Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour • Presented by Archives on Screen

Sois belle et tais-toi! (Be Pretty and Shut Up!)

Introduction by Morgan Adamson

Saturday, February 15 • 4:00pm • Tickets: $12 General (+ $2 online fee), $8 Members (no fee), $8 Students (door)

ABOUT THE FILM

Be Pretty and Shut Up! is a cheeky title for a talking head documentary. French actress and filmmaker Delphine Seyrig interviews 23 well-known female performers––including Shirley MacLaine, Maria Schneider, Viva, and Jane Fonda––about their routine indignity of being a woman in cinema. Released in 1976 and produced by the Defiant Muses, this documentary is a widely unseen precursor to the Bechdel Test, which measures the representation and absence of women in cinema. Newly restored from a badly damaged print by the Simone de Beauvoir Centre, Be Pretty and Shut Up! challenges the expectations filmmakers and audiences place on women both on and off screen.

Il Cinema Ritrovato Program Notes

Actress and feminist activist, Delphine Seyrig was also a filmmaker, and has made, either working alone or with a team, several socially-conscious films including Sois belle et tais-toi!, in which, with the aid of her self-contained Portapak video camera, she interviews 23 actresses about being women in cinema: their roles and their relationships with producers, directors and the technical crew.

In 1976, a rather negative picture emerged of a profession limited to stereotypical and alienating roles; echoes of this can still remain today. What does fiction do to women? Seyrig and Roussopoulos led the way in pointing to moulding and acquiescence to a particular sexist gaze that was also ageist and racist. To explore the scope of possibilities in 1975 – despite having just made three films by female directors (Akerman, Duras and Kermadec) herself – Seyrig stepped aside and invited a diverse range of actresses, some (including Jane Fonda) more well known than others and across the age range (Maria Schneider at 20, Maidie Norman at 70). The questionnaire was a precursor of the 1985 Bechdel test that aimed to measure the representation and absence of women in fiction.

Shot in 1-inch format, Sois belle et tais-toi! was a pioneering piece of video work, celebrating the birth of a medium that was democratic, user-friendly, affordable, in a "pure player" media format (indispensable nowadays on social media platforms): no filter, raw material, a perfect tool to unleash the flow of raw conversation and precipitate a change in outlook. In the words of Ellen Burstyn: "I would not want to be a man because today we have vitality on our side. The gift we share is that things matter to us, we worry about each other, we care for one another, we make things better. Now it’s the planet that we need to care for and make better. I don’t believe that this kind of care could come from the guys who put us in the position we’re in right now. As women, we possess a code of survival that needs to flourish and become stronger than anything else. Without this there will be no planet." Today, we call this ecofeminism. –Émilie Cauquy

RESTORATION NOTES:

Be Pretty and Shut Up!: Copy from Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir. Restored in 2023 by Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir and BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France).