It takes nothing away from the genius of Alison Bechdel to note that a version of her famous Bechdel test was proposed in the nineteen-seventies by Delphine Seyrig, the great French actress and activist, in Seyrig’s documentary feature “Be Pretty and Shut Up!” In that prescient and powerful film, Seyrig interviews twenty-two actresses—including Jane Fonda, Jill Clayburgh, Ellen Burstyn, and Maria Schneider—about their experiences as actresses in film industries dominated by men. (The film, long unavailable, is now streaming on MUBI.) To many of her subjects, Seyrig poses the same crucial question: Have they ever acted in a movie in which they’ve shared a “warm” relationship (or some version thereof) with another female character?
Whereas Bechdel approaches movies from the perspective of moviegoers, Seyrig confronts them as a filmmaker. In “Be Pretty and Shut Up!,” Seyrig—who started her film career in the American independent film “Pull My Daisy”and starred in some of the most daring films of her time, including Chantal Akerman’s history-making “Jeanne Dielman”—offers a radical view of the cinema that’s voiced by its participants and matched by her audaciously pure method and reserved style. There’s no inherent merit in such austerity; rather, the film’s originality derives from Seyrig’s imaginative expansion of it. She crafts an austerity that’s anything but bare, relying on simple means and plain forms to deliver mighty torrents of ideas and experiences. “Be Pretty and Shut Up!” is an interview film—it contains nothing but interviews, almost exclusively ones that Seyrig herself conducts and that the cinematographer Carole Roussopoulos, also a key feminist filmmaker, films. (The sole exception is a clip of an interview with Shirley MacLaine by the talk-show host Michel Drucker, from French television.) The interviews, filmed in Hollywood in 1975 and in Paris in 1976, show the actresses in medium closeup, with no reverse shots of Seyrig, no B-roll of décor or locations, no clips from films, and, most of all, almost no editing within the interview segments. (The participants are identified in a strikingly low-tech way, by means of still photographs placed in front of the camera, by hand, at the start of the film—there are no texts superimposed over the interviews, and the end credits are merely handwritten.)
Seyrig (working with the editors Joanna Wieder and Roussopoulos) selects continuous chunks of discussion, sometimes on the briefer side and sometimes several minutes long, which grant the actors intimate spans of time in which to develop their ideas and express them freely. The prime subject of “Be Pretty and Shut Up!” is the very idea of being a female movie actor at a time when the field was dominated by men behind the camera, in boardrooms, and—therefore—also onscreen. The first seven of the movie’s sixty interview segments are all focussed on the intersection of the participants’ professional lives and personal desires—whether, if they’d been male, they’d have become movie actors. Speakers such as Clayburgh, Millie Perkins, and Juliet Berto describe the many other opportunities available to men (and not so much to women) outside of movies, their long-frustrated goals to direct films instead of act in them, and what Clayburgh calls the “masochism” of being an actress, the dependence on the cinema’s “external daddy.”
Jane Fonda—speaking in French—then quickly shifts the terrain away from the psychological price of movie acting to the physical price of stardom, as she experienced it as a teen-age neophyte in the waning days of Hollywood’s studio system. (The movie is subtitled in English; its many English-speaking actors are accompanied by a simultaneous French translation, by Toby Gilbert, which somewhat drowns out their voices on the soundtrack.) Fonda says that the group of makeup men who surrounded her “like surgeons” transformed her appearance to render her virtually unrecognizable to herself, and that one of them wanted to have her jaw broken in order to hollow out her cheeks. The director Joshua Logan—who was also her godfather—said, “You’ll never play in a tragedy, because a nose like that cannot be taken seriously!” The studio mogul Jack Warner demanded that she wear fake breasts to make hers look larger. (And for a decade she did, she says, along with the makeup and bleached-blond hair and eyebrows.) The result, as she puts it, is that “I, Jane Fonda, was here and this image was there, and there was this alienation between the two.”
This alienation from one’s own appearance is a feeling many other actresses in the documentary describe, in regard to the roles that they got cast to play. For Perkins, it was wives. For the Canadian actress Luce Guilbeault, it was “prostitutes or alcoholics, wasted women, abandoned women”—and, when she wanted to infuse one of those characters with the practical details of their own ways of life, male producers shot the idea down in favor of her playing the “dirty women” that they said men liked. Patti D’Arbanville was being offered roles playing sixteen-year-olds when she was twenty-four. (“You just want to strangle somebody,” she says.) Maidie Norman, the only Black actress interviewed by Seyrig, says that, earlier in her career, she played “many, many maids,” and that there was little more for Black actresses to do “unless you were very Black and could play a slave.” Since then, she says, there has been “an evolution” in Black women’s roles, which have come to include nurses, social workers, and mothers. However, she had nothing against playing maids, she adds, because there were Black women working as maids in real life—the problem was one of inadequate development of the characters.
MacLaine, in her television appearance, offers a remarkable theory regarding the declining substance of actresses’ roles. In the age of the censorious Hays Code, Hollywood made so-called women’s pictures, in which women often played politicians and businesspeople—precisely because, MacLaine says, “with scenes in the bedroom, you couldn’t really see much. They therefore wrote parts for women outside the bedroom.” When the code was jettisoned, the imaginations of male producers, directors, and screenwriters were finally freed up—and “the fantasies they want to see are the women in the bedroom. The freedom from censorship backfired. Women were back in the bedroom and they never got out.” Delia Salvi adds, in her interview with Seyrig, that “cinema is one enormous masculine phantasm.”
Candy Clark and many other participants cite the ageism that actresses endure in Hollywood. Others, such as Schneider, address the age gap between female and male leads: her co-star in “The Passenger,” Jack Nicholson, was thirty-seven, and she was twenty-three—and, in “Last Tango in Paris,” the gap between her and Marlon Brando was even greater. (She also says that she was shut out of the creative process on which Brando and the film’s director, Bernardo Bertolucci, were full collaborators.) Salvi cites the distressing case of the screenwriter Eleanor Perry, who had long collaborated with her husband, Frank, who directed. After their divorce, she found herself in virtual exile from the industry.
What dominates the film, though, is Seyrig’s curiously, urgently, and cannily insistent questioning of the actresses’ “warm relationships” onscreen with other female characters. Few, of course, have experienced such a thing, and the deftly associative editing of the actresses’ discussions reveals why this matters; the absence of films that show women’s relationships with one another is no trivial omission but, rather, speaks to the cinema’s crucial failing. Warm relationships with women—including with other actresses—are the very stuff of many of the participants’ real lives, as they tell Seyrig. Their most damning indictment of the male-dominated world of movies is simply that it doesn’t reflect their experiences, their personal, off-camera realities.
