Event

LOCATION HUNTING

Dir. Michel Soutter, 1977.
Switzerland, 87 min.
VHS Rip

Michel Soutter was a founding member of the New Swiss Cinema movement, and his early films are among the countrys best-kept secrets. He branched out slightly into more international fare in the 70s, directing French legend Jean-Pierre Trintignant in several films. Rarely seen, the metatextual chamber drama Location Hunting stars Trintignant as a filmmaker desperate to win back the affections of his ex-wife of ten years (Seyrig). He casts her in an adaptation of Checkovs Three Sisters, and they sound find themselves isolated together with two other actresses on a location scout to an aging Swiss resort.

*****

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 Seyrig's filmography is an endlessly rewarding excavation of idiosyncratic gems, from queer vampire thrillers to pioneering camp adaptations of Virginia Woolf's Orlando.