Delphine et Carole, insoumuses

From Alain Resnais' L'année dernière à Marienbad (1961) to Ulrike Ottinger's Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1989), Delphine Seyrig's filmography includes a multitude of outstanding roles with numerous style-setting directors. Less known are Seyrig's own works as a filmmaker, and the fact that in the early 1970s she founded the video collective "Les Insoumuses" with the Swiss director and feminist Carole Roussopoulos. Birgit Kohler writes that the Insoumuses, or resistant muses, not only documented “protests by the French women’s movement, but also used the new medium of video to counter the dominant representation of women on TV and elsewhere with their own images and commentaries. (…) This film traces the beginnings of a creative political practice that used boldness, humor, and subversion to unite collective action, media intervention, and archival documentation.” (mg)