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DOI: 10.1215/02705346-3454441
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Citation for published version (APA): Murray, R. (2016). Raised Fists: Politics, Technology, and Embodiment in 1970s French Feminist Video Collectives . CAMERA OBSCURA, 31(1 (91)), 93-121. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-3454441
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Download date: 29. Sep. 2021 Raised Fists: Politics, Technology and Embodiment in 1970s French Feminist
Video Collectives
At the end of Maso et Miso vont en bateau (Maso and Miso go Boating, Les Muses s’amusent, 1976) a floating, hand-written title credit reads: "No televisual image wants or is able to represent us. We express ourselves with video." An extraordinary example of video’s capacity to disrupt and re-invent the hegemonic, bland and watered-down politics of feminism shown on television screens, Maso et Miso vont en bateau concludes by displaying the signatures of four women ("Carole," "Delphine,"
"Ioana" and "Nadja") intent on proving that only video provides the emancipatory tools their politics require. Collectively known as "Les Muses s’amusent" (Carole
Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig, Ioana Wieder and Nadja Ringart), the name of the group,1 like the title of the film, reveals an ingenious and virtually untranslatable play on words as these women search for new forms of textual and audiovisual language, at once playful, ironic and irate; a language that would always be expressed in the first-person plural.
The way that video was taken up in France in the early 1970s was clearly influenced by the aftermath of 1968, with its urge to conceive new forms of collective relations characterised by political urgency, as well as by the emergence of feminist politics that focused on the power of collective action both on the streets and in domestic spaces in the form of consciousness raising groups. It is significant that, unlike in the
US context, video art did not arrive in France until the late 1970s, video being taken up principally by activist groups explicitly using video documentary as a political weapon. The history of activist video in France remains largely undocumented in
1 comparison to art video, despite the fact that in France, video work was overtly political from its very origins, often refusing to sit in the category of "art" but demanding, instead, screenings at meetings, in town squares, and on the street where the action was taking place.2
Directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, the Dziga Vertov Group, and Chris Marker are the most famous of the original video-makers, using it alongside film. Carole
Roussopoulo