"Defiant Muses", 2019, Exhibition Catalogue for the homonymous exhibition in Museu Reain Sofia (Madrid)

In the opening text, from the exhibition’s curators, the case at hand is very well explained: interest in portable film devices came from the possibilities of exploration of “women’s experiences and struggles, as well as the material conditions of their lives”. 

The curators, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Giovanna Zapperi, relate Seyrig to what they call “disobedient practices”, in which the actress played differentiated roles. Together with Roussopoulos and other collaborators, she used video recording and editing as an emancipatory weapon in political struggles and movements. This began around 1974, after Seyrig took part in training sessions designed by the already activist-filmmaker Caroline Roussopoulos, one of the first directors to own a Portapak device. Earlier in the decade of 1970, Roussopoulos founded (with her husband) a militant video collective called Video Out, “which gave voice to oppressed and socially excluded citizens”. A few years later, along with Seyrig, Wieder and other people, Roussopoulos was involved in the creation of the collective Les Muses s’Amusent (later Insoumuses), whose “video productions show how visual and media practices emanating from the experiences of the women’s movement allow for a rethinking of the image and the gaze in the context of a struggle for autonomy”, while experimenting with “new forms of collective agency and media critique” that revel on the feelings of disobedience and emancipation brought up by the new portable cameras. The videography of Les Insoumuses and their circle was a “strategic appropriation the audiovisual medium”, while their themes were politically and socially grounded in experiences of otherness: from the gendered gaze to the body as a place of conflict and resistance, these defiant muses created a network of political and creative alliances and friendships.

A lot of their work was coming from a desire of a media critique, as Seyrig’s preoccupations were (while non-exclusively) very directed to the roles of women in the media, and how it translated to the real, everyday life of french women. This stemmed from her own experience as a fetishised actress from French media. Video was, in her own words, “la possibility de faire du cinéma sans rien demander à personne… une révélation, un énorme plaisir, une revanche enorme”. I am curious to follow-up on several of the works (both written and filmed) referenced in this catalogue, the first being Seyrig’s documentary Sois belle et tais-toi! (Be pretty and shut up!), which brought together testimonies of two dozens of actresses, underlining the “shared experience of alienation, in which the self is caught in multiple constraining devices that are activated both on and off screen”. 

“Film’s empowering effect comes from its ability to articulate the singularity of each (…), the political meaning of what each was experiencing at an individual level (…). It opens up the possibility of a new becoming that is grounded on a new form of media critique and appropriation” (p.21)

The question of disobedience is important to the curators, as video (specifically, Seyrig’s and Roussopoulos’) “becomes an agent of political activism” while their processes of “an ethics of filming that is also a form of empowerment” would take them further into experimentation with other subjectivities and characters. These subjects are not portrayed as victims, but as people who understand the possibility of communicating with others who share their experiences through video. This is especially notable when we are aware of the intersections present at Roussopoulos (and other female videographers): like after recording a meeting of the homossexual revolutionaries, the director showed the footage in the next meeting of the group, while filming the following discussion of the viewing; or her sensibility for an “intimate portrayal of sex workers defining their struggle in their own terms”, visible in Les prostituées de Lyon parent (1975). Roussopoulos was truly harnessing the power of video to “convey the immediacy and the relational dimension” at the pace of real life itself. The proximity between subjects allowed by the medium itself allows for dialogue and exchange, information and counter-information, to inhabit the same sphere of togetherness. 

The group were also concerned with questions surrounding racism and migration, specially the struggles of migrants in France and people in the french colonies. As we will see later on the catalogue, this wasn’t without processes of white/eurocentric visibilities, but Roussopoulos exchanged technical and revolutionary knowledge with filmmakers and militants from Algeria, Congo, or even the american party of the Black Panthers. Although her and Seyrig’s work being more focused on the social and political experiences of white women, the work of their conjoined project - the Centre audio-visuel Simone de Beauvoir - was expanding the scope of who can be behind the camera. In the 1980’s, they commissioned several videos on transnational feminisms, like The women’s conference - Nairobi 85, where numerous problems are discussed (from LGBTQI+ communities to the Palestinian resistance) by an heterogeneous group of women, from which Angela Davis shines. Around the same decade, the Centre also produced videos by migrant women living in France, while organising screenings and events open to the community.

Delphine Seyrig was aware of “the importance of preserving the traces of the struggles in which her generation had been involved”, as I believe I should also be, and contributed greatly for “feminism’s audiovisual memory”. In the short Maso et Miso, a boat flows away flagging the phrase “No television image want or is able to represent us. We express ourselves with VIDEO” - a war-like shout for the recognition of the tools and the liberation they reclaim. As Ros Murray writes, “Video, feminist or otherwise, cannot represent women, suggest the Muses, because there is no such thing as a representative voice or image. The power of video lies […] in its capacity to disrupt false representational regimes” (110). The disruption, this un-doing of a damage done to the ways women can claim their own bodies and identities, was only possible through the opening of the view scope to different (and differentiated) subjectivities, through processes of inclusivity and open-ended participation.

The most relevant text in this catalogue is undoubtedly Françoise Verges’ contribution. Within a critical scope that recognises the whiteness of the feminist struggles (specially in France) in the 1970’s/80’s, disclaiming that Seyrig’s feminism, close to Beauvoir’s, was not keen in identifying the men (the “opposite” of women) and the patriarchal institution as inherently white. For Verges, a kind of white feminism ignores that “male domination is also racial domination, that racism and sexism travel together, and that capitalism, the state, and patriarchy intersect and combine (…) [and] will never seek to dismantle the regime they have worked to establish.” (p.140). Establishing a direct connection between french feminists’ experiments with video and their access to innovative and political filmography of national liberation struggles, like the counter-colonialist Algerian fights, the filmmaker’s place was now one of denouncing political and social struggles: “she was duty-bound (…) to invent a new way of filming, looking, and showing rooted in a perspective that was radically critical of colonial cinema (…). The struggles against colonialism paved the way for a cinema of liberation, for the production of films that celebrated those struggles”. But the debt of western social movements to the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist fights on the Global South (“which had pushed them beyond their European provincialism”) remained unacknowledged, as most western revolutionaries failed to analyze and come to terms with their own colonial past and present, and their racist positions. This was visible in European feminist movements, that failed to decolonize themselves, as all other white-lead social movements. But an intersection between anti-colonial and feminist struggles would come to light in an undeniable way, through cinema and moving image: a symbolic link was forged in the search of other forms of storytelling, of narrative experimentation, but most importantly, of self- and same- representation and the deconstruction of stereotyped images, and oppressive/extractivist ways of making visible. “anti-colonialism and anti-racism offered theoretical tools to twentieth-century European feminism” and its productions. 

Last notes:

“producing a gaze also means being produced by historical modalities, institutional constraints and technological possibilities” (Lebovici, 181).

Luce Irigaray: female desire is a lost civilization whose language is no longer known today