A Swiss woman in Paris: rapprochement, friendship, solidarity

Lausanne-born director Danielle Jaeggi has been living and working in Paris since the late 1960s. La Fille de Prague avec un sac très lourd (1979), restored by the Cinémathèque suisse in 2021, was her first feature-length film.

The film’s working title was Anne, ma sœur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir? Danielle Jaeggi likely wrote an initial project outline in 1975, placing her CV at the beginning. After graduating from the renowned film school Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC, now La Fémis), she made several short films, was a video activist with the collective Les Cent Fleurs, which was part of the French women's liberation movement (Mouvement de libération des femmes, MLF), and worked as an editor for Chris Marker and Marguerite Duras.

Milena, the protagonist of La Fille de Prague avec un sac très lourd, travels from Prague to Paris to visit her friend Sophie. In her bag, she carries films, music and texts that are banned in the Soviet Union and that she wants to make accessible to her left-wing friends in Paris and to the Western media. However, her stories are met with incomprehension, while she, in turn, observes events in Paris with a sense of detachment.

”In this film, I want the difference in perspective to become tangible“, is how Jaeggi describes the film's theme in the project outline. La fille de Prague explores cultural differences but also conveys themes of rapprochement and friendship despite differences.

“I was a feminist. And I still am.”

Danielle Jaeggi, video interview, 2024

In the interview, Danielle Jaeggi discusses the feminist perspectives of the film, its critique of the media, and its restoration by Cinémathèque suisse.

The two scenes she highlights in the interview reference activist movements that were ongoing at the time. The photographs that the newspaper editor refuses to print are real images taken by photographer Christian Weiss, who worked for the newspaper Libération. They depict female workers on strike in Cerizay. The Les Cent Fleurs collective, of which Danielle Jaeggi was a member, documented this strike in the 1973 video Cerisay, elles ont osé.

This feminist critique of the media resurfaces in the second scene. A group of left-wing activists attempts to interview residents of a suburb. Their effort to listen to a woman’s story ultimately fails. As Jaeggi explains in the interview, she wanted to show how established media suppressed the perspectives of women and political activists.

“We, who is this ‘we’? Women are not all the same, and do not have the same problems. You are different from me and we must first learn the shared struggle [...] Women's film? Feminist film? Let's look not only at ourselves, at our lives, but at society and its numerous relationships with our own eyes, our own experiences, with our will to change.”

Danielle Jaeggi, La Revue du cinéma, 1974

In 1974, Danielle Jaeggi published an article titled “Film de femmes“ in La Revue du cinéma magazine, reflecting on the emergence on the emergence of feminist filmmaking. As in La fille de Prague, she emphasises that there is no singular ‘we’ within the feminist movement and argues that societal change must be considered as a whole.

The text was later translated in German and published in the first issue of Frauen und Film, a feminist film magazine initiated by Helke Sander. The translation highlights the international exchange between feminist directors in the 1970s. Danielle Jaeggi had a particularly close connection with the director Claudia von Alemann, who co-organised the First International Women's Film Seminar in Berlin in 1973.

The Cinémathèque suisse archives contain numerous contemporary reviews of the film.

“We hope that Danielle Jaeggi will find her place among the young women who have made a name for themselves in French cinema in recent months (Coline Serreau, Diane Kurys...), not through feminist proclamation, but because, as women, they have brought a new sensitivity that cinema urgently needed.”

Jean Delmas, Jeune Cinéma, 1978

The film La Fille de Prague avec un sac très lourd was restored and digitized in 2021 by the Cinémathèque suisse.