uses, which can lead to aestheticising stances of subversion as well as historical misinterpretations. While Carole Roussopoulos was not opposed to presenting her films in cinemas and art centres, she always sought to preserve the political understanding of her works and their intervention function, striving to maintain a space for debate. This was the case during the screenings organised, in her presence, on the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to her work by the Cinémathèque française in June and July 2007.

Within the context of the 1970s, Carole Roussopoulos was very critical towards a particular use of video, which reduced it to “yet another electronic gadget”. 31 She would draw a careful distinction between her militant practice and Video Art, which she considered with a certain degree of suspicion. The Vidéo Out group thus distin-guished itself from the formalist approach of the members of the The Kitchen, in New York. In 1972, as Carole and Paul Roussopoulos were showing a videotape shot in Amman during the war between Jordan and Palestine people, their hosts offered them to use the image colouring machine — an invitation which they found utter-ly inappropriate: “The guys’ only concern was whether we want-ed our bombings to be blue, yellow or red” 32; “Children burned by napalm in red or green!! The content meant nothing to them.” 33

Now restored by the BnF for this editorial project, the video SCUM Manifesto had first been preserved thanks to the attentive care of Paul Roussopoulos — a physicist, mathematician and painter — who never ceased to use his expertise in order to transfer the films made by Carole Rouspoulos and her accomplices, according to the planned obsolescence of video technologies. Although all filmed documents have not been preserved (the tapes were often reused