Les Insoumuses

Les Insoumuses was a women's collective consisting of Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig, and Ioana Wieder. The collective produced videos on the struggles of women in the 1970s.

Delphine Seyrig and Ioana Wieder started to use the camera around 1974 after participating in training sessions organised by activist filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos, who taught cinema at the newly founded Université de Vincennes à Saint-Denis in Paris. Along with Jean-Luc Godard, Roussopoulos was one of the first to own the Portapak video system designed by Sony in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s she and her husband, Paul, founded the first militant video collective, Vidéo Out, which gave voice to oppressed and socially excluded citizens. In the mid-1970s, Ioana Wieder and Delphine Seyrig, together with Claude Lefèvre-Jourde, Monique Duriez, and Josée Constantin, organized the collective Les Muses s’amusent [The Muses Have Fun]. Wieder, Seyrig, and Roussopoulos later transformed it into Les Insoumuses (a play on words that combines insoumise—unruly or disobedient—and muse; it can be translated as “Disobedient Muses” or “Defiant Muses”). (Source)

Literature

• Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France, 1970s-1980s, Madrid: Museo Reina Sofía, 2019, 231 pp. (English)
  • Musas insumisas: Delphine Seyrig y los colectivos de vídeo feminista en Francia en los 70 y 80, Madrid: Museo Reina Sofía, 2019, 231 pp. (Spanish)