Event

INDIA SONG

Dir. Marguerite Duras, 1975.
France. 115 min.

Marguerite Duras had previously written the screenplay for Seyrigs international breakthrough HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR, and directed her in the 1967 adaptation of her own play LA MUSICA. Their re-teaming in 1975 marked a masterful standout in both of their careers. A tale of doomed love amidst 1930s colonial India, the film is a mysterious mesh of haunting memories and Duras most lauded work.

The most feminine film I have ever seen, a rarefied work of lyricism, despair, and passion, imbued with a kind of primitive emotional hunger. - Molly Haskell

*****

When Delphine Seyrigs fairy godmother character nonchalantly descends in a helicopter upon the Medieval fairy tale realm of Jacques Demys Donkey Skin, the surreal image is pretty indicative of Seyrigs regrettably short, enormously prolific (she appeared in over sixty films and only lived until age fifty-eight), and trenchantly unforgettable career. Seyrig had an innate ability to transcend every film in which she appeared, regardless of what auteur was directing.

She mostly famously worked with Chantal Akerman, Alain Resnais, and Luis Buñuel, but also Robert Frank, Francois Truffaut, and Harold Pinter. Among the first filmmakers to make use of video in France, Seyrig co-founded a radical, anarchistic collective of feminist filmmakers and directed two feature documentaries (Sois belle et this-toi and Maso et miso vont en bateau) and several shorts, including a wonderfully droll reading of the SCUM Manifesto with filmmaker Carole Rossoupoulos. Digging through Seyrigs filmography is an endlessly rewarding excavation of idiosyncratic gems, from queer vampire thrillers to pioneering camp adaptations of Virginia Woolfs Orlando