An Archive of One’s Own: Revisiting Feminist History and Media History

Chiara Siravo in conversation with Giovanna Zapperi

This conversation with Giovanna Zapperi is born out of an initiative between Umbau journal and HfG’s Open Resource Center to introduce essays and conversations that address the archive in relation to the themes explored in the journal. The theme of “Political Bodies” (Umbau issue 1) is connected to the archive in a number of ways, in particular to our bodies as archival sites in and of themselves. In Spring 2022, I interviewed the art historian and curator Giovanna Zapperi. Our conversation began with a discussion of what we today call a “counter-archive.” Founded in 1982 in Paris by a group of women known as Les Insoumuses, the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir[1] is an archive that answers the need to preserve and practice feminist media activism, which took the representation of female bodies as a point of departure to both shatter and re-invent the role of women in all its forms. The conversation centers around the exhibition Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France in the 1970s and 1980s, conceived and curated by Giovanna Zapperi and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez. It opened in Madrid[2] at the Museo Reina Sofia in 2019 and travelled to Kunsthalle Wien[3] this year. In early 2023, the exhibition will open at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart.

Chiara Siravo: I thought we could start with you telling us a bit about how this research and exhibition project, Defiant Muses began. You and Nataša decided to explore a group of women known as Les Insoumuses, a group of feminist media activists operating in France in the 1970s and 1980s, who set out to harness new mainstream audiovisual technologies in an effort to build a female gaze, by and for women. But in fact, the story is much more complex, and involves a number of different intersecting worlds, from Hollywood to experimental cinema, which affect the lives of ordinary women in France, the United States, and the Global South.

Giovanna Zapperi: The project to produce this exhibition started in 2015, and it had quite a long gestation period. With other feminist scholars in the fields of art and cinema, we were putting together a research group called Travelling Feminist, a name I really like because it’s a play on words between French and English, where the word travelling refers to film or the cinematic, however when you add “feminist” you don’t know if it is a person or an entity.

The project started in Paris with the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir. The Centre had received some funding from a foundation in France (Fondation de France) and our idea was to look at the Centre’s archive to see how it resonates in the present. We organized a series of seminars with a group of seven or eight researchers. The idea of conceiving an exhibition came up early in our discussions, and from the beginning the figure of Delphine Seyrig really stood out as exceptional. She was an actress, an activist, and a filmmaker. She then became the focus of both our research and later of the exhibition. It was a timely decision since the project started just before the #MeToo movement took off, just before the Harvey Weinstein scandal exploded.

The question became: how could one do an exhibition about an actress; how could one show this material? Nobody in the research group was sure, because we are not curators per se. Eventually Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, who is a curator, and I decided OK, we will do this together. But it is really important to note that the exhibition was born out of a collective experience, and that it emerged out of the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir.

As we began to work on the exhibition, we looked deeper into the archive. From the beginning the idea was to do a contemporary art show. Let me explain: first of all, we were interested in how the practices and materials found in the archive speak to us in the present, and in how Les Insoumuses had invented a visual culture that is entirely unexplored, one that resonates deeply with contemporary concerns, especially those of women artists and artists of color, with respect to genealogies, archiving, re-writing, and revising history.

But we were also interested in Les Insoumuses’ inventive use of audiovisual media. As a result, we did not want to make a historical or heritage exhibition. We excluded anything that smacked of a Bibliothéque Nationale sort of display, the type of show that historical institutions organize based on archives. Moreover, we did not want to do a show about a famous actress, such as those the Cinémathèque in Paris often puts on. We wanted to consider Delphine Seyrig beyond her identity as an actress. We wanted to look at her singularity, her trajectory, but most of all we were interested in looking at her within the context of a creative and political network. It’s as if she was at the center of a constellation and we wanted to enter this constellation. Another reason why we didn’t want to do a Delphine Seyrig show is because you end up reproducing what always happens in cinema: you isolate the diva or the actress from the material conditions in which she works and the political concerns of her time. And from there you build up an idealized figure of the star. Ultimately, we did not want to produce a biography or a “biopic.”

So that’s how it started: by thinking about the contemporary relevance of the archival material and the network in which Seyrig circulated. It took four years of delving into all kinds of archives, so Defiant Muses really is a research-based exhibition, and we tried to develop multiple threads starting from the materials we found. Again, I must underline that this has been a collective process throughout. I couldn’t have done it without Nataša, and I think she feels the same way. But also, we could not have done it without the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, its director Nicole Fernandez Ferrer, and art historian Élisabeth Lebovici, to mention a few. The project indeed developed from and within a network of feminist friendship and followed the collective approach of Les Insoumuses.

CS: How did the existence of an audio-visual archive, the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir—founded by Delphine Seyrig, Carole Roussopoulos, and Ioana Wieder—change the process of researching this history, and in fact create the possibility for revising the history of the women’s liberation movement? Perhaps even thanks to the emergence of a different approach to what gets to be in an archive—both in terms of materiality and subject matter?

GZ: One of the aims of Defiant Muses was to try to tell a different history, to produce an alternative way of looking at feminism in France in the 1970s and 1980s. The history of the French women’s movement tends to be dominated by the MLF, the Mouvement de libération des femmes. The name itself became controversial after it was appropriated by one faction, that ultimately focused on certain aspects of feminism—on writing and psychoanalysis. The latter of course reflected the priorities of the group Psych et Po (Psychanalyse et Politique) and its leader, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Antoinette Fouque. And of course, there is also the legacy of Simone de Beauvoir. This is why it was important for us to look at the history of the women’s movement through the visual materials we found in the Centre. In a sense, this exhibition presents an untold media history of the women’s movement in France, in which questions of activism are intertwined with creative practices. The reason why Delphine Seyrig is so crucial to this endeavor is because she really stands at the center of a confluence of developments. You have the history of cinema, the history of early video—begun in the late 1960s when the Sony Portapak was put on the market—the history of the women’s movement, and of course women’s cinema. So, through her engagement in these different fields, we could construct a new narrative and trace a history based on visual and activist practices. The idea was also to break away from the implicit hierarchy governing the relationship between the written word—intellectual speculation and writing—and visual media, film, and video-making. I would say that today actresses are taken seriously for the first time as political subjects, so for us it was important to valorize the positions and persons that heretofore have not been acknowledged for their agency. And this is another reason why we were so struck by Delphine Seyrig’s trajectory.

To make a long story short, Seyrig was an important actress in 1960s French Auteur cinema. She was always very much aware of the conditions in which she was working as an actress, and she reflected a lot upon her profession. With the political events of 1968 she became involved in the protests. When she later recounted her experience of May ’68, she said something I find very interesting: Seyrig was convinced that new aesthetic forms would emerge from it, new projects, new theater . . . but what actually came out of it was feminism, at least for her, and it changed her life. Feminism gave her an opportunity to embrace change and build new worlds. She engaged with the feminist movement in many ways, and, by the early 1970s, she became interested in video. Of course, like most actresses, she was frustrated with the roles that were imposed upon her as a woman, with the isolation that characterized both the parts she interpreted and her professional dynamics and networks. In 1974, she made her first video, and subsequently met Carole Roussopoulos.

Carole already had a practice as a video-maker and activist together with her husband Paul Roussopoulos. She was sharing her knowledge of video with other women, and this is how she, Seyrig, and Ioana Wieder all met. They formed a collective from this encounter: Les Muses s’amusent, which later became Les Insoumuses. The three women were the core of the project, even though sometimes they collaborated with other women (such as Nadja Ringart). There were so many collectives at the time, it was really the moment in which these things were happening.

The relationship between these three women became strong, especially between Delphine and Carole. By the end of the 1970s, they had collected a lot of material produced by Les Insoumuses as well as by other women and other collectives, and they thought we need to archive this, we cannot lose this. In 1981, François Mitterand was elected president of France and the season of struggle came to an end. With a more leftist government in place, they were able to secure public funding and create the archive. They asked Simone de Beauvoir if she would agree to give her name to the Centre. I think this was a very important gesture, one that emphasized a continuity between generations of feminists. De Beauvoir died just a few years later, in 1986.

From its inception, the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir formulated its own idea of archiving. What do you archive for? You archive for the future. So, this idea of intergenerational relations was placed at the center of the project. This is also why the archive became a center of production from day one. Not only was it preserving material, but it was also supporting the production of new material.

CS: New media technologies, in particular the Portapak camera, offered new possibilities for broadcasting women’s voices, bodies, and vital questions for women’s liberation, including sexual autonomy, reproductive labor, sex work, LGBTQIA+ rights, anti-racism, de-colonization, and communication between all women. It is also true that many of the themes addressed were excluded from mainstream outlets. The internet did not exist. This perhaps made it even more important to create a container, an archive. And so, the Centre audiovisuel’s purpose was manifold: to ensure the long-term survival of the videotapes, to continue to produce them, and to broadcast what was produced. One might ask: did archives like this exist before? And moreover, were Seyrig, Roussopolous, and Wieder looking at other activist groups engaging with new visual and archival practices?

GZ: I’m not sure. Keep in mind, they were pioneers and they were part of a moment. As I said before, the idea of the exhibition was not to make heroines out of Les Insoumuses, but to look at their practice within its specific context. This context was very new. You have to remember that the first Sony Portapak came out on the market in 1968/1969, and Carole Roussopoulos was the first woman to use one in France. She had just left her job at Vogue, and her friend, the writer Jean Genet, told her to collect her check and go to Boulevard Sébastopol where she could buy a Sony Portapak camera. This would make her a free woman, and she’d be able to do whatever she wanted. And she did. Video was very new: Jean-Luc Godard had just bought a Portapak, so had Chris Marker. Video was instrumental to this new generation of filmmakers who were also engaged in the political struggles of the time. Carole was one of them.

CS: Since you mention Vogue, it seems that both Seyrig, from the world of cinema, and Roussopolous, from a fashion magazine, emerged from very mainstream contexts, but in very confined frameworks. They came from top-down pop worlds, and then they went underground.

GZ: Well, both operated from within contexts in which visual culture was crucial. Les Insoumuses were acquainted with how representation produces femininity and subjectivity, and this is what they wanted to overthrow. The way they used the camera really challenged how mainstream media objectifies the person filmed and how they appear on screen. They thought about alternative ways of using the technical means of production to foreground a connection and foster relationships. Listening is very important in their video work. For them, the camera was not so much a tool for documenting struggles, but rather one through which to engage with these struggles.

One of the most emblematic examples of their feminist use of the camera is the project they undertook with a group of sex workers in Lyon. In 1975, a group of sex workers went on strike and occupied a church, in itself an important episode in the history of sex workers’ rights. It is important to point out that Delphine and Carole were upper class, white women. Sex work, as we know, is a complex topic within feminist debate, and one about which feminists argue a lot. One might have expected women in their position to keep a certain distance or even support abolitionist stances. Instead, they went to Lyon to meet these women, to listen, and to learn. They realized the importance of the strike, and the strikers agreed to be filmed. In the video, they talk about their living conditions, about what they want, their demands for basic civil rights and to be recognized as workers. A monitor was installed outside the church and manifestos were hung up listing their political demands. The monitors broadcast the voices of the women inside. People gathered on the street, and an interesting interaction ensued between those inside and outside. Remember, this is 1975. Even today, almost fifty years later, sex work remains a controversial topic. However, the real significance of this experience is that the camera became a tool for a political struggle, a tool that could be shared.

Together Les Insoumuses constructed something new. They worked without pre-conceived ideas as to whether prostitution was good or bad, building a connection between women from very different backgrounds and forming an alliance between their collective and the sex workers. At the same time, they activated a dialogue with the outside world. As a result, they were able to intervene from inside a struggle, which is different from mere documentation. They were active participants who engaged from within.

CS: I read that Seyrig in a way felt close to the sex workers’ rights movement, because she saw some parallels with the condition of being an actress in those years.

GZ: Absolutely, she was very much aware of what the labor of an actress entails. How sexuality, gender, and constructions of femininity are used. Also, that same year Chantal Ackerman’s very important film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles came out. In the film, Seyrig plays the role of a woman who is a housewife living alone with her son and who prostitutes herself in order to make ends meet. The topic was dear to Seyrig, and after the strike in Lyon she spoke at the general assembly of sex workers.

CS: The Portapak allowed film and video makers to get closer, to play a more active role. One could film and then broadcast with relatively little time and effort needed between the two steps. What about their étique de tournage, or their ethics of filming? It seems to me that the idea of an ethic of how to film was quite unprecedented, and perhaps also shared something with the anti-colonial movements that were active at the same time. The French word tournage implies movement, a turning of the page or turning of the angle of the camera. It challenges the subject–object dynamic.

GZ: There are many threads we can develop around the idea of an éthique de tournage. In the first place, how can one produce an image where the image itself does not contribute to the objectification of the subject, or the aggression and violence around it? This was really important to Les Insoumuses. I think it grew out of Carole’s own development as a video-maker while working from within various political struggles during the early 1970s. She had travelled with Jean Genet to Palestine, and was close to members of the Black Panther Party in Algiers. She had never directed anything before she started to produce moving images. This is very important, because the idea was to produce an image that was not so much a visual representation, but rather a more complex way of talking, relating to, and participating in the struggle. So, again, the question of listening is very important. This is also how they started to work together as a collective, through listening.

Les Insoumuses’ éthique de tournage came from politics and activism, not from film. It grew out of their connection with and their participation in a common struggle. Delphine Seyrig’s first video, produced before she met Carole Roussoupoulos, is in fact very different from what she would later develop. She was already active in the feminist movement when she made her first video, a staged reenactment of torture entitled Inês. Although it is a theatrical representation (of a true story), it is difficult to watch, and it is the only film that Seyrig made in this style. Afterwards, when she began to work with Roussoupoulos, a different film ethic emerged, one in which the actual violence is never reproduced.

In Inês you do not see the man who enacts the torture: a male voice sounds in the background and the woman’s body is on stage. Thus, the video is quite violent and very much about the image of the female body, making it problematic due to the way it stages violence against women. Once Seyrig began working with Roussoupoulos there was a real shift. No one is filmed pretending, nor is there an actor or actress acting. Rather, the focus is on relationality, on our connection to life, and on questions of life itself. Which brings us to Sois belle et tais-toi, perhaps Delphine Seyrig’s most personal film. Be beautiful and shut up was what actresses had to do most of the time. As I said earlier, in the 1960s, Seyrig was already very aware of the conditions and circumstances of her profession, and of the role(s) she had to play. But over time she increasingly tried to introduce a twist.

I want to say a few words about her as an actress, before returning to Sois belle. Seyrig became famous thanks to one of Nouvelle Vague’s most important films, Last Year at Marienbad. Here she plays the part of an ethereal beautiful young woman who doesn’t remember what happened last year in Marienbad (an elegant pre-WWII spa town). The male character appears to be chasing her throughout the film. He speaks all the time, so the soundscape is occupied by his oppressive male voice. While the film is formally avant-garde and experimental, its sexual politics are conservative and reactionary. Seyrig plays this mysterious woman, a cliché. After this, of course, she kept being asked to play bourgeois female characters, like in Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses. In the latter film, if you look at the way she plays Madame Tabard, I think she infuses the character with a subtle irony. This is 1968, eight years after Marienbad, yet once again she is stuck playing this clichéd female character. But by now she is very much aware and able to create a distance between the cliché and how she plays it. You can see there is a real shift, something doesn’t quite fit. Nothing like a little irony.

As the women’s movement gained momentum, Seyrig began to give political meaning to her thoughts. By the mid 1970s, she had embarked upon Sois belle et tais-toi, a conversation with twenty-four actresses across France, in Hollywood and in New York. She asked them the same questions she was asking herself: questions about the material conditions in which they worked, about their relationships with producers, with the all-male teams that surround any actress, about the roles they had to play and the variety of these roles—in the sense that the roles are always the same—and importantly also about how relationships among women are staged on screen as well as curtailed off-screen.

What emerged from this montage of twenty-four women opening up about their profession is what has now become mainstream after #MeToo. They don’t talk so much about sexual harassment, but more about the material conditions, the relationships, and the roles. What is striking is that they all speak of their loneliness on stage, about the stereotypes they have to fulfill, about the fact that they always have to pretend to be stupid, that they must wait for men to explain everything to them. What was absolutely forbidden on screen was friendship among women. Throughout the film, you come to understand how their isolation is a political and ideological technique. The construction of the diva is a technique that aims at isolating women from one another. The film industry fears alliances between women more than anything else.

Sois belle et tais-toi is yet another example of how Les Insoumuses created a new ethic. Here we have an actress in conversation with other actresses, not an outsider, like a journalist, asking actresses about their personal lives (which is what the mainstream media does). The film is about shared experiences and about acknowledging these experiences. It resonated strongly with feminist practice and especially with consciousness-raising, which had spread amongst feminist groups in the USA and Europe during those years. The idea behind it is women listening to one another, without a leader, without judgement, and without commentary. It was about creating a space for conversation, for saying things that were not allowed, that were considered shameful or merely irrelevant. In the process of sharing these experiences there also comes a recognition of one another as individuals. Sois belle is a sort of cinematic experiment. The interviews are one-on-one—always between Delphine and another actress, but in editing the material she created an ongoing conversation among different women, which is where it becomes political. One actress recounts her visits with a producer: every time they meet, he asks her “how tall are you? Because you know, you’re too tall.” Obviously, actresses had to be shorter than their male counterparts. And so, she could only play in Westerns because they cast taller actors. These apparently insignificant but deeply humiliating experiences are evoked in the film. Jane Fonda recounts a director telling her—Jane Fonda, who was Hollywood aristocracy from the beginning—“with your nose you can only play in comedies because no one is going to take you seriously with this nose.” Can you believe that? It was constant humiliation.

There is a camera in Sois belle, but the film can maintain a sense of intimacy as the conversation develops between women sharing their professional experiences. That’s very important. The personal being political is what Sois belle et tais-toi is all about.

CS: Images of women working, filming, directing, and generally communicating appear throughout the Defiant Muses exhibition and its catalogue. It seems that Les Insoumuses helped to create a space for all women and one in which to adopt identities and fulfill roles that previously had been unacceptable or inaccessible. Here I’m thinking also in terms of operating a space like the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir. On the one hand, I wonder, did the container, the archive become a productive force in its own right, rather than just a retrospective gesture?

GZ: The idea was really to create an “archive of one’s own”, so to speak, an archive of women’s struggles, run by women. Les Insoumuses were also ahead of their time with an inclusive notion of women vis-à-vis Trans identity, especially considering the more limited debate on this in the 1970s and 1980s compared with today. In fact, in the show we wanted to highlight this open-mindedness as well as Seyrig’s ongoing interest in the rights of Trans women. One of the documents we included, filmed by Les Insoumuses, is a performance by Les Gasolines, a very early Trans collective that emerged in the 1970s, including singer Marie-France, Hélène Hazéra, and other figures who are crucial to the history of the Trans movement in France. Les Insoumuses felt very close to them and to their struggles, because they were looking at the question of femininity as a representation. I think this is important for our perspective today.

You mentioned the documents where you see women on strike, not just sex workers, but also factory workers and collectives of migrant women in the early 1980s, as well as early LGBTQI+ groups like Le FHAR in the early 1970s. The latter appeared publicly as a gay and lesbian organization. So really, the Centre audiovisuel is an archive for all these different political subjects. It opens up so many doors to new ways of engaging with politics and speaking out in the 1970s. There is also the question of labor, which was so important to Seyrig, particularly when it came to cinema and how labor and the profession produce representation and a visual culture that ends up being oppressive. The intertwinement of the two (women’s labor and cinema) was at the very center of what she was trying to do. Through her collaboration with women directors, the movement also provided her, as an actress, with the possibility of playing different roles. Suddenly, there were more women making films and for Seyrig this was an incredible opportunity to play roles that were previously unthinkable, such as Jeanne Dielman, or think of Ulrike Ottinger’s queer cinema.

CS: In fact, what is interesting is that on the one hand there is the creation of films that represent a reality to counter the male fantasy of who women are, and on the other there are the Ottinger films of a fantasy world that is different—perhaps it even has traces of the male fantasy, but that fantasy is turned on itself.

GZ: This is because the question was not to deny the dimension of pleasure or of the phantasmatic—that was not the point. The point was to explore different ways of producing images; ones not based on normative fantasies or on subject–object relationships, but more on the intersubjective relations of producing an image. That’s really at the core of what they were trying to do.

CS: Several of the documents and films in the exhibition address bodily gesture. One phrase that struck me in Sois belle et tais-toi is when one of the actresses says: “We discovered that it had never occurred to us that we could direct.” Well, I would add act (differently) and archive (differently). In Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Seyrig plays the role of a housewife who finds comfort (and later doesn’t) in repeating the domestic gestures and tasks that fill the hours of her day. It really strikes a chord, because somehow it archives how women were silenced through ritual, how women’s bodies are at once archives of inequality, as well as being the potential agents/vehicles of their liberation. SCUM Manifesto, the film Roussopoulos and Seyrig made together in 1976 inspired by the infamous 1967 text from Valerie Solonas, has two women facing each other across a table, one appears as the secretary, while the other dictates the text of the manifesto. A TV sits between them on the table, broadcasting the news delivered by a man, about men at war. In a nutshell, they underlined and archived these “female” gestures, but they also refused them, subverted them, changed their languages, and revealed their realities and true meanings.

GZ: I think you make an important point. Repetition is structural to how gender norms are constructed, function, and become pervasive. This is what you see in Jeanne Dielman: repetition as a form of survival, but also as a form of alienation. And so, I think that what they did throughout with this archive, what it represents, is an attempt to interrupt this sequence of repetition. This doesn’t mean to deny it or create a different world (of course this can be true in the case of Ottinger and other such filmmakers). Les Insoumuses wanted to confront alienating mechanisms, and how they work throughout image-making and representation, so that they could interrupt them.

Look at Delphine and Carole’s SCUM Manifesto film, based on the 1967 radical feminist manifesto of the same name by Valerie Solanas, which was out of print in the French translation when they made the film. At first, they were going to just read it and thus make it available again. But then, it became something different, a performative interpretation of her text. Their film is concerned with automation and technology, which are central to Solanas’s text. However, they also adapted the manifesto to the French context, which has a very authoritarian educational system. In the film Delphine is dictating to Carole, thereby reproducing a typical exercise present throughout French schooling. The act of dictation becomes a way to represent institutional power, as well as the grounds for disrupting it. What you see is Carole typing, but she is not writing anything, she is just lashing out against the typewriter. At one point she stops: the refusal. She smokes a cigarette.

Another theme is the question of labor, also very important in the original SCUM Manifesto. In the film, we see a TV on the desk broadcasting the news: Vietnam, Lebanon, and Palestine. What emerges is a very interesting super-imposition of subject matter and forms of representation. This film is an example of how the performative had shifted for Les Insoumuses. Look at Inês, and then SCUM Manifesto two years later. It’s an entirely different way of employing the performative within an activist video. Here, the two authors of the film are the ones performing, and they in turn are dealing with another figure, the author, Valerie Solanas. You have the relational, you have a text, irony, humor, re-contextualization, but also a lot of force. Fundamentally both the written manifesto and the film are concerned with work and the refusal to comply with the given construction of feminized labor.

CS: While reading about the different films conceived by Les Insoumuses and other figures they worked with, their effort to bring women into conversation with one another, both in the present and in the past really stands out. They somehow suggest treating historical figures as people we might have been able to talk to. In particular, in Seyrig’s unfinished project about the American nineteenth century frontierswoman Calamity Jane, it seems to me that there was a desire (and a need) to speak to all women and to overcome temporal barriers. Somehow the idea of time takes on a different meaning here.

GZ: Well, I can tell you that Nataša and I, we talked to Delphine and Carole a lot! We very much felt their presence. Not just because we were exploring their archives. We visited Duncan Youngerman, Seyrig’s son, several times, had long conversations with him, and she was very much in the room. Since you mention Calamity Jane—I think this project may provide a good model of how one can work with a historical figure. I do not aim to memorialize or monumentalize Delphine Seyrig, even though of course in my opinion she deserves a monument. But this is not the point. The point is how Seyrig’s manifold activities resonate on a political, subjective, and existential level. By the early 1980s she had started to develop the project of a film based on the letters sent by Calamity Jane to her daughter. It seems that the letters were apocryphal, it’s not clear whether they were real or not. However, Seyrig thought they were real, or perhaps she didn’t mind. She was interested in the historical figure of Calamity Jane, but also in mother–daughter relationships in general. There were various reasons behind this interest in intergenerational relations, some to do with her own mother, but also with her son Duncan. Because she was separated from both for long periods, letters were important.

There are various layers to the Calamity Jane project, ultimately an unmade film. It was about telling a story, writing a history (fictional in part because Seyrig wanted to make a feature film) based on a historical figure, and exploring a mother–daughter dynamic. This project was very important to us because it takes place during the same period in which Seyrig was constructing the Centre audiovisuel. It has to do with trans-generational relations, specifically with those between women in a political sense, as well as in a personal and creative one. Seyrig really wanted to make this film but was unable to secure enough funding. She wrote the script, developed a storyboard with drawings made by her son, and travelled to Billings, Montana where Calamity Jane had lived. Travelling with Babette Mangolte, who filmed the whole time, she visited a woman who to this day holds the archive and the original letters Jane sent to her daughter. For Defiant Muses, Mangolte edited the materials into a new film, a wonderful secondary outcome of our project.

Also, Seyrig wrote the script for Calamity Jane with poet and painter Etel Adnan. It proved to be a very complex project, involving a whole network of people. I would say that the way we approached the history of Les Insoumuses has something in common with the way Seyrig approached this (unmade) film. We wanted to underline the contemporaneity of the material, how we relate to it, and what it means to us today. This is also why we wanted the exhibition to be housed in a museum of contemporary art. We did not want to build a monument, what we wanted was to bring the material to life, because it is alive.

CS: The efforts to build the Centre audiovisuel, which was the main activity of Les Insoumuses during the 1980s, coincides with Seyrig’s engagement with the transnational women’s movement. Did these feed into each other? And how much does the women’s liberation movement owe to de-colonization efforts, in particular those activists that employed the same tools: the moving image and the archive?

GZ: This is a very important and unresolved question, which is why we commissioned an essay by Françoise Vergès (in which the author complicates the relationships between Les Insoumuses and different figures involved in anti-colonial struggles). The exhibition’s main focus is France. However, transnational networks were important back then. These were the years of de-colonization, of the Vietnam War, etc. We tried to map the ways in which Les Insoumuses and the Centre audiovisuel were involved in transnational struggles in one of the exhibition’s sections.

In France, the 1970s represented the immediate post-colonial period, and the legacy of the Algerian War of Independence remains a complex topic. Even though French intellectuals had been very much engaged in it (think of Jean Paul Sartre), by the late 1960s, the question of Algeria (independent since 1962) and the French colonies seemingly disappeared from the public debate. This lack of interest is a big issue, also from the perspective of the women’s movement, and not only in France. The 1970s women’s movement in France was unable to acknowledge the significance of the nation’s recent colonial past and the presence in French territory of post-colonial subjects was mostly overlooked. So, this was something we wanted to address without pretending that Les Insoumuses were in any way different. They were not. In fact, in the 1970s, there was far more interest in the Black Panthers than in what was happening at home. Things changed in the 1980s, but in the 1970s, except for a few documents we found regarding an association called Coordination des Femmes Noires, which they (Les Insoumuses) supported very actively, their focus was elsewhere. Everyone involved in politics in this moment looked to Palestine, to the African American struggles, to the war in Vietnam. All of course very important, but why was there such a lack of interest in raising the issue of the French colonialist legacy?

I do think that Delphine Seyrig indirectly referred to this legacy when she made Inês in 1974, her film about torture in Brazil. In 1963 she had played the leading role in Alain Resnais’ Muriel (1963), a film that deals with the Algerian War and specifically with torture. Ten years later, when the question of torture returned into her trajectory, it came back via a dictatorship in South America. But make no mistake, to bring up the subject of torture in France in the 1970s came with the inevitable specter of Algeria. I do think Inês has a connection to post-colonial France, though somewhat indirectly. The apparent lack of interest in the subject among French intellectuals is a contradiction that we cannot resolve, but we can point to Seyrig’s displaced narrative.

But as I said, the dynamic between the internationalist stance women took in the 1970s and the acknowledgement of France’s colonial legacy is a very complex and controversial topic. We did not want to resolve it nor to justify anyone. They were part of their time, and this is how things were addressed back then.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, things partially shifted: under Mitterand’s presidency, mass demonstrations and a new anti-racism movement emerged in France (one can think for instance of “Touche pas à mon pote,” the official slogan of the French group SOS Racisme, founded in 1984). The materials produced by the Centre audiovisuel in this period are indeed very much about racism and migrant workers. To be fair, there are also tapes from the early 1970s in which Carole documents migrant workers, as well as the strike at the newspaper Jeune Afrique. But in the 1980s, this intensified. In fact, there was a shift, a moment at which French society began to move in a new direction with respect to these themes. And you can observe this change in the Centre audiovisuel.

During this same period, debates on intersectionality emerged. One of the most important documents in the exhibition is a film by Françoise Dasques entitled La Conférence des Femmes. Nairobi 85, set in Nairobi during the UN’s Third World Conference on Women. In parallel, there was an NGO conference, an extraordinary event with organizations from all over the world gathering in Kenya to protest the official United Nations event. Angela Davis was there, amongst many other women. Dasques’s film is a striking document of what happened in Nairobi: there is no commentary, no voice-over, there is no explanation, rather it records a sequence of gatherings, discussions, and moments of assembly. You see the things that happened. It documents the beginning of a trans-nationalist women’s movement in the mid-1980s. I think it represents a turning point in the history of feminism.

CS: You mentioned voice-over earlier. One of the goals of Les Insoumuses was not to have male voices narrating their films.

GZ: Yes, they totally refused the explanatory and the “objective” narrative. They were able to avoid these, although in some instances it was difficult. For example, recently I’ve become interested in the Italian filmmaker Cecilia Mangini. In 1965, she made this wonderful film entitled Essere donne, in which a male voice-over constantly explains what is going on to a supposedly male viewer. The audience was presumably made up of workers, as the film was commissioned by the UDI (Unione Donne Italiane, part of the Italian Communist Party). However, you can see how Mangini counterbalances the male voice-over—which was imposed by the production—by giving space to the women speaking in the film. As a result, the film manages to work through this contradiction between the omniscient male voice and the multiplicity of female narratives that emerge from it. Mangini’s documentary is very much based on empathy and on listening, a fact that resonates with the work of Les Insomuses, even though it was made a full ten years earlier. Mangini’s political aim was in a way alike that of Les Insoumuses. But she came from a cinematic tradition (which preceded video), and the film was an official Communist Party documentary, so Essere donne is really saddled with this inner contradiction. With video you can avoid that, as you never have to explain and viewers are given the possibility of thinking for themselves without someone directing what they should see, what they should understand, or the conclusions they have to draw. This is yet another way of defining the question of ethics and the political dimension of filming in the way they did.

CS: It makes me think how obsessed we are with the past, and at the same time how easily we forget it. And therefore, how important these gestures are, that we must keep making them otherwise we will forget and have to start all over again.

GZ: And you know, while preparing this show we didn’t know how it would be received—as in, there are eleven hours of poor quality black and white video on view. The sound quality is bad, the image quality is bad, but the point is we must not try to aestheticize it further, it must sound bad because that’s what it was. You can’t polish it. But we had to ask ourselves, how will it be received? Were we right in thinking that this material still speaks to us as much today as it did in the past, even if on a formal level it is far from the moving images we experience today in museums? I think we took a chance. It isn’t easy to find ways of showing these materials, while at the same time creating a narrative; arranging and adapting so many videos with headphones and monitors to the exhibition space. But the idea of the show was inspired by the model of the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir itself. The exhibition actually works as an audiovisual center. Of course, we had to make choices, as not everything is on the same level and otherwise it would have consisted of 300 hours of video. Some films are projected at length (Sois belle, SCUM), while of others only excerpts are shown on monitors. We thought in terms of how to access an archive, with the idea that as a visitor you could stay thirty minutes or several hours. You can navigate your own path; you can sit in the Transnational Struggles room or in the Disobedient Practices room. In essence the exhibition has been constructed to work like an archive, a showcase archive.

CS: Yes, an archive that is different not only in terms of what it contains. We forget that there are archives that were born from struggles, and this makes for places that are much more active than classic institutional archives.

GZ: Yes, because it grew out of the struggles, and also because it’s archiving something that was relatively new: media and technology. Because, until now, we had thought of archives in a Foucauldian sense: the national archives, the papers, the police, and the institutions that produce power. Whereas here we are looking at a counter-archive, also in terms of where it came from—from the margins, even the media it employs is marginal. I therefore think the Centre audiovisuel is a model, one that can serve minority groups of all kinds, groups for whom the idea of an archive is becoming more and more important. In fact, it’s important for the history of political struggles everywhere.

The interview took place on May 7, 2022 at Giovanna Zapperi’s apartment in Rome. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

[1] https://www.centre-simone-de-beauvoir.com/

[2] https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/defiant-muses

[3] https://kunsthallewien.at/en/exhibition/defiant-muses-delphine-seyrig-and-the-feminist-video-collectives-of-1970s-and-1980s-france/