Event

JOHANNA D'ARC OF MONGOLIA

Dir. Ulrike Ottinger, 1989.
Germany. 165 min.

Delphine Seyrigs last screen role found her fittingly re-teaming with Ulrike Ottinger for a tri-lingual adventure epic with an all woman cast. Ottinger plays with the genre trappings of train triptychs and biblical epics in her most ambitious work, in which seven female voyagers are captured by a band of Mongolian woman. Ottingers goal isnt to pit cultures against each other or exploit them, but to tell an extensively details ethnographic tale of multicultural harmony.

"A fabulous three-course blend of myth, spectacular visions of an ancient land and frisky song-and-dance. A quixotic and ebullient leap of the imagination. Breathtaking. - Judy Stone, SF Chronicle

*****

When Delphine Seyrig's fairy godmother character nonchalantly descends in a helicopter upon the Medieval fairy tale realm of Jacques Demy's Donkey Skin, the surreal image is pretty indicative of Seyrig's 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.