Feminine plural: revealing representations of overlooked women’s experiences in Paula Delsol’s La Dérive (1964) and Ben et Benedict (1977)

In this thesis, I examine the work of French filmmaker Paula Delsol, specifically her two major films, La Dérive (1964) and Ben et Benedict (1977). Both films foreground certain overlooked aspects of women’s experiences of sex, reproductive politics, motherhood and unpaid domestic and wage labour. A small number of commentators have recognised La Dérive but only within a framework of auteur criticism, reclaiming it as a lost Nouvelle Vague text and (mis)labelling Delsol in terms of a putative feminism. Ben et Benedict, meanwhile, remains almost completely unknown in Francophone and Anglophone literature. Viewing her cinema for the first time by examining relevant facets of the conditions of production, I adopt a new critical framework for approaching Delsol’s work. I explore how these two films supplement contemporaneous and twenty-first century understandings of women’s lived experiences during the 1960s and 1970s. I consider a range of materials from each decade, including popular women’s magazines, advertisements, essays, manifestos, televised newsreels and films which indicate popular understandings of key aspects of women’s experiences circulating at the time, and add to them with archival research and more recent theoretical perspectives. These socio-political contexts –referred to throughout as “snapshots” – are used for evaluating each film via close textualanalysis of selected scenes from La Dérive and Ben et Benedict. I interrogate the extent to which Delsol’s films and their thematic and formal treatment of the rarely considered facets of women’s work, sexual encounters, reproductive futures and relationships with motherhood, may knowingly or unknowingly supplement, and indeed challenge, representations of these same issues in other media of the time. I argue that Delsol’s films make a significant contribution to French cinema through their unexplored representations which expand critical perceptions of some overlooked aspects of women’s experiences in parts of 1960s and 1970s France.