SCUM MANIFESTO contexts 49
Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig’s video fight: restoring Solanas’s voice
The SCUM Manifesto videotape (1976) by Carole and Delphine, is a “video-pamphlet” or “video-analysis” 31, which aims at keeping a record of the manifesto, then unavailable in France.
However, the video is more akin to a filmed performance than to a pure militant documentation. Through their mise-en-scène (the legend has it that it is a one-shot video), Carole and Delphine’s position shifts from that of filming to being filmed, from director to performer.
Seated at a table and holding the book SCUM Manifesto, Del-phine reads out passages that she has selected and translated to French. 32 Facing her, Carole types, in a robotic and randomly gro-tesque way, the excerpts methodically dictated to her with the punctuation, “demonstrating that a nightmare of French pedago-gy cannot incarcerate a feminist polemic”. 33
In the background, the silent footage of the television news is displayed on a TV monitor. Once in a while, either Delphine or Carole turn up the volume. The dominant rhetoric of the news — daily images of male imperialism that are not only globalised (the Cold War, the conflicts in Ireland and Lebanon, Argentina’s military dictatorship, police violence), but also extraterrestrial (the
31 The author’s translation of Patrice Flichy’s words quoted in a text by Hélène Fleckinger “Une caméra à soi. Quand les féministes s’emparent de la vidéo”, in Hélène Fleckinger, ed., Caméra militante. Luttes de libération des années 1970, Geneva, MetisPresses, 2010, p. 36
32 Delphine Seyrig’s French translation of the text is quite different from Emmanuèle de Lesseps’s translation (éditions L’Unique Et Son Ombre, 1986).
33 Catherine Lord, “Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter”, in Hilary Robinson, ed., Feminism Art Theory: An Anthology 1968-2014, Hoboken (New Jersey), Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, p. 421