Biographie

”What’s important to me is others’ words, those words you never hear.”

Carole Roussopoulos was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 25 May 1945. She grew up in Sion in the Canton of Valais. Following the usual primary and secondary school education, she began studies in literature in Switzerland, then Paris, where she met Paul Roussopoulos, a Greek political refugee, physicist and painter who became her companion in life, political activism and video art, and the father of her two children.

At first, she worked for Vogue as well as Jeune Afrique in her spare time. In 1970, she left journalism and, at the urging of Jean Genet, bought the first portable video camera, the famous Sony Portapak. Roussopoulos quickly grasped all of the machine’s potential and began to make good use of those possibilities, its lightweight body, mobility and low cost with respect to film.

She started by filming and later editing her images. The job of editing videotape was quite a balancing act initially, but her husband Paul came up with a do-it-yourself system with Scotch tape and scissors and a calculation for synchronizing the whole, a method that was to catch on in the militant video milieu. Shooting a film with the Portapak camera did not require a large film crew; Paul often held the mike and Carole the camera.

With Paul in 1970, she organized a small video group in Paris called Video Out. The same year, she made Jean Genet parle d’Angela Davis (Jean Genet Talks about Angela Davis) and a video shot in the Palestinian camps, Hussein, le Néron d’Aman (Hussein, the Nero of Aman—all copies of the video have since been lost).

She also filmed in the traditional May Day Parade on 1 May 1970 the first homosexual parade in Paris, and followed the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action during its historic meetings in the University of Vincennes’s Department of Philosophy, simply turning her camera on and filming the exchanges and debates without interruption. With rare clear-sightedness, she has managed to reconcile the arts of listening and seeing, in a glance sizing up the audience and the reactions of those who are listening. Her sense of the camera, of selecting the right position and distance, insures, when editing her material later, the pertinence of what she wants to get across.

Roussopoulos put her knowledge in the service of militant feminists by organizing forums and video workshops that drew many women, notably Delphine Seyrig, whom she met at one of these encounters. Thus began a long collaboration with Seyrig, the two realizing in 1976, for example, a remarkable little pamphlet called the S.C.U.M. Manifesto.

Roussopoulos has closely followed and filmed women’s struggles. Her work has helped to publicize the efforts of Lyons’ prostitutes and Lip factory workers in favor of their rights, the fight for abortion and open and free contraception. Yet Roussopoulos is not at all interested in trying to become a part of the groups or identify with the people she films; rather, she attempts to comprehend as accurately as possible a given situation or point of view. She has translated into images in this way various international struggles, the struggle of the excluded, the Fourth World, the homeless, day-to-day struggles (in the hospital or retirement home), the struggle of the mothers of Basque prisoners, and all the struggles of women generally (abortion, rape, contraception, violent abuse, professional equality…)

In 1982, she founded with Delphine Seyrig and Iona Wieder the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Center, the first audiovisual center devoted to women’s history.

Listening to others without ever commenting on what they have to say, the filmmaker is constantly questioning viewers’ preconceived ideas about subjects that are controversial or the least covered by mainstream media. In just a few minutes, she gets her bearings vis-à-vion, capturing in her video a mindset, a point of view, a way of speaking, seeing, working or moving. In terms of both image and editing, her work represents a true exploration, not a demonstration laid out in advance.

Loyal in both her friendships and her filmmaking, Roussopoulos works quite closely with her camera- and soundmen, generally offering only a few spoken indications. While filming, she is open and quite able to rework a phrase, change a certain lighting, shift a person in the shot, question more deeply the people she is shooting. Nothing is automatic with her. She remains very alert, always attentive to the person being filmed. Whether prostitutes from Lyons, Lip employees or women who are victims of violence, Roussopoulos is engaged in work that truly listens to her subjects and listens at length, over a period of time. She shoots long interviews, yet remains mobile, ready to film an event when something significant occurs.

Working with groups and associations, she has dealt with questions and causes that feminists have taken up, i.e., abortion, contraception, rape and incest. Her cassettes have been passed around and become an educational tool and the starting point for discussion and debate. Roussopoulos also works for and/or with militant groups as well as associations, foundations and ministries.

Her first videos clearly situated her oeuvre, which today numbers over 50 films, in her relationship with the world. What others have to say is primordial. The struggle for fundamental rights is legitimate. Human beings are of prime importance.

In the 1980s, she began to focus on women’s place in the working world, on occupations and professional statuses that are overlooked in official categories (professional women farmers and oyster growers, for instance) and professional equality in agriculture and the nuclear industry.

From 1987 to 1994, she managed Entrepôt, a space that brought together three movie theaters, a bookstore and a restaurant, and thus picked up two new professional roles, film programmer and restaurant manager.

In the 1990s, Roussopoulos undertook a very long film on disease, death, pain and the care given to terminally ill patients in their final weeks of life, from the point of view of both patients and the medical personnel.

In 1995, she returned to Switzerland and decided to film subjects that were being given scant treatment in her native country, violence against women and children and homosexuality. She also worked at the same time on restoring her first videos.

Witnessing the death of women around her who had been deeply committed to the struggle for women’s rights and realizing that audiovisual archives on the feminist movement were being scattered or left in neglect, Roussopoulos tackled a major film project dedicated to the women’s liberation movement, an undertaking that would eventually yield in 2000 the documentary Debout ! Une histoire du mouvement de libération des femmes (Arise! A History of the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1970-1980). The work was well received at various festivals and shown many times around the world, attracting extensive and flattering coverage by the press.

In 1992, Roussopoulos was named Knight of Arts and Letters and in 2001 Knight of the Legion of Honor, recognizing “her 32 years of artistic activity as a filmmaker.”

At this writing in 2003, she continues to work and has a number projects in mind, including the second part of her film Debout, une histoire du mouvement des femmes.


Nicole Fernandez Ferrer