Saturday, March 10, 2012 at 7:30pm
Three Tapes by Carole Roussopoulos
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
Presented by Ridykeulous and Stuart Comer
Jean Genet parle d'Angela Davis, Carole Roussopoulos, video, 1970, 10 mins
Le F.H.A.R., Carole Roussopoulos, video, 1971, 26 mins
S.C.U.M. Manifesto, Carole Roussopoulos, video, 1976, 26 mins
One of the pioneers of video in France, Swiss-born Carole Roussopoulos purchased a lightweight Sony Portapak in 1970, at the suggestion of Jean Genet. With her husband Paul, she formed the collective Vidéo Out, which would go on to chronicle workers’ marches, the anti-imperialist movement, early feminist actions, and gay liberation meetings. Using the camera to transmit not only images of activists, but their words as well, Roussoupolos saw video as a powerful new means to give voice to oppressed groups who had been excluded from dominant modes of communication. ”What’s important to me is others’ words,” Roussopoulos once remarked, “those words you never hear.”
This selection of Roussopoulos’s early tapes begins with Jean Genet parle d’Angela Davis, which records both Genet reading a statement about Davis’s arrest and the indifference of a television crew on hand to broadcast the event. Le F.H.A.R. documents the first march and public meeting of the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action, a group whose founding members included writer Guy Hocquenghem, who appears as one of the meeting’s impassioned speakers.
The program concludes with S.C.U.M. Manifesto, a collaboration between Roussopoulos and actor Delphine Seyrig that tonight will be paired with a live performance by Ridykeulous and special guest Dr. Laurie Weeks. Here video is used as a means of publishing Valerie Solanas’s infamous tract, which at that time was unavailable in France. Sitting in front of the camera, Seyrig dictates portions of Solanas’s text to Roussopoulos, who types them out while a nearby television blares the political news of the day. As Avital Ronell once said of Solanas: sometimes you have to scream to be heard.
Alive since ’05, Ridykeulous is the collaborative effort of Nicole Eisenman and A.L. Steiner to subvert, sabotage and overturn the language commonly used to define feminism and lesbian art. Our efforts usually involve curation, intervention, publication, performance and highly-regarded affects on happenstance.
Stuart Comer is Curator of Film at Tate Modern.
Tickets - $7, available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm.
Subtitles by Buyong Kim and Nottingham Contemporary.