The series Sex, Truth, and Videotape: French Feminist Activism is playing on MUBI in many countries.
Maso and Miso Go Boating
To commemorate the United Nations decreeing 1975 as the International Year of the Woman, French television host Bernard Pivot invited the State Secretary for Women Françoise Giroud to chat with a series of men who all proudly identified as misogynists. Throughout “The Year of the Woman: Thank God! It’s Over,” representatives from various corners of the arts came together to discuss why women will never be great artists, cooks, or human beings. Giroud happily agrees with them, the group having a chatty back and forth about why women marry their abusers. There’s no dissent from anyone, and these experts in their field and representatives of the state reveal the shallowness of hegemony, which is in turn transmitted directly into the homes of the French. These are the people in power and the complaints of those below aren’t worth considering.
“No single woman can represent women in a patriarchal government of any kind, only symbolize women’s condition,” declare the Insoumuses, a collective of independent filmmakers spearheaded by Carole Roussopoulos, and included Delphine Seyrig, Ioana Wieder, and Nadja Ringart. By cutting up the society depicted in “Thank God! It’s Over” they create Maso and Miso Go Boating (1976), a challenge both playful and furious. Where the episode presents itself as a self-contained whole, through editing they’re able to respond, the audience becomes as central as the presenters. When Giroud jokes with these men, the Insoumuses reply with intertitles, demanding more from their ministers, challenging her answers. Sentences are repeated, phrasing challenged, and words are easily turned against their speakers. They juxtapose these men with footage of women protesting in the streets, expanding the depictions of women from these narrow images to the actions taking place beyond the television set. These men and their project are undermined, the (maso)chist and (miso)gynist are defanged, and Giroud would later request that this film stop being screened. Maso and Miso is part of the larger project of the Insoumuses, who through video, which only became available in France in 1970, would spend the next decade documenting the varied protests breaking out across the country, both on the streets and on the screens.
Carole Roussopoulos got her Sony Portapak in 1970, the second purchased in the country (the story goes that the first was purchased by Jean-Luc Godard). As discussed in Callisto McNulty’s documentary Delphine and Carole (2019), Roussopoulos set up video workshops, and later collectives, to teach women how to use this new technology. Not much of a cinephile, Roussopoulos did not recognize Seyrig when she joined her class, but the two quickly began working together, Seyrig later making her own documentary about the experiences of actresses, Be Pretty and Shut Up! (1976). For Roussopoulos, it was integral that women portray themselves on their terms, which would be the focus of both her films and her teaching work. There is a limitation to these films, her subjects are generally white, and there’s little to no discussion of or outside of the white experience of that time, but they remain remarkable works of praxis.
Be Pretty and Shut Up
That Giroud would so happily speak to misogynists on television makes her refusal to speak to the prostitutes of Lyon all the more fraught. Starting on June 2nd, 1975, over 100 prostitutes occupied the Saint-Nizier church in Lyon to protest their working conditions, including excessive fines and vulnerability to violence. Unlike Giroud, Roussopoulos was there with her camera, and The Prostitutes of Lyon Speak (1975) is a document both of the protest, and the means of creating community. Roussopoulos’s camera is at eye level with the protestors, sitting amongst them as they discuss their circumstances and their desires. This is a key part of her methodology. In F.H.A.R. (Front Homosexuel D’action Révolutionnaire) from 1971, and then her films of the Lip factory protests, Monique, Lip 1 (1973) and Christiane et Monique (LIP V) (1976), Roussopoulos is always with the protestors, marching with them in the street, and then sitting amongst them for discussion. Their actions are not spontaneous but planned. Their demands come from debate amongst each other, with the goal of everyone’s needs being represented. She films the signs, their chants, but also focuses on the crowds watching them, even interviewing people on the street. There’s a clear connection between making oneself seen through protest, and the reception of the public that Roussopoulos is contemplating. These are people—homosexuals, factory workers, sex workers—who are insisting on being seen on their own terms, and spilling out into the streets to do so.
The Prostitutes of Lyon Speak
Back at Lyon, Roussopoulos would interview the protestors and then would immediately show them the footage so they could approve of it. Most are filmed in medium close-up, a framing that Seying advised Roussopoulos to use, so they’ll be listened to without distraction, the way one would frame “the president of France.” Some women would have their faces covered while others would hold the microphone for them, others are just the back of a head, or a voice on a blank screen. The women would talk about the mistreatment by the police, the fines and arrests, and the hypocrisy of society. There are no sensational stories of mistreatment, or “experts” weighing in on what needs to be done, but rather women wanting to better their situation. Roussopoulos would take this footage and screen it outside of the church, so passersby could see and hear the occupiers. The reception of the crowd is also part of the film, for there is never one single voice, but people speaking as part of a complex system. For the police, one woman tells us, we’re less than nothing. But for her fellow protestors, her voice is valuable, and they work together as a collective to have their demands heard. Roussopoulos is on hand to make sure this happens.
There’s a direct line for Roussopoulos from the images on television, to the action on the street, to control over the body. Y’a Qu’à Pas Baiser (1971) opens with a series of ads targeted to women, about their bodies and being presentable, which then is juxtaposed with a group of men discussing abortion rights on the news. Roussopoulos then moves to the streets, suddenly in the midst of a protest for the right to abortion and contraception. On the ground she asks the spectators what they think; one older woman in favor, another dismissive, suggesting they should just learn not to have sex. But Roussopoulos shifts from what others say about women’s rights to what happens behind closed doors, and turns the camera towards a woman controlling her own body. She is a guest to a woman’s abortion, a procedure that was illegal in France at the time, and eschews the cliched filmic language for this procedure. There are no women sitting sadly in waiting rooms with a closed curtain leaving the rest to our imaginations. Instead, both the patient and the abortionist are cheerful and chatty, happily discussing this married woman’s sex life in a bright and sunny room. Each step of the procedure is explained by the abortionist, and Roussopoulos is there filming every moment. The explanation is solely for the patient. Roussopoulos and her camera are only guests here. At times the patient’s given a hand mirror to see what is being done, and to see parts of herself she’d never seen before. The procedure is explicit to the viewer, but banal, treated like a routine medical procedure. “It’s wonderful to be able to watch,” the patient tells us afterwards, and it is hard not to be moved. Abortions have become private, secret acts, for obvious reasons considering their legal status, but here we see it all, demystified. That Roussopoulos can be part of these communities comes from positioning herself as an extension of the protests in all their forms, like the intimate interviews with women speaking on their own terms about their own experiences. But, vitally, all these individual acts are framed within a collective—no action can happen on its own. The protestors need numbers, the images need an audience, the woman in need of an abortion needs someone to provide it.
Y’a Qu’à Pas Baiser
Outside of her films, Roussopoulos would continue teaching, and eventually in 1982, with Seying and Wieder, she created the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Center, a collection of feminist audiovisual art from the latter half of the last century. “It is with video that we will tell our story ourselves,” one of the intertitles in Maso and Miso proclaims, and for Roussopoulos the “video” was as integral as the “we.” There is power in how one is depicted, and how one can see oneself, whether it is with a camera or a hand mirror.