SCUM MANIFESTO contexts 51

The manifesto’s enraged prose contrasts with Delphine’s calm and articulate voice, which is itself punctuated by Carole’s musical transcription on the typewriter. The performance involves the po-liticised use of the typewriter — a feminised tool that symbolises women’s subordinate work. And yet, Carole is not an obedient sec-retary. She regularly takes cigarette breaks, she puts up the volume of the television news, and observes these tragic images with de-tachment, casually smoking. Mute but far from being silent, Car-ole transcribes Solanas’s rage through her percussive keystrokes.

Different layers of voices encounter, collide and resonate. In this sense, SCUM Manifesto is a collaborative film d’auteures, in its feminine plural form.

The militant force of SCUM Manifesto lies in its ambiguous, mul-tiple status (between video-pamphlet and a filmed performance), in a confrontation between a militant content and the artistic ap-proach of a mise-en-scène.

Supporting the voices of Valerie Solanas, Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig

Free from male colonisation and rooted in the practice of lis-tening to others (as opposed to the imperialist tradition of speak-ing for others) 34, video became, from the beginning of the 1970s, a medium used to enable women’s emancipation from “the death of silences”. 35

Inviting us to re-explore the voices of Delphine Seyrig, Car-ole Roussopoulos and Valerie Solanas, the restoration of this vide-