The first sentences declare that “the male is a biological accident, an incomplete female, a walking abortion. The clatter of the typewriter keys, the recurring noise of the carriage return and the actress’s voice are layered over one another, creating an omnipresent sound whose rhythm accompanies our discovery of the text. Manifesto” (1) by Valerie Solanas (2) and Roussopoulos types the text. Delphine Seyrig begins reading the “S.C.U.M. In the background, a television screen shows live images without sound from a current news broadcast. Together with Ioana Wieder and Carole Roussopoulos, in 1982 she founded the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, and served as its president until her death in 1990.īook in hand, Delphine Seyrig faces the director, Carole Roussopoulos, who sits at a typewriter. In the early 1970s, in the milieu of Carole Roussopoulos, she discovered the possibilities of working with video among other things, in 1976, she and Roussopoulos shot the feminist film S.C.U.M. At the same time, Seyrig joined the women’s movement that formed in the aftermath of May ’68. For her first film role, she acted in Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy (USA, 1959) in the 1960s and 1970s, she acted in films by Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Demy, and Chantal Akerman. In 1956, she trained at the Actors Studio in New York. In 1952, she began an acting career in France. Her extensive filmography comprises more than one hundred works.ĭelphine Seyrig was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1932 and spent her childhood by turns in the Middle East and the United States. In 1982, together with Delphine Seyrig and Ioana Wieder, she founded the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, the first archive for audiovisual works with a feminist emphasis.

In 1970, on the advice of her friend Jean Genet, she bought a portable video camera and shot her first film, Genet parle d’Angela Davis. She studied in Lausanne and moved to Paris in 1967, where she founded the militant video collective “Video Out” with her future husband. As news images of male-dominated world events flicker across the television screen, Delphine Seyrig disseminates Valerie Solanas’s theses on men – who, according to the manifesto, are both biologically incomplete and driven by vagina envy.Ĭarole Roussopoulos was born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1945 she died in 2009. Manifesto stages a reading of Valerie Solanas’s eponymous manifesto from 1967.

Scum manifesto