Maso & Miso Go Boating Preceded by SCUM Manifesto

Director: Delphine Seyrig

1975 / 84min / DCP

1975 has been declared Year of the Woman by the United Nations, prompting popular television Bernard Pivot to host then-Secretary of State for the Condition of Women Françoise Giroud on his program, where she’ll be asked to respond to a litany of misogynistic statements from various French public figures. This smarmy broadcast ambush is the basis of the Les Insoumuses collective’s viciously funny deconstruction strike-back, Maso and Miso Go Boating, in which Seyrig and Roussopoulos employ subversive re-edits, ironic intertitles, and other techniques of the Situationist détournement to undercut and tactically decimate the smug, condescending, paternalistic assumptions at the heart of Pivot’s special, titled “One more day until International Women’s Year—Oof!—is over.”

Screens with Scum Manifesto, a crucial piece of early feminist video art from the Les Insoumuses collective that documents a staged reading of would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas’s notorious misandrist call-to-arms of the same name—the acronym stands for “Society for Cutting Up Men”—in which readers Seyrig and Roussopoulos emphatically recite Solanas’s treatise on the tragic consequences of “vagina envy,” then unavailable in France, while, between them, a television set flickers with news images that testify to the ubiquity of rampant violence throughout the male-dominated world.

Maso and Miso Go Boating (1975, 55')

SCUM Manifesto (1976, 29')

MASO AND MISO GO BOATING digitally restored by the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe.

SCUM MANIFESTO digitally restored by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (National Library of France).