La Dame dans le livre
( The Lady in the Book - Sylvia Plath, Portraits )

Gesa Matthies
2016 - 60 min - Video Full HD - Couleur - France

"The lady in the book" is Sylvia Plath, one of the most celebrated American poets of the 20th century who became a feminist icon after her sudden and brutal death at the age of 30.
The film proposes an immersion in her world and her writings by presenting today’s women in the places where Sylvia Plath grew up: the beaches of the Atlantic ocean, the suburbs of Boston and the university Smith College in Massachusetts.
Sylvia Plath was 18 years old in the early 50ies. In her diary she writes about her coming of age as an artist and young woman wanting to break free from traditional female role models. The students of Smith College know her writings very well. They still read them today in order to put their own feelings into words. It’s the student’s readings and comments of Plath’s journal passages that will have us discover her work and her beginnings as a writer. Sylvia’s and the young women’s words together form a voice of female identity that emerges laboriously against authority and conformism.