“Calamity Jane & Delphine Seyrig: A Story” Film by Babette Mangolte, © 2019/2020, 87 minutes. Original sound is English and French
The film is a homage to Delphine Seyrig and her fascination for the book Calamity Jane’s Letters to her Daughter. Those letters are from a mother to an absent daughter which became a feminist landmark in the late 1970 and the source for Seyrig’s film project about Calamity Jane’s sensibility and insight about life. The reading of those letters to a daughter who doesn’t receive them as they are not sent permits a self-reflection about feminism and motherhood and is a homage to Seyrig’s creativity and a long-term commitment among women in the 21st century to share other women stories.
With Delphine Seyrig, Stella Foote, Claire Wolverton, Duncan Youngerman, JJ Wilson, & Julia Lynn Trotta reading the letters of Calamity Jane to her daughter from the edition from 1976 by Shameless Hussy Press, San Francisco, California.
Master in 2K HD from HD shooting and 16mm film from 1983 and documents from the 19th century.
Image stills from film:
Production history:
The script relied on archives from Delphine Seyrig’s private papers about her film project available thanks to Duncan Youngerman, her son and the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir. The shooting in 1983 and editing between 2018-2019 is by Babette Mangolte © 2019 BM
The original 16mm production is by Delphine Seyrig in 1983 working with Mangolte as cinematographer and editor, Helen Kaplan as sound recordist and Mark Daniels as assistant camera. Mangolte handled the direction of production and the film processing and work print from a movie lab in New York City in 1983. A telecine made in 2010 of the 16 mm footage was made by the Centre Simone de Beauvoir, which was used for a pre-edit in 2011. The current film was made starting 2018 and a new 2 K scan of the 1983 footage was made in August 2019, for the mastering of the final edit finished on September 5, 2019.
Special thanks to Duncan Youngerman, Nicole Ferrer Fernández from the Centre Simone de Beauvoir and Etel Adnan who told me to contact JJ Wilson at the Sitting Room in Sonoma County. I also want to thank Giovanna Zapperi and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez for their support.