Like a Longing for Independence: Breaking Free from Community Television
JM: Helen, one of the things you’ve brought up several times is your connections with other groups. We quickly discussed the fact that there was a need to share resources, including production equipment, but how did you work with the other collectives? And also, at one point, you wished to break off and become more independent. Why was that?
JF: There were Ciné-Vidéobec, Ciné-Vidéo du Faubourg, and Vidéo Femmes. The three of us got together to form an equipment pool. And from that, La Bande Vidéo was born. Hélène Roy’s document explains it well. I’m referring to the archived document you gave us this morning.
JM: What I read was that there was this idea of talking about women, of changing the focus, but that there were also some political differences, since some of the groups had Marxist leanings.
JF: Ciné-Vidéobec was more Marxist. Vidéo du Faubourg was more community-based.
NG: That’s right. We wanted to break free from those structures, which we found restrictive. And we also felt it was easier to agree on ideas and projects when it was just us girls. We had more shared interests.
HD: There was also the whole “my body belongs to me, so do my ideas” movement. But it wasn’t radical. It never was. Almost all of our boyfriends came to help us out at one point or another. But we always stuck to the idea of deciding on the content and doing it ourselves.
NG: We leaned more toward the idea of a collective. We also found that the structure of those groups was more rigid. You had to go before all sorts of committees to present your projects. We didn’t work that way. If someone put forth an idea and it sparked the others’ interest, we just did it! It was more organic. Easier, really.
JM: In Hélène Roy’s text, I got the idea that yours was a non-hierarchical structure and that you were all on equal footing, in that you worked according to your interests, but there was also a lot of cooperation between you. NG: That’s right. It was less hierarchical.
LR: I sometimes did my editing at Ciné-Vidéobec, in a basement on Du Roy Street. They were very, very politically engaged. They were quite radical. Say I had a certain brand of yogurt, or a Caramilk or Nestlé chocolate bar, they were boycotted. Certain things were not allowed. They were very . . .
Johanne Fournier à la prise de son lors d’un tournage dans les années 1980. Collection personnelle de Johanne Fournier.
Photographie du Portapak Sony AV-3400 issu des collections de la Cinémathèque québécoise (recadrée). ©Technès. CC-BY-SA 4.0.
NG: Rigid!
LR: Rigid, exactly. And because I didn’t really subscribe to that kind of thing, I wasn’t very comfortable talking to them. Whereas with the girls at Vidéo Femmes, it was easy.
JM: I understand. At that time, when you obtained the Portapak camera, that was your first experience with lightweight technology, wasn’t it?
JF: Yes. We had started out with black and white open reels.
JM: The duration of a reel was 30 minutes, right?
LR: Yes, 30 minutes.
NG: After 30 minutes, you had to stop and change the reel.
HD: With 16mm, the reels lasted 10 minutes!
JM: How many people did you need, say, to shoot your first film, Philosophie de boudoir?
NG: It depended on the project. Philosophie de boudoir was shot in one day. Jean Fiset was on the camera, I presume Helen was on sound, and my sister Johanne and I did the interviews.
HD: Sometimes there were only two of us. One on the camera and the other on sound. Sometimes three people, which was a big luxury. Three people was a big luxury.
JM: I’ve noticed you often mention that the Portapak allowed you to capture events on the fly. You had to shoot things as they happened, which was an innovation in the media landscape. But creativity was also a very important element for you. At what point did you consider the aesthetic and creative aspects of your productions? Was it a case of “We want to talk about current events, so we have to record them. They have to be made available?” Or did you say to yourselves, “I’m performing a gesture, an act of creation at the same time?”
NG: We spoke earlier about Philosophie de boudoir. That film was shot in one day, because it was made at the Women’s Show. But that was an exception. After that, although our subsequent films were tied to the issues of the time, each production involved several shoots. There were interviews, actors, scripted roles. We did research, editing, all that. Even our early productions were pretty structured.
HD: I think the film Une nef...et ses sorcières was a turning point.
Manuel d’instruction de la caméra Sony AV-3400. 9 p. Collection Richard Diehl.
"Une nef... et ses sorcières" (1976)
HD: One morning, Hélène Roy said to us, “I just met with Luce Guilbeault and Nicole Brossard. They’re working on a big project called La Nef des sorcières. Let’s apply for a Canada Council for the Arts grant to film and document their project.” Our application was approved, and I think she got—it’s in her files—something like $10,000. And because it was all going to take place in Montréal, we teamed up with Hélène Bourgault, who served as a kind of hub. Hélène Bourgault had made a video on abortion, Partir pour la famille?, which had been produced by Groupe Intervention Vidéo in 1974.
It took almost a year before the play was performed. Hélène Roy called Nicole and me and invited us to take part in the shoot. We recorded the writers and actors while the play was being written, and also during the rehearsals. The play revolved around a series of archetypes: the working-class woman, the actress, the menopausal woman, the writer, and so on. That was the point at which we began to approach documentary films differently, innovating in both content and form. We began to ask ourselves questions about writing and the aesthetics of video. What is feminine writing? Feminist writing? What is expression? What subjects are taboo?
Éditomètre du Vidéogaphe. Collection de la Cinémathèque québécoise. 2016.0006.AP.
JM: I believe it took a year and a half to produce it, with a total of 52 reels at the end of the shoot, and two versions.
HD: Both versions were edited at Le Vidéographe in Montréal, as well as in Quebec City. Vidéo Femmes had recently obtained some editing equipment, including an editometer, a device that facilitated editing, notably by enabling us to make more precise cuts.
JM: I also wanted to ask you a question about Hélène Roy. I’ve always been impressed by her. She was quite a traditional family woman, as her daughter Nathalie has said, with five children, and yet at the same time, she made films like Une nef… et ses sorcières. But that’s not all. She was also very knowledgeable about the arts, and about engaged artists like Luce Guilbeault and Paule Baillargeon. Can you explain that? How did she manage her “double life?”
HD: Double life! Ha ha!
NG: We knew her in her “other” life. We didn’t know what she was like at home.
LR: Remember also that she studied fine arts in Montréal, with Micheline Beauchemin . . .
NG: And Marcelle Ferron!
LR: Marcelle Ferron! She knew all those people. She was in close contact with directors, and women directors too, from other countries, and was connected to the creative arts network in Quebec.
Hélène Roy, Patrice Houx et Lynda Roy à la caméra sur le tournage de Demain la cinquantaine, 1986. Collection personnelle de Lynda Roy.
LR: Marcelle Ferron! She knew all those people. She was in close contact with directors, and women directors too, from other countries, and was connected to the creative arts network in Quebec.
JM: I didn’t know she had trained at the Montréal Fine Arts School. In that case, it doesn’t surprise me that she got in contact with Nicole Brossard and Luce Guilbeault for La Nef des sorcières.
HD: And she knew Louisette Dussault through the children’s theatre. She knew all the actors that had been in the shows we watched as kids, like La Boîte à Surprise and La souris verte.
JM: She would invite them to her house. She did mix her personal life with Vidéo Femmes.
HD: It was something she already did before she met us, a practice from the fine arts school.
JM: Yes. So, you were on the set of Une nef... et ses sorcières. It must have been a pretty complicated shoot, since I believe you weren’t allowed to record at the TNM?
NG: For union reasons, we weren’t allowed to film the performances at the TNM, but we filmed all the rehearsals. That was the bulk of the filming, which took a year.
HD: Jean-Louis Roux, the director of the theatre, had given us permission, so there was no problem there. But when we were there, we felt we had to be as quiet as mice. We were there just to observe, not to get involved in any way. We had to be very discreet.
JM: Do you have any memories of working with all those actresses and writers during the rehearsals for the play?
NG: Hélène was the one who booked the meetings and did the talking. We were the crew. For the ones we did get to know better, that was through subsequent projects. Like you, Helen, with Louisette Dussault in Chaperons rouges, or with Pol Pelletier, because you shot with her.
HD: After the performances, Hélène stayed on for a bit because she wanted to shoot other sequences for the edits. So she ended up with a big pile of tapes. At one point, we said, “Hélène, you’re the one who initiated the project, you deal with the editing!”
NG: Good luck! [Laughs]
Affiche promouvant la diffusion du film Une nef...et ses sorcières à l’ONF en 1976. Collection de la Cinémathèque québécoise.
Nathalie Roy, Nicole Brossard, Julia Minne, Nicole Giguère et Helen Doyle lors de la projection du film Une nef...et ses sorcières en novembre 2022, dans le cadre des Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal. Photographe : Maryse Boyce.
HD: We kind of bailed on her, but she was sensitive and intelligent enough to do it on her own. For example, when I watched it at the Cinémathèque in 2022, I said to myself, “My God, this is brilliant!”
JF: A very smart editor. It’s very modern!
LR: Luce Guilbeault’s monologue is extraordinary!
HD: She wasn’t afraid of anything. There are some daring edits that reflect her cinematic background. Hélène was always pushing us, but boy was she talented.
JM: She didn’t make very many films, but she was truly talented! I also remember Histoire des luttes féministes au Québec, which she shot in 1980 with feminist historians like Michèle Jean. Nowadays, it’s extremely valuable to have access to a documentary like that.
HD: The same goes for her video on menopause, Demain la cinquantaine. Who wanted to talk about menopause fifty years ago? No one! But she decided to talk about it. Like Une chambre à soi, une maison bien à nous, which referred to the book by Virginia Woolf. That’s pretty eye-opening, too.
NG: Subjects we didn’t tackle ourselves, because we hadn’t experienced them yet!
HD: She had doubts when she made her films, and it could be complicated, but when you watch them now, you think, “For the times, my God!”
Documenting Feminist Struggles
JM: Tell me about your experience in France during the Feminism and Communication internship. It was in 1977, I believe. In the films we digitized at the Cinémathèque, I found one that reviewed the internship. It shows Michèle Pérusse with a bottle of wine in her hand, asking you, “How was the internship in France?” What’s most striking about it is the differing view of feminism.
JF: There was definitely a disconnect between theory and practice. In Paris, Marseille, and Aix-en-Provence, the approach to feminism of the groups we met was very intellectual. Very theoretical.
NG: We went to see the women at La Librairie des Femmes in Aix and in Paris. They were very intellectual. It wasn’t a group that did community video, like us!
Photographie prise pendant le stage « Féminismes et communications », 1977. Collection personnelle de Nicole Giguère.
JF: Exactly. Also, there were some highly organized lesbian groups. Yes, we had lesbian friends, and we knew of others, but they weren’t organized in the way they were later on in Quebec. But in France, there were some groups that were very organized.
LR: It was harder in Paris than it was in the south of France. In Marseille and Aix-en-Provence, it was more joyful. A bit more like us. Whereas in Paris, feminist practice was very theoretical.
JM: But in your early films, some of the actions of the feminist movement seem quite organized.
LR: I think it was in the way it was expressed. Reprenons la nuit is a good example. Everyone was highly motivated to express their desire to change things. But it still wasn’t as theoretical. And a number of feminist books had already been published in France. In Quebec, there weren’t as many.
HD: There was the committee on the status of women, which provided advice to the government, but had no actual power. There were also union groups, like the ones for nurses and teachers and all that. There was a lot of activity, all over the place. And later on, a feminist research group was created at Laval University. But we didn’t want to join those groups. We wanted to pursue our own vocation and remain free to create our own images.
LR: But that didn’t stop us from associating with them. We filmed the group that campaigned for home births. We filmed for Viol-Secours. We filmed for other activist groups, but we were alongside them. We weren’t their standard-bearers, if you know what I mean. So that differentiated us from them.
JM: So if I’ve understood correctly, the idea was to support them, as well as to provide a more educational—or layperson’s—perspective of their messages?
HD: We were always guided by the film we were making, the way we wanted to make it, and the way we wanted to distribute it afterwards. That’s why I’m saying we weren’t activists. We didn’t take an activist approach, like some French women did. When Nicole Fernandez Ferrer came to Montréal in March 2023, we realized that during that same era in France, there had been activist groups that were much more structured and had precise objectives. As for us, we were just dancing with life! I don’t know how else to put it. We were a bit afraid of that rigidity. We valued our freedom and our slightly anarchic way of doing things.
JM: Lynda, you brought up Reprenons la nuit. Do you remember filming that demonstration? From what I remember, in addition to the demands that were being made, there were some musical groups.
LR: Yes, there were musicians at that event. But you also have to contextualize Reprenons la nuit . . . I don’t know if the demonstration would have taken place no matter what, but not long before, France Lachapelle had been murdered. She had lived in the neighbourhood of Saint-Jean-Baptiste. She was raped and murdered. It still gives me shivers. It was horrible. And the demonstration took place immediately after that, so it became even bigger. So there was strength to be found in being there for the women. And there was also strength in the fact that we were filming it and were able to get the message out. The title said it well: Reprenons la nuit [Take Back the Night]. It was as though we couldn’t leave our homes. That it was dangerous. You always had to protect yourself and be on guard. The slogan was “La nuit, les femmes sans peur” [At night, women without fear]. That’s what the women were chanting in the streets.
JM: There was also International Women’s Day. Was it important for you to be there each March 8th?
JF: Yes. And those were the best years of the Centre Vidéo Populaire de la Rive-Sud, when we documented things like that. It’s important to have a record of that. I made two. But a year later, Michèle Pérusse and Madeleine Bélanger made one at Vidéo Femmes, as well.
NG: We did that for several years at Vidéo Femmes. We did it under the title D’un 8 mars à l’autre, which was a document we presented at our festival, to show what the feminist groups had been up to for the past year.
JM: It also showed that at the political level, there was some overlap with the struggles of the working class. Women were also a part of that. And after that, women wanted their own freedom, and to talk about their own struggles.
JF: We attended round tables about the status of women. They were fascinating. The battles went on for years. Women’s struggles . . . a never-ending subject!
Creating our Own Distribution Network
JM: That internship later enabled you to collaborate with the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Centre and the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival, isn’t that correct?
HD: That was also thanks to Hélène Roy, who knew Delphine Seyrig, who was friends with Luce Guilbeault. I remember meeting Delphine and Carole with Hélène Roy. We had already produced a few films. We already wished to hold discussions about them. The problem was that we were using both NTSC and PAL.
NG: They weren’t the same format!
HD: The two video formats weren’t compatible. So it was easier to send a document to Vancouver, or New York . . .
Jackie Buet (directrice du festival) et Lynda Roy lors du Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil dans les années 90. Collection personnelle de Lynda Roy.
Nicole Giguère en France, 1977.
NG: or even Japan . . .
HD: . . . than it was to send it to Paris or London, because we couldn’t convert them. That’s what happened when I made Chaperons rouges. Hélène Bourgault and I decided to blow up the film to 16mm, so that it would travel better, because that was the only possible “recipe.” But we still kept in contact and had discussions. Carole’s and Delphine’s films tended to be shown at festivals, because the French Consulate was able to provide us with screening equipment. But once the films were shown, the equipment went back and that was it.
JM: At the time, you used to set up in cafés, and at festivals, too. Was that how you showed your films?
Michèle Pérusse, Nicole Giguère et Madeleine Bélanger en France, 1977. Collection de la Cinémathèque québécoise. 2023.0037.PH.09.
NG: In the 1970s, none of the cinemas were equipped to show videotapes. Even at the Cinémathèque, it came much later. That’s how it was elsewhere, too. When we showed videos, it was often on television monitors. In Créteil, we talked about our initial connections with France. The first time I went to Créteil was in 1980. We showed our films in a separate room, on monitors, because they couldn’t be projected onto the big screen. But people came anyway. They were quite popular, but we were always in a separate location.
LR: That came later. In the ‘80s, there were projectors that could be used in amphitheatres to project the videos onto the screen.
JM: What did you do when the festival came along, and you wanted to show your films? How did you do that? How did you show them?
JF: On monitors.
NG: We screened certain films.
HD: In Quebec City, there was an NFB screening room, and we had agreements with them to show films during the festival. There were two formats. Some of the films were shown on monitors, and others on screens. I remember La femme de l’hôtel by Léa Pool and La cuisine rouge by Paule Baillargeon.
JM: I’m having trouble picturing that. You can’t get very many people around a monitor.
Paule Barllargeon sur le tournage du film, La femme de l’hôtel de Léa Pool, 1983. Photographe : Martine Waltzer. Collection de la Cinémathèque québécoise. 1995.1196.PH.01.
Johanne Fournier et Nicole Giguère devant une installation lors de La Video Fameuse Fête en 1984. Collection personnelle de Nicole Giguère.
NG: There were several monitors.
LR: And there were bigger ones, too. I remember I was given this huge monitor that was . . .
HD: A monster!
LR: It really was a monster. It was so heavy that we couldn’t move it. But it was about 40, 50 inches. It was bigger than the others. At one point, no one else wanted it, so I ended up with it!
JF: The rooms held 30 to 40 people. People were used to watching small TVs, so it worked. People came to watch them.
HD: Yes, yes. And at festivals, or in other more “formal” situations, there could be four or five good-sized televisions. They weren’t your typical little household TVs.
LR: Let’s not forget that just showing a film on a monitor in a room was something special. I don’t know if you’ve ever travelled to a country where people aren’t used to having television sets. You might see 100 people gathered around a small TV, even if they can barely see it! It’s the uniqueness of the occasion. That’s what makes it special, even if the screen is small. I think our relationships to screens, and our expectations of them, were different back then.
JM: That’s for sure.
HD: And there were people who were linked to the films and videos we showed. It’s still done with documentaries. If you’re there to introduce your film, it has a lot more impact than if the film is just shown on its own.
Louise Giguère et Nicole Giguère représentent Vidéo Femmes au Japon dans les années 1980. Collection de la Cinémathèque québécoise. 2023.0035.PH.46.
« Chaperons Rouges » (1979)
Affiche du film Chaperons rouges d'Helen Doyle et Hélène Bourgault (1979). Collection de la Cinémathèque québécoise. 1998.0225.AF.
JM: What came after Une nef . . . et ses sorcières?
HD: I made Chaperons rouges with Hélène Bourgault. And Nicole came to help us out several times. I often stayed at Hélène Bourgault’s while we were making Une nef . . . et ses sorcières. At one point, she said to me, “I’m doing a project on tenderness. Do you want to join me?” I said, “Sure, why not?” But we didn’t even discuss whether we’d shoot it in Montréal or Quebec City, because neither of us had a car! It was just like, “Yes, let’s try.” So we started working on it. And I don’t know how it happened, but we ended up making a film about rape.
JM: What you told me was that after talking to several people, you realized their stories quickly drifted into stories of rape.
HD: When we started interviewing our friends, we noticed they were telling us things that nobody talked about at the time. This was long before the #metoo movement. No one talked about them at all. The subject was very, very taboo. It was something you only whispered about.
NG: Rape was never talked about on television. Jeannette Bertrand hadn’t yet made shows like L’amour avec un grand A or Jeannette veut savoir. The film was widely viewed. This was during the same period that Anne Claire Poirier made Mourir à tue-tête (1979) at the NFB.
HD: Hélène and I really debated the format of that film. How do you film personal accounts of rape? We received a $5,000 grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to make that film. It took about a year and a half to make it. It was just the two of us working on it, with no film crew. We knew about Anne Claire Poirier’s film because we knew some people who were working on it. Since we didn’t really have the means to make Chaperons rouges, we had to give a great deal of formal thought to how to shoot such a sensitive subject using video. The result is quite hybridized, artisanal, and very feminist.
JM: We really should mention Christiane Viens’ performance in the film. What was the impact of Chaperons Rouges in terms of distribution??
HD: At the time, Pierre Falardeau and Julien Poulin had blown up their film Le Magra to 16mm at the National Film Board, for screening at the Cinémathèque québécoise. As for Vidéo Femmes, it was the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival that had requested a copy of Chaperons Rouges for screening. Thanks to Falardeau and Poulin, we were able to transfer the film through Challenge for Change, an NFB film production program. They were kind enough to help us, which gave the film great visibility. Hélène Bourgault went to France with the 16mm copy to show it at festivals and in other organizations. It was also shown in La Rochelle, Italy, and Amsterdam.
Se frayer un chemin entre la vidéo et le cinéma
JM: Helen, you said you were interested in the connection between creation and madness. It’s a subject you dealt with a lot in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
HD: It’s like a chain reaction. It’s difficult to explain. You get drawn from one subject to the next. It’s like the entire history of Vidéo Femmes.
JF: It’s like a sequence. A long sequence. Helen continued on with Les maux/mots du silence. Everything is linked together. It’s pretty amazing! We were always going deeper into some aspect or another.
HD: Sometimes it was the subject. Sometimes it was the form. Sometimes it was both. It’s hard to explain because it just happened so naturally. It wasn’t like this project, where you’re writing a thesis. You had to draft an outline. You have to hand it in on a certain date. We didn’t have any of those constraints.
JM: Yes, it was much more organic.
HD: Instinctive.
JM: Another topic that interests me is your reflections on creation. The formal aspect of your films is also very important. I wanted to know how you did Chaperons rouges, with its formal aspect, but that also dealt with rape—a subject that touches on trauma and violence.
HD: I think that was the case for all the women at Vidéo Femmes. We had two models to work from: The films of the NFB, in which women were scarcely represented, and the shows of Radio-Canada, Femmes d’aujourd’hui, etc.
Affiche de promotion du film Les maux/mots du silence, Helen Doyle, 1983. Collection personnelle d’Helen Doyle.
Helen Doyle et Christiane Viens lors de la projection du film Chaperons rouges aux Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal en novembre 2022. Photographe : Maryse Boyce.
The NFB was the last bastion of the Jesuits, as the girls there used to say. So one of our creative models was a masculine vision with a lot of resources. And the other was Femmes d’aujourd’hui, a TV show featuring interviews and talk segments about people discussing women’s issues, feminist issues. I think the fact that we had those contacts through Hélène Roy, with documentaries, films being made all over the place, fiction films, festivals . . . it broadened our horizons. That’s why I mentioned freedom. The NFB had one style at that time: direct cinema. Which is great! The films of Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault, etc. But where were the women in all that? You have to watch Anne Claire Poirier’s film Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, where she goes in search of images of women in NFB films . . . My God! I remember when I started working with Hélène Roy. We said to each other, “We’re not going to do things like the NFB, and we’re not going to do things like Radio-Canada.” That much was clear. So we had to invent everything. The hybrid model quickly became our method of choice.
NG: I find it difficult when Julia asks us questions like that. Things weren’t planned in advance. There was no theory. For me, anyway, when I made a film, it was because the subject interested me. “Okay! What can I say about this?” We did our research, but it wasn’t based on theoretical reflection.
LR: We had some good examples with the productions we presented through theatre, like Une nef . . . et ses sorcières, which was based on a certain process but came up with something different. But what drove us was the learning. Giving people a voice. Doing things differently.
JM: Yes, and seeing the Women’s Film Festival must have inspired you in your creations, or in other words, to look for formal inventiveness beyond even what interested you. You’re always looking for influences . . .
HD: Varda’s explosive films were already around.
JF: It was virgin territory. At the time, there weren’t that many films that had been made by women, so we could go in any direction we wanted. And the fact that with video, we didn’t have to deal with expensive reels that only lasted 10 minutes. We could record for longer periods. We could experiment. “Should we try this?” “Sure, and we’ll see how it turns out when we edit it!” We didn’t hold ourselves back.
Christiane Viens lors du tournage de* Chaperons rouges* (1979). Collection personnelle d’Helen Doyle.
JM: That’s right. Video allowed you to go with a hybrid model. You could explore things and take the time to experiment, like you said, Johanne.
HD: Even direct cinema documentary is a school of thought. It’s a type of cinema from here that ended up all over the world. You’d say, “I make films,” and everyone would immediately start talking about direct cinema. In the filmmaking world, everyone was talking about direct cinema. But that wasn’t what I did. It was clear to me that that was not what I wanted to do. Even though it’s very remarkable!
JM: Yes. And you get a sense of that in Chaperons rouges. The fact that there are actual performances in it.
HD: We made it up as we went along. Like Johanne said, we’d say, “Should we try this? If it doesn’t work out, we’ll throw it out and no one will see it.” Even during editing, we’d try new things, and we’d say, “It worked!” We had to be very inventive. Our national cinema is very inventive. As for us, we had even less resources, so maybe that gave us even more space to be inventive.
NG: No resources and no role models!
JF: And no schooling! Very few of us had studied filmmaking.
NG: Not us, in any case. Not those of us who were there at the start.
JF: That gave us a lot of freedom. I sometimes feel that our experimentation was based more in literature than in certain bold films we had been completely unaware of, and which we only discovered through the festivals. Nicole went on to do a lot of things with music. Music helped provide form. There were all sorts of blends.
JM: I get the impression that because there was no rigid school of video in the early days, you were allowed to be more inventive.
HD: Sometimes it was frustrating because we were pushed aside, but I sometimes think that gave us even more freedom! We didn’t have to answer to anyone. No one told us whether what we were doing was right or wrong. We were happy, we had an audience. There were people who came to watch our videos and discuss them with us.
NG: And we didn’t get much feedback from filmmakers or film critics!
JM: Was it mostly the newspapers?
HD: When we put on a festival, it was in Le Soleil and Le Journal de Québec. Other than that, there were occasional articles in the Council on the Status of Women’s La Gazette des Femmes or in La vie en rose. But those were pretty much the only articles that were a bit more in-depth. No one was really paying attention to what we were doing. So we just kept on doing our thing.
Johanne Fournier au son sur le tournage de On fait toutes du showbusiness de Nicole Giguère, 1983. Collection personnelle de Johanne Fournier.
Hubert Sabino-Brunette, Julia Minne, Nicole Brossard, Helen Doyle et Nathalie Roy lors de la projection du film Une nef... et ses sorcières aux Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal en novembre 2022. Photographe : Maryse Boyce.
JM: In the 1970s and 1980s, you were interviewed by Copie Zéro, and you said that it was tough not to be recognized by the film industry.
NG: That came later, but not at the beginning. In the ‘70s, we didn’t really care. Later, when our productions became more comprehensive and more complex, we would have liked to see them more widely distributed and recognized, but I think that in the beginning, we were just engrossed by what we were doing, and we didn’t care.
JF: Video wasn’t included in the Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québécois. Also, we were in Quebec City, and we were women. So the whole system was set up to ensure we didn’t exist.
HD: And I have to point out that we didn’t exist for the Cinémathèque, either.
JF: It took a French woman, Julia, to discover us!