otape by the Bibliothèque nationale de France stems from a fem-inist initiative in that it ensures the valorisation of women’s video heritage, the preservation of “Herstory” — women’s images and voices, absent from History (that is usually told from a male point of view).

Indeed, due to its militant content and its form — video was traditionally perceived as an “imperfect”, “amateurish” version of 35 mm film 36 — feminist video was been marginalised, often find-ing refuge in private collections or specialised archives. These vid-eotapes represent what the art theorist Hito Steyerl defines as “poor images”, images excluded from dominant circuits, “a lumpen pro-letarian in the class society of appearances”. 37 In other words, they are scum images. The low-resolution, pirate copy of SCUM Mani-festo circulating until recently on Youtube is a record of the gene-alogy of the videotape, of the mechanisms of marginalisation and re-appropriation leading to its online presence as “poor images”.

Today, SCUM Manifesto is one of the early videotapes that is most shown in museums and contemporary art spaces (including the Tate Gallery in London, and Centre Pompidou in Paris). 1970s militant video is currently experiencing a certain “cultural and ar-tistic revival” 38 which, while providing visibility to the videos, can become problematic when it translates into the nostalgic aesthet-icisation of the TV monitor and the black and white image it dis-plays. The formalist sacralisation of the video installation fetishises