ENGLISH TRANSLATION, Sorry for the many mistakes I sure have made (Note: You have to understand that in French, “féminité”, that I translated as “femininity”, does mean the same litterally (“the fact to be a woman”), but is very widely used as “ the overall psychological, physical characteristics assigned to a woman”. It usually goes with a certain vision of woman as she should be: wearing make up and heels, being beautiful, a potential mother etc…) Delphine Seyrig is here interviewed during the shooting of “Jeanne Dielman”, by Chantal Akerman, 1974.
Delphine Seyrig - Let’s say that I'm very happy to adress a way of seeing/considering women that is yet unknown, and one that is more thorough than what is usually presented. That's the case because the ones that make movies are usually men and that whatever their perceptions of things is, whatever their sensitivity - There are directors, like Bergman, who spent their entire lives making movies about women/whose subjects are women-, when women talk about themselves, I think it's gonna be completely different. You see, the characters that we see are stereotypes: mothers, prostitutes, “bad girls”, nymphettes, etc… All of this, a very precise range of women.. I think that when a woman approaches those very subjects, prostitution for instance, it will be from a perspective that we have never seen yet.
Journalist - People say you’re a feminist: have you gradually become one and if so, through what event, situation, evolution?
D. S. - I think that.. It’s a bit long to explain. I think that all women are feminists, or else we should all kill ourselves immediately, I mean, either you’re a woman and you see that there is no hope and that the role that women have in the world is very limited: have kids, wash the dishes, cook, wake up in the morning and serve their husband and children, which is a prefabricated vocation: we have been raised, since we were little girls, to do so and I think all women know this from a very early age, that they are meant to do so, and comes a time when we get more or less upset about it. Women can respond differently to this: either they become ultra-feminine because that’s the only way they can get through life. That’s what happened to me, I played that card because I knew it was the only way I could manage within society as it was. I think it’s still kind of a will to survive, in a way, we want to cope, pull through in anyway possible. But now, there maybe more interesting ways to manage in life than playing the feminine card, and I think that’s what’s happening now. If I were thirteen now, I don’t know if I would choose femininity as a way to find a window on the world, as a possibility in life. In my own time, when I was fourteen, it looked like it was the only way, which is to put on make up, to become a lady, to be loved, adored, worshipped. For me, I only had a reason to exist if I was accepted and loved by someone of the opposite sex, since the opposite sex was the only one that mattered, which is to say: a man. I think that now, maybe, women will begin to not base everything on the judgement of men about them. And that’s the moment when femininity as it is required, make up, etc.. will change, if they think they carry their value within themselves. They won’t feel the need to adjust to men criterias. Maybe.
Journalist - But the following question could be asked: What is femininity, now? If we question motherhood, women working etc…
D.S - The thing that is questionned here is choice. No woman will say that they deny motherhood, or at least deny it for all women. They may renounce to it for themselves, maybe they don’t want to be a mother but I think what women want is to have a choice: become a mother or not, do whatever it is they feel like doing with their lives, to have a choice. Whereas until now, half of humankind’s destiny was already prefabricated, from the moment they were born: women, because men always had possibilities… Even the simple possibility of dreaming of something else. Even the more oppressed men, the ones for instance that didn’t have a choice but to go down in the mines, I think they had a possibility of imagination that the women never even had a chance to get. Women always considered/imagined that the best that could happen was to have children, to be the handywoman for men, the one that does it all. I think this has been their only horizon.
