) and S.C.U.M. Manifesto 1967 (1976) is not present here; rather, Seyrig is a sincere and compassionate witness, crafting a composite portrait of a gendered condition. If only so much of it didn’t sound so familiar still today.

The English-language title of Fassbinder’s Women (2000), Rosa von Praunheim’s latitudinal study of the people surrounding the infamously tempestuous director, captures little of the saucy attitude of the German: Für mich gab’s nur noch Fassbinder: Die glücklichen Opfer des Rainer Werner F., or, “For Me, There Was Only Fassbinder: The Happy Victims of Rainer Werner F.” Like Be Pretty and Shut Up!, the film gathers a plurality of voices to reflect on a shared experience, in this case what it was like to be in the orbit of the prolific filmmaker who passed away in 1982 at only thirty-seven. Yet here, rather than the justified grievances aired in Seyrig’s video, what surfaces is a psycho-socio-sexual tangle shot through with ambivalence—and a twinge of nostalgia. In a 1993 interview, von Praunheim admitted that he never liked Fassbinder and felt competitive toward him as a fellow gay filmmaker working independently in West Germany. Von Praunheim said that although he found Fassbinder’s films “relatively boring,” he was fascinated by the man’s life because “he was mean-spirited and sadistic toward his coworkers, and they let themselves be tortured by him. He was the driven, ugly man seeking to build self-esteem through sadomasochism.” Cozy collectivity this wasn’t. Hearing about all this decades later is the gossipy delight of this documentary, in which being one of Fassbinder’s “women,” it turns out, has little to do with one’s gender. It is all a matter of power, and that power is exerted differentially on the various members of the gang. In line with RWF’s predilection for giving male collaborators feminine nicknames, von Praunheim interviews not just figures like Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla, and Brigitta Mira, but also Peer Raben and Harry Baer (a.k.a. “Isla”). As a chronicle of a scene that—I beg to differ, Rosa—produced some of the best films ever made, Fassbinder’s Women is not entirely devoid of reverence but does put some pressure on the lionization of the great auteur through its attentiveness to the contributions of his various “happy victims.” Fassbinder might have been the Führer, as Doris Mattes calls him, but in cinema as in politics, every leader needs a supporting team.

Von Praunheim, who passed away on December 17, 2025, at the age of eighty-three after making more than 150 films, possessed an unflagging energy for documenting queer subculture. His earlier film Tally Brown, New York (1979) offers a superlative portrait of the titular performer, a woman he knows is a star and treats like a star, despite—or perhaps because—most people have never heard of her. A demimonde diva who performed on Broadway, appeared in Andy Warhol and Gregory Markopoulos’s films, and sang at the Continental Baths, Brown says she found her first appreciative audience with “old strippers and young sailors.” Von Praunheim roams around New York, filming her performances and giving her the chance to tell her life story in voice-over, as images of her beloved metropolis cascade by. All powdered and zaftig, with a coarseness that somehow matches her poise, Brown is not unlike the sequin-bedecked character of Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1949), aged by three decades. But where Anger’s starlet was silent, what a voice Tally has, whether singing or talking. She is a force to be contained by no one, not to mention a lens through which a vision of an entire city, now vanished, comes into view.

Palling around with Taylor Mead and Divine, singing David Bowie and Kurt Weill, enjoying her femininity like a drag masquerade, Tally has none of the aboveground success of the protagonist of the program’s fifth film. Near the start of All by Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story (1982), we see the singer and actress attending the inaugural ball for Ronald Reagan—an event the film juxtaposes with the New York Times’ revelation in 1975 that Kitt had been subject to surveillance by the CIA owing to her criticism of the war in Vietnam. Both Kitt and Brown, however, are singer-survivors, and both films alternate between onstage and backstage, between two kinds of performance: one for the public, the other for the documentarian, both in the twilight of the women’s careers. In Be Pretty and Shut Up!, most of the actresses have not yet passed into the ripeness of age. It is something they fear, foreseeing a moment when the prejudices of the industry will bear down on them with an even greater weight. Brown and Kitt, by contrast, appear in these films after they have crossed the Rubicon of fifty. All by Myself depicts its subject with great pathos but no pity. The resilience that echoes through the lyrics of Kitt’s songs seeps into her offstage persona, as she embraces challenges and refuses compromise. Rather than using its access to Kitt to frame her as an everywoman—as if to say, “Stars, they’re just like us!”—Blackwood’s film finds a perhaps unexpected kinship with von Praunheim’s portrait of Tally Brown, in that both refuse to reduce an exceptional personality to the banality of the relatable. They say instead: just look at how fascinating she is.

In her recent criticism collection The Hunger: Film Writing, 2012–2024, Anderson writes that Boyd McDonald’s notion that “motion pictures are for people who like to watch women” is for her “the purest, simplest distillation of cinephilia—or at least one strain of it, mine especially.” This kind of visual pleasure is emphatically not what Laura Mulvey had in mind when she proposed that classical Hollywood was marked by a male gaze. It is, however, the kind of queer, feminist pleasure that drips from these five films, a pleasure inextricable from their affirmation of what one might call Galatea’s unruly obstinacy. Ivory, the substance from which she was initially made, is harder than bone, after all. Actresses Unfiltered brings together works of meta-cinema that look closely at female performance, outside the forms of directorial control that often prevail in fiction filmmaking. In so doing, they tutor the viewer in a way of looking, offering an optic through which more women and more movies deserve to be seen.