Aloise creates a series of haunting drawings while she is incarcerated in an institution for the insane in turn-of-the-century Switzerland. She endures torments as a musically gifted girl and later as a young woman; her developing madness and the barbaric treatments of the time are shown.

One of a handful of female outsider artists to earn praise from the early exponents of art brut, Aloïse Corbaz—born in modest circumstances in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1886; institutionalized as a schizophrenic in 1918; and kept under psychiatric observation until her death in 1964—is portrayed here by two of the premiere European actresses of their respective generations: Isabelle Huppert, who plays Corbaz as a ruminative, searching young woman, and Delphine Seyrig, astonishingly committed as the elder artist.

Produced by Paul Vecchiali, de Kermadec’s sophomore feature, newly restored by Cinémathèque Française, is an ideal introduction to an unjustly forgotten giant of post–New Wave French cinema, who in the same year of its release would serve as one of the producers on Seyrig and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman.