Delphine and Carole – Delphine Seyrig, the actress who starred in the films of Resnais and Buñuel, Duras and Akerman; and Carole Roussopoulos, the pioneering video-maker, who, after Jean-Luc Godard, was only the second person in France to use video as a film production tool. From the mid-1970s, in the turbulence of post’68 and the feminist movement, the two women embarked on a militant working partnership, making a series of videos devised as political interventions to champion the struggle of women, whether actresses, prostitutes or workers.
Delphine et Carole Insoumuses, the result of a project launched by Carole to pay tribute to her late friend Delphine, retraces this collaboration by mixing video images filmed by the two directors, interviews with Carole, archive pictures
of Delphine and images from films made by others in which Delphine acts. Through these edited images emerges a portrait of a working relationship that was founded on jubilant complicity as well as radical militant commitment. It is also the portrait of an era of aesthetic initiatives, teeming with politics, with its avant-gardes and its reactions, its engagements and its immobilisms, its centre and its margins. An excavation that aims to supply today’s struggles with what was most convivial and radically emancipating about the struggles of yesterday. (N.L.)
Callisto Mc Nulty
