Carole Roussopoulos (1945)
Switzerland, France


Biography :

"Born on May 25, 1945 in Lausanne, Carole Roussopoulos spent her childhood in Sion and moved to Paris in 1967. Two years later, on the advice of her friend the writer Jean Genet, when she had just been licensed by Vogue magazine, she bought one of the first portable video cameras, the famous "Portapack" from Sony, whose first buyer in France was Jean-Luc Godard. With her companion Paul Roussopoulos, she founded the first video collective activist, “Video Out”, and from then on continues to give a voice to the “voiceless”, oppressed and excluded: “Portable video made it possible to give a voice to the people directly concerned, who were therefore not not obliged to go through the mill of journalists and the media, and who could produce their own information.”


Carole Roussopoulos' video activism is part of the current of cultural protest that emerged from May 68. Throughout the 1970s, endowed with a keen sense of History, she accompanied the great struggles that were contemporary to her, book a critique of the media, reveals oppression and repression, documents counter-attacks and awareness. Camera in hand, Carole Roussopoulos supports workers' strikes (six documentaries in three years on the Lip conflicts), anti-imperialist struggles (those of the Palestinians, Black Panthers and other liberation movements), homosexuals (Homosexual Action Front Revolutionary) and above all feminist: the fights in favor of abortion and free contraception from 1971, the mobilization of prostitutes in Lyon in 1975, that against rape, the struggle of women in Cyprus and in Franco's Spain .


It was at this time that she co-directed, notably with Delphine Seyrig to whom she taught video in 1974, two pamphlets that became references through their inventiveness, their humor and their irreverence: Maso and Miso go by boat, diversion of a television program with Françoise Giroud, then Secretary of State for the Status of Women, and S.C.U.M. Manifesto, based on the manifesto by Valerie Solanas. “There comes a time when you have to take out the knives. It's just a fact. Purely technical. […] The knife is the only way to define oneself as oppressed. The only audible communication,” wrote Christiane Rochefort in her preface. Carole Roussopoulos contributes to this “definition of the oppressed” in her own way: she experiments with the immense possibilities offered by video, a new means of expression, a tool without a past or school, which women appropriated at the same time everywhere in the world, and which allows direct agitation on the terrain of struggles. She always designs her tapes as debate supports and distributes them on the markets, with the singer Brigitte Fontaine and the musician Julie Dassin, before the creation of the distribution collective specializing in activist videos, “Mon oeil”.


Between 1973 and 1976, Carole Roussopoulos taught video at the brand new University of Vincennes. In 1982, with her accomplices Delphine Seyrig and Ioana Wieder, she opened the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Center, the first center for the production and archiving of audiovisual documents devoted to women created with financial support from Yvette's Ministry of Women's Rights. Roudy. There she made numerous documentaries on non-sexist education, immigrant women, little-known or unrecognized female professions, such as that of farmer, and filmed portraits of feminists (Flo Kennedy, Yvonne Netter). From 1984, within Video Out, she continued her exploration of ignored subjects (extreme poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, prisons, death of the sick) and began her series on incest, "the taboo of taboos", the first part of which is subtitled The Conspiracy of Blocked Ears (1988). From 1986 to 1994 in Paris, taking over from Frédéric Mitterrand, Carole Roussopoulos directed and hosted the arthouse cinema “L’Entrepôt”, a cultural space bringing together three rooms, a bookstore and a restaurant. In 1995, she returned to live in Valais, near Sion, and continued to work there as a director, clearing neglected areas: violence against women, marital rape, lesbian struggles, excision, gender studies, but also people elderly, organ donations, palliative care, disability. “I wake up in the morning and I say to myself: ‘this has to stop,’” Carole Roussopoulos explained recently. What interests me is to have a small lever of action on reality, in all modesty, because I never thought that a videotape would change the world. It’s the situation, the meeting of people at a given moment, that makes things happen. And then, the image and my energy can actually intervene. It’s a question of energy, more than aesthetics. And a question of anger, a word that I really like. I find that anger is something extremely positive. This is what prevents us from falling asleep.”


In 1999, the woman who liked to compare herself to the figure of a volleyball passer ("you take the ball and you pass it"), directed Debout! A history of the Women's Liberation Movement (1970-1980), a feature-length documentary which alternates archive images and interviews with the women who created and carried the movement in France and Switzerland. The film pays tribute to their intelligence, their audacity and their humor and enthuses young feminists: “The videos show the eyes which still shine today, thirty years later. The role of images in transmission is therefore decisive, they allow us to break the clichés,” underlined Carole Roussopoulos. It is with the same concern to transmit a little-known and often falsified history that she recently became involved in the “Testimony for Feminism” project, set up by Archives du feminisme and which intends to respond to the urgency of safeguard the memory of past and current feminist struggles.


At the time of her death, Carole Roussopoulos was putting the finishing touches on a moving documentary simply titled Delphine Seyrig, a portrait which reveals the little-known aspects of a multi-faceted actress, too often reduced to a surreal and inaccessible icon. The film powerfully evokes her feminist convictions and commitments, her discovery and practice of video as a director, by sharing with us her enthusiasm and her anger. Marguerite Duras said of Delphine Seyrig: “The only obstacle to her freedom is the injustice of which others are victims”. She could also have said it about Carole Roussopoulos.


In May and June 2007, the Cinémathèque française paid a vibrant tribute to this “giant of political documentaries like Joris Ivens, René Vautier, Chris Marker or Robert Kramer”, in the words of Nicole Brenez. In recent years, the work of Carole Roussopoulos has been the subject of programming in Europe: La Rochelle, Nyon and La Comédie Genève (Switzerland), Trieste (Italy), Tate Modern (London), or even in Turkey and Quebec. In 2001, Carole Roussopoulos was named Knight of the Legion of Honor and in 2004, she was awarded the City of Sion Prize. On October 9, 2009, she gathered her last strength to jokingly receive the prestigious Valais Cultural Prize for all of her work.


Carole Roussopoulos has directed and edited nearly one hundred and fifty documentaries, always from a feminist and humanist perspective, driven by the constant desire to “make people understand that it is a great joy and a great laugh to fight!” » His work is kept at the Médiathèque Valais, in Martigny (Switzerland), and also archived at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Paris.

The quotes from Carole Roussopoulos are taken from the interview published in the journal Nouvelles Questions Féministes (volume 28, n°1, 2009, p. 98-118)." (Source, website, Association Carole Roussopoulos)

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