Defiant Muses. Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France in the 1970s and 1980s

An exhibition exploring the unique personality of Delphine Seyrig (1932-1990), a cult actress known for her roles in French auteur cinema during the sixties and seventies, video-filmmaker and militant feminist.

Seyrig became famous for working with some of the best known auteurs of French cinema during the sixties, such as Truffaut and Buñuel. During the seventies, she became involved in feminist activism and, together with female cinematographers, reconstructed her own diva image. She gradually started specialising in audiovisual filmmaking and launched the Defiant Muses collection, which uses video as a tool for emancipation and an agent for political activism. Her audiovisual archive is an unprecedented portrayal, with a ground-breaking aesthetic, of the struggles of the time, such as the fight for legalised abortion, against the Vietnam War and for sex workers’ rights.Through some of these video clips, photographs and documents, the exhibition explores the intersection between the histories of cinema, video and feminism in France, also pointing out the cross-border relations that women maintained within the feminist movement.