Dossier

Julia Minne: Nicole and Helen, could you tell me about when you first met? How did you come to create the collective with Hélène Roy? I know Hélène began working with the Women and Film Festival in the early 1970s, doing the programming for women’s films in Quebec City. Please tell me everything!

Helen Doyle: Well, once upon a time . . . [laughs]. In 1973, I heard about a festival that was taking place at Laval University, a festival dedicated to women’s films. I went to a few screenings. I saw several films and immediately said to myself, “You can do that? I want to do that! I want to do that! I want to do that!” It was a revelation of sorts. By coincidence, I had some graphic designer friends who had made the festival poster. They gave me Hélène Roy’s contact information.

After the festival, I called Hélène and told her, “I went to the festival, and I want to do the same thing.” So she said, “Come over to my place.” I went to see her and we talked. In the past, I had worked with Nicole, who had been on CKRL, the Laval University community radio station.

Before that, I’d done a series called Un sourire à l’envers for Quebec City’s community television station. And although I had made films, what I had just seen was something else entirely. It was true cinema. I called Nicole and we went to meet Hélène together. And I don’t know . . . Things happened very quickly. Seemingly overnight, we found ourselves at Papillon [laughs].

Nicole Giguère: That’s pretty much how it happened! Papillon was a men’s clothing store on Saint-Jean Street in the Saint-Jean-Baptiste district of Quebec City. It was the first location for our group, which at the time was called “La Femme et le Film” [Woman and Film]. It was in the basement. It was the era of community and grassroots organizations. The idea was to create a community communications centre, where we could do radio, video, a bit of everything.

JM: Tell me about when you first arrived at that legendary location on Saint-Jean Street. When you decided to become a production, distribution, and broadcasting collective, how did you organize things?

NG: At first, there were also some guys on the team. It was a neighbourhood community video centre. So we started filming all kinds of events in the neighbourhood of Saint-Jean-Baptiste. I did something on what we called the “robineux,” that is, homeless people with drinking problems . . .

JM: It was called Paye-moi donc un café (1974).

HD: There was a lot going on in that neighbourhood, on all fronts. We shared the premises with another, more “political” video group. Michèle Pérusse, Madeleine Bélanger, Nicole Renaud, and Jean Fiset soon joined us, and we temporarily set up shop on De La Couronne Street, in a tiny, uncomfortable former Chinese grocery store. We set it up with Hélène Roy’s help. We acquired a Portapack and by re-using tapes, we set about producing Mamzelle Maman, Le mariage et puis après, and others. We received funds through a federal employment program, which provided us with a decent budget. Recalling all this makes me feel like I’m paying tribute to my dear friend Michèle Pérusse, who is now deceased and whom I miss terribly.

NG: You’re right, Helen, to point out that that period, and our involvement with the Saint-Jean-Baptiste neighbourhood, were decisive for the future of Vidéo Femmes. Our choice of subjects, our relationships with people, our collaborations . . . It’s too bad Michèle can’t be here to remind us even more about that period . . .

HD: We should also talk about Hélène Roy’s background. She had kids, and she had been active in children’s theatre and cinema. She already had a self-assurance that we didn’t really have. I wasn’t considering video, I was considering film, because that’s what I had just seen.

JM: When you founded the collective La Femme et le Film, your goal wasn’t to become a director, was it?

Hélène Roy: I wasn’t much of a director, myself. When I met Helen and Nicole at the festival in the spring of 1973, we wanted to extend the experience by founding the centre. Things moved slowly, because we had to find funding.

JM: Could you tell me about your own background, as well as your role in Vidéo Femmes? How did you manage the centre?

HR: First of all, I was raising five children. I wasn’t planning on a career in filmmaking. At first, I was more of a spectator. Then I got involved in creating theatre for children. After that, I discovered the children’s films that Rock Demers was showing in Quebec City. But that was all volunteer work. I gave a lot of my time, and that went very well in Quebec City. We created one audience at a time, for the cinema and for the theatre. At around the same time, a team from Toronto was looking for a coordinator for the 1973 Women and Film Festival, and Rock Demers gave them my name.

JM: Nicole Brossard?

HR: Nicole! Nicole, whom I already knew . . . I had a lot of friends who were in the arts. So that was when the three of us got the idea, a sort of flash of inspiration, of observing the production of this play in 1976 that they were writing with other feminist authors of the time. The play, which was originally called La Nef des sorcières, was very provocative for its time. It featured seven monologues by women who were oppressed by society at the time. To make the film, we had two film crews. I figured it out as we went along. I had no qualifications. I just put in a lot of hard work. I did the editing on my own, and in fact it was Pierre Falardeau who had given me a few editing tips at Le Vidéographe.

JM: In fact, aren’t there two versions of Une nef...et ses sorcières? There’s the editing with the interviews, and the filming, right?

HR: Yes. What happened was that when it came to filming it, we needed two crews. So we also had Vidéographe’s Portapak. When the dress rehearsals for La Nef des sorcières took place, that’s when we absolutely had to record the play. Except that I got sick. I think I had pneumonia. And no one else could do it that day. So we ended up having to film it during an actual performance, without authorization, hiding under the balcony at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (TNM). Hélène Bourgault and I each had a part to record. Hélène was doing the first part, and I was doing the second, with 30-minute reels each. But because I already knew it by heart, we only filmed the key parts of the play.

At first the festival was called the Festival de Films et Vidéos de Femmes, before becoming the Festival des Filles des Vues a few years later. It’s the oldest women’s film festival in the world, even older than the one in Créteil, France. The first screenings took place in cafés in Quebec City, like Chez Temporel. For the films in the NFB’s En tant que femmes series, the audiences were larger, so at one point we obtained access to a small screening room at the NFB. That was a big deal, because it allowed us to show little-known films. In 1984, the festival truly found its home base when the Gabrielle-Roy Library was built in Quebec City’s Lower Town. Vidéo Femmes’ premises were also in the Lower Town. That was where the festival celebrated its tenth anniversary with La Vidéo fameuse fête and took on an international aspect, through contacts with France and Japan. Louise and Nicole went and delivered video workshops to women in Japan.

We obtained small budgets that ran parallel to the operations of Vidéo Femmes. As for me, I coordinated the festival and worked on its development, with the team. We received no support from the city of Quebec, and we held a press conference about that. Jean Pelletier was the mayor of Quebec City at that time, but then he was replaced by Jean-Paul L’Allier, who was more open. We then received some support from the city. And later on, I created La Mondiale de Films et Vidéos, a festival of films produced by women, with Nicole Bonenfant. There were two international editions of that festival, in 1991 and 1993, and we continued until 1995, holding weekend cinema events, which I coordinated.

JM: I’d like to hear how the collective was run, and how the films were produced, such as Demain, la cinquantaine, for example, and about Vidéo Femmes’ collaborations with other collectives, like GIV.

HR: We collaborated with GIV a lot.

HR: Yes. Each year, I went to watch films and videos that had been shot that year. We created our own distribution service with rental fees, starting in the 1980s. And then we trained with Robert Morin at the . . .

JM: The Coop Vidéo?

HR: Yes, that’s it. So Robert and Jean-Pierre St-Louis, and others whose names I can’t remember, trained us on how to work with colour. And so by the time we did Tous les jours, tous les jours, tous les jours in 1982, we had already been doing distribution for two years. We were beginning to have a few works in our repertoire. The catalogue also contained works by GIV and the NFB. It didn’t only contain ours.

JM: If I remember correctly, your distribution circuit began after the Ciné-Vidéo-Bus, didn’t it?

HR: Yes. There was a federal government-funded screening project in 1974 called “Perspectives jeunesse.” I put up posters in the student residences at Laval University. A few students showed up. We showed them their films, as well as some women’s films. You can find them in the archives.

JM: Right.

HR: So that was one of our first screening events. Once we saw that there was interest in those videos, we set up a distribution network and collected rental fees. There were high schools, CÉGEPs, and certain universities. We had some pretty regular clients.

At that time, GIV also had a distribution system, and we had a printed catalogue that been distributed in several locations. It was useful for GIV to appear in our catalogue. We were also in contact with some people in Sherbrooke. We would receive videos and decide if we would accept them or not.

JM: Helen, in another interview you told me you had studied at the Beaux-Arts de Québec [Academy of Fine Arts of Québec] and, I believe, you had made a 16mm film. What led you to become interested in women’s creations when you attended Hélène Roy’s festival?

HD: At school, there had been a camera just lying around, so I decided to use it. I started asking everyone for information. I went to the community television station and told them, “I want to make shows.” So they gave me a camera and some reels that had just been erased. A technician gave me a training course that was two or three hours long, and then I went out and started shooting. None of it exists anymore. One of the shows I did was about Nicole making cheese.

NG: Who was raising goats on a farm in the countryside . . . It was the “back-to-the-earth” era!

HD: So I made a series of six documentaries, which no longer exist. Except for the one about Nicole, which I gave to her as a birthday present at one point.

JM: So you were already aware that women’s films were under-represented. One of the videos that was digitized by the Cinémathèque is called La Superfrancofête. In one part, Helen leads a discussion with other women from Tunisia, from Lebanon . . .

HD: Those were the early days, in the summer of 1974. The Superfrancofête Festival featured artists and sports events from several countries. Through a bunch of connections with Quebec filmmakers, I ended up being hired. I sometimes went out to do fieldwork. At one point, I realized, “My God! I’m meeting so many women!” So Hélène Roy and I decided to take over the community TV studios. That time, we interviewed several women from other countries, and we decided to keep the footage. I remember it had been quite complicated to get some of the girls to leave the campus where they were staying.

JM: It was?

HD: Even then! The young girls had to be accompanied by their chaperones. We managed to do it because Hélène was a bit more mature. She was a mother herself! We convinced them by saying we’d pick them up and drive them back to campus after the shoot. We kind of improvised a meeting with those girls, and managed to get them away from the university unaccompanied.

HD: Next, we shot Philosophie de boudoir with Nicole at the 1975 Women’s Show, during that infamous Year of the Woman! I felt like it marked the occasion, you know? It has become a valuable archive from that era!

NG: We worked with the community TV station to make that video, since we didn’t have any equipment at the time. There were all sorts of booths at that so-called Women’s Show. You can see me, as the host, interviewing people about what they thought of the show, which made for some rather comical results, as you can see. That documentary has high archival value. But the images are old and the quality is not very good.

JM: You know how much I love archives! That film is very important to me. It bears witness to early experimentation with the medium, and also, we sense that you had a lot of audacity and wanted to expose a different point of view about women, which is something that television and cinema didn’t do very well at the time.

Lynda Roy: That’s when we joined the collective. Johanne and I also started out in community television, the one in Lévis called the Centre Vidéo Populaire de la Rive-Sud, which had been nicknamed “CV POP.” You have to remember how things worked back then. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission required that cable companies offer their services to the community, given that they had an exclusive license.

In Lévis at the time, Vidéotron was the distributor for the area, and they had purchased equipment for community television. We became the CV POP team. I had chosen to focus on feminist themes. Johanne, you were more interested in citizens’ causes. We covered both current events and the issues of our community. Working in community television was what made us want to remain in that domain, which we enjoyed, and to learn the job as we went. A little later, I went to Vidéographe in Montréal, which was one of the forerunners. That’s where I met Hélène Roy, who was part of a group of women. I said to myself, “Wow! There’s a group of women in Quebec City. I didn’t know that.” After that, in May ‘77, I did an internship in France through the OFJQ, the Office Québécois de la Jeunesse [Quebec Youth Office], through a program called “Féminisme et Communication.” Johanne and Nicole also attended. We met a lot of women there, some of whom were from the CKRL community radio station, freelance journalists from the Conseil du Statut de la Femme [Council on the Status of Women] and from Viol-Secours, who spoke out in the media. In short, we met our counterparts in France!

JM: And you, Johanne?

JF: My background was in theatre. I had given workshops to students at the CÉGEP de Lévis-Lauzon. That’s where I met Lynda. In October 1976, I had just given birth. So doing theatre work, going out on tour, all of that, had become more complicated. François, my daughter’s father, suggested that we form a new team to re-launch the Centre Vidéo Populaire de la Rive-Sud, which wasn’t doing very well. I asked Lynda to join us. It was really just the two of us. Slowly but surely, we got the centre back up and running, recruited some new people, and started producing a lot of projects. There were volunteers, and it grew quickly. It was very vibrant. If I remember correctly, that was in January ‘77.

JF: Yes, we showed a clip from it when we took part in the round table on November 24, 2022, at the Cinémathèque with Julia. So that was how I had found out that La Femme et le Film existed. Lynda had also met them. So one thing led to another, and we ended up at the workshop in France with those women.

NG: There had to be a minimum of fifteen or sixteen participants for the internship to take place. But there weren’t enough of us. There were only five or six of us. So we invited them to come, and they stayed on with us afterwards.

JF: Lynda, you became part of the Vidéo Femmes team more quickly than I did. I stayed at the Centre Vidéo Populaire de la Rive-Sud for a little longer, because in 1980 I made La violence ordinaire, for which I had received a grant. It was my first creative film, made with fragments and the dramatization of a number of everyday situations. When we launched the film in our offices in old Lévis, Hélène Roy came and said, “We want that film. We want to distribute it and show it at our festival.” I was extremely honoured. I was quite amazed. That was in 1980 or 1981. I still wasn’t fully part of Vidéo Femmes. After that, I truly joined the team when the film Tous les jours, tous les jours, tous les jours was being made.

JM: Could you tell me about Michèle Pérusse? What did she do?

NG: At one point, the city of Quebec gave us some equipment. A camera and an editing unit, consisting of two VCRs linked together. We learned how to operate it as we went along! By trying it out. We had advertised and organized some workshops. That’s how Michèle Pérusse came to join us. Madeleine Bélanger, too. And some others, who didn’t stay as long. So that’s how we grew the team. Michèle Pérusse stayed for several years. She directed and edited a number of productions and took on all sorts of roles at Vidéo Femmes. She was also a journalist, and she wrote lovely articles for the Gazette des femmes and things like that.

HD: Michèle joined Vidéo Femmes because she was in contact with Laval University, and she said, “We do a lot of theory, but no practice.” Several people joined for that same reason. And because she was a journalist, she put us in contact with several women from La vie en rose [magazine], who were interested in what we were doing in Quebec City, even though they were in Montréal. All their articles that are listed on the BAnQ site are at the bottom of the list on our Wikipedia page.

HD: All that was built up day by day, out of necessity. There was also the networking, which Hélène had initiated at the women’s film festival. Suddenly, we discovered videos made by women at the community television station in Jonquière. And by Johanne and Lynda in Lévis. There were also those in Montréal, at Vidéographe and GIV. We suddenly became aware of all sorts of productions, which we started to collect. That’s how we started doing distribution, gradually.

LR: All of that happened because of light video technology. It allowed us to express ourselves and to carve out a place for ourselves in society. Of course we wanted to create, but another big part of it was the sharing. So that’s how the screenings and the festivals came about. It was all linked together. It was a difficult time for young people who were trying to find work. But there were government programs we could apply for, such as Canada Works, Perspectives Jeunesse, Programme Initiatives Locales . . . We benefitted from those for several years.

JM: Nicole, we haven’t talked much about your sister Louise’s involvement.