Nottingham Contemporary

Callisto Mc Nulty, Delphine et Carole, insoumuses (2019), HD Video, sound, colour, 78'

This series explores independent but interconnected feminist solidarity networks for film and video production and distribution in Britain and in France, foregrounding the historical tensions between representation and moving image, while looking towards new approaches and collaborations in contemporary moving image practices.

Callisto Mc Nulty’s film, Delphine et Carole, insoumuses (2019), looks at feminist video activists in France from the 1970s, including actress Delphine Seyrig and Carole Roussopoulos, founders of the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir – the first French organisation to distribute film and video by women artists. As well as being some of the first to document protests by the French women’s movement, they also used the new medium to counter the dominant representation of women on TV and elsewhere with their own images and commentaries. This film both writes a chapter in the history of feminism and traces the beginnings of a creative political practice that used boldness, humour, and subversion to unite collective action, media intervention, and archival documentation.