Dossier

LR: We inaugurated the amphitheatre and the entertainment venues. We were the first group to hold an event there. I remember choreographer Dena Davida’s performance. It was phenomenal. Dena was the director of Tangente and she came to put on a dance performance. During the choreography, she would pick up a man on one side of the room and carry him on her back to the other side. Then she would pick up another one and carry him to another spot. It was a performance unlike any we’d never seen.

NR: We also inaugurated a space where people could watch videos on demand, with headphones. I remember seeing a photo of my sister Josée watching a video.

LR: You could walk around the installation in the corridor that played excerpts from Vidéo Femmes’ productions. Tous les jours, tous les jours, tous les jours was the first one we showed. And at the end, you could go into the back room and ask for any of the titles we had available for distribution.

JF: In addition to Dena Davida’s performance, there was also Geneviève Letarte’s. La Chambre Blanche also presented some works. We had begun to open it up to other art forms. In those days, we were grouping together and inviting other women to join us.

JM: Wow, it must have been quite something to see all of that!

HD: We did the same thing with V-Tape in Toronto, with Lisa Steele. That’s how those types of exchanges were made. We also went to France.

JF: While we’re on the subject of New York, I’d like to mention that one year we went to the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, which was at the forefront of video creation at the time. We did an internship in special effects, where we learned a lot of things we put into practice afterwards, such as in Nicole’s productions.

NG: For Je voudrais voir la mer, the dancers were my two sisters, and that’s where I had worked on the dancers with the fish inlays. It was a special effect that was impossible to achieve in our editing room!

LB: I worked with Louise a lot. She was on the camera and I did the sound recording, so we naturally became a team. Our biggest project was C’est pas parce que c’est un château qu’on est des princesses, about women in prison. We gave it that title because the Gomin prison in Quebec City was located in a former house with turrets, so it looked like a castle! For an entire year, Louise and I showed films in the prison. We brought the TV and the VCR with us, all of that. We wanted to get to know the women and build up their trust.

JF: At that time, we also moved into a bigger location at 56 Saint-Pierre Street in the Old Port, with Bande Vidéo. The distribution team had grown to four people!

JM: On a more delicate matter: What was your financial situation like at that time? In 1985-1986?

LR: There were federal and provincial employment programs for young people. You had to be younger than 35. At that time, there wasn’t a lot of work for young people. Those programs allowed us to be paid for a certain number of hours per week, and then we received unemployment insurance for the rest. We went from program to program. We didn’t make a lot of money.

NR: We also collaborated with private studios, who let us use their editing tables, among other things, but we had to go there at night, when there were no clients around. We did things like that. We managed. We also had some of our own equipment, and we helped create La Bande Vidéo, which grouped together several organizations to share equipment.

JM: I also remember reading in the archives that there was a video association—I can’t remember its acronym—that often made requests to the government to have video recognized as a separate art form, because the subsidies often went to cinema productions. Video didn’t necessarily qualify, and so the budgets were unevenly distributed. Did you take part in that?

JF: Oh yes. There were a lot of meetings with other groups in Montréal, a lot of consultations. We also held meetings on the topic of regionalization. It looks like not much has changed since then! People still have to fight to have documentaries and productions that were made outside of Montréal acknowledged!

JM: These days, you hear a lot about documentaries, and how they’re under-valued. Do you feel things were different at that time? Were documentary films given more importance, or has it always been a bit of a battle to have the genre recognized?

JF: I should mention the Montréal International Documentary Festival (RIDM), which was launched in 1997 and helped bring about a resurgence and recognition of auteur documentaries.

NG: Last year, a group of documentary filmmakers lobbied the SODEC to increase its documentary budget to 15% of its production budget. That percentage had gotten significantly lower over the past few years. And we still have to fight with broadcasters, because there aren’t enough time slots for documentaries. Also, television is much more strictly formatted, and they impose time limits on you. When you sell one to television, you always have to redo the edits and create a new version. For Prisons sans barreaux, there’s the original 73-minute version, and there’s a 48-minute version we made for TV5-Unis.

JM: Was there really a big difference in video in the 1980s? Formats for television? More amateurish formats?

NG: More or less. I sold Alice au pays des gros nez, which I had made over ten years. I had started with my small camera. It included all the formats. It aired on Radio-Canada. It depended. They would tell us we needed to use such-and-such particular equipment, but nowadays people make films using their telephones, so . . .

JM: Yes, that’s very true. I was just wondering if they had made a distinction at that time, as a way of saying, “We don’t want your film because the format is not acceptable . . .” as sort of an excuse!

LB: But when they did want the film . . . Clara, d’amour et de révolte was 36 minutes long. Radio-Canada bought it. They didn’t make me edit it down at all. When it was in their interests, they made it work. There was a nice article about it in the Devoir.

NR: Our festival was an incredible gathering place. Many filmmakers came to Quebec City. They were happy to finally meet each other and talk in person. One of my favourite memories is of when Sally Potter, the British director, came and led a workshop called Genius. The participants had to get into pairs and face each other, and they had to tell each other about a moment in their lives when they had demonstrated genius.

JM: To help our readers better understand, how was the festival structured?

JF: The whole team was involved. A planning committee came up with the programming and the overall look of the festival. That was dependent on availability, because some people were working on films. The festival always seemed to come back around so quickly. As soon as one edition was over, we had to write up the reports for the funding bodies, and then we almost immediately had to start applying for funding for the following year, so while we were still returning tapes from one year’s festival, we had already established the programming for the next.

LR: My role was more logistical. I wrote up the agreements with the Gabrielle Roy Library, whose amphitheatre and adjacent rooms we booked. I coordinated the use of the space and the allotment of the technicians, the arrival of the equipment, the technical installation, etc. I took care of that type of thing. Telvibec, from whom we rented and/or purchased filming equipment during the year, often provided us with equipment free of charge for the festival.

NR: In 1986, I worked on coordination with Martine Sauvageau. I don’t know if you remember that. She was from outside of Vidéo Femmes. Nicole was the executive producer, Lynda was the technical manager, and the rest of the team members had the title of “precious collaborator.”

LG: By then I was with Les Folles Alliées. I wasn’t in Vidéo Femmes anymore, but as audience members, we always looked forward to the festival. We wanted to attend every night. The Folles Alliées almost always prepared a show for the closing night.

JM: In terms of funding, to hold a festival like that and invite people from abroad, what kinds of subsidies did you receive?

LB: The funding for the plane tickets of the filmmakers from abroad, and for transporting the films, came from Délégations du Québec.

JF: [Looking at her notes] I have some of the numbers here. For example, in 1984, the Institut Québécois du Cinéma gave us $9,000.

NG: It later became the SODEC.

JF: The Quebec Ministry of Cultural Affairs: $8,500. The Canada Council for the Arts: it doesn’t say. The Minister for the Status of Women: $3,500. The Ministry of Recreation, Hunting and Fishing: $2,000. There was a production, wasn’t there, Lise? What was it again?

LB: Bella, moucheuse de nature.

NR: My mother put so much energy into writing up the grant applications all the time. And it had to be done every year.

JM: In the 1980s, you also participated in international events. How did you end up going to Japan in 1986?

JF: We knew Michael Goldberg, a videographer from Montréal, who had worked for the Canada Council for the Arts. He later moved to Japan, and we had kept in touch with him.

NG: Michael used to organize screenings of Canadian videos in Japan. One year, he showed some of Vidéo Femmes’ productions, and a group that distributed women’s films showed interest in us. They approached the Quebec Delegation to Tokyo, and that’s how we came to be invited to deliver video workshops to women in 1986, and also to do a small tour to present several of our works in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hiroshima. They had selected twelve of our productions to be translated into Japanese. I was supposed to go with Helen, but she got sick at the last minute, so I went with Louise, who had just gotten back from Colombia with Lynda.

NG: The Japanese had translated our productions, but when we got there, they had one left to do: Une nef... et ses sorcières. So we filmed the actor who did the dubbing of our films. It was a bit surreal!

HD: In France there was a small group in Nantes, and two women named Catherine invited us there a few times. We don’t know what ended up happening to them, because they didn’t receive any funding, a bit like us in our early days. There were a lot of things like that that came and went, that would be part of the circuit for two or three years and then disappear. And of course, we also collaborated with the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival for several years.

NR: During those years, we also organized tours within Quebec. We split up the team: I was in the group that did the Lower St. Lawrence, the Gaspé Peninsula, and the Matapedia Valley. Another group went to the Saguenay, so we covered several regions.

JF: In 1983 and 1984, we wanted to experiment with form. Françoise Dugré and I made an experimental film called C’est une bonne journée, which was very atmospheric. It was a ten-minute short film.

“Today is a good day. I put on my moustache, my asphalt mouth” [direct translation]. It was a bit sad. There were also some scenes in a bathtub. That film was shown at several festivals, including Vidéo 84, which was organized by Andrée Duchaine. There was also one of Helen’s videos. Afterwards, Françoise moved to the Bic, which is the region I’m originally from. So we kept in touch. We sent each other books by Marguerite Duras, and all sorts of other things to read. She won a few contracts with Radio-Québec Rimouski, who had equipment and an editing room.

We asked each other, “Should we try a fiction film? So we wrote Le sourire d’une parfumeuse, which we mostly filmed in Quebec City, as well as a bit in the Lower St. Lawrence region. It was a pretty big job. Nicole did the cinematography and Pierre Pelletier did the lighting. We filmed a sequence at the now-defunct Cineplex Odeon in Quebec City, with about thirty extras wandering around in the women’s washrooms, because the character was a perfumer who worked in the women’s washrooms. We also filmed some scenes at the train station in Lévis, with the train and all the smoke, because the character was going to the Bic to be with her mother, in her final moments. Marie Aubut played the perfumer. She had appeared in Tous les jours, tous les jours, tous les jours, and she later became the singer Marie-Carmen. Sylvie Tremblay wrote some beautiful songs for the film.

I always alternated between personal projects and editing contracts. I enjoyed working on other people’s projects because my only goal was to make the best film possible, to show the best scenes possible. It gave me a kind of distance that you can’t really get when you’re working on your own images or scripts. It helped me a lot in later years.

JM: Why did you decide to make a fiction film about that subject?

JF: We wanted to make fiction. After we made C’est une bonne journée, we felt like exploring our imaginations, constructing images, trying that kind of writing, challenging ourselves in that way. Before getting behind the camera, I had been an actress for several years. And my mother had recently passed away. I wanted to talk about that. We had our literature, and we wanted to create an atmospheres and a poetic feeling of being both in the Bic and in Quebec City.

JM : Comment avez-vous choisi les groupes et les chanteuses ? Parce que, il y a à la fois des artistes comme Marjo, Diane Dufresne, Belgazou ou encore Louise Portal, mais aussi des groupes comme Blue Oil et Wonderbrass, comment avez-vous approché toutes ces personnalités ?

NG : On cherchait des vedettes, ça c’était normal, Marjo, Nanette etc… Mais on cherchait aussi des groupes de filles. Il n’y en avait pas tellement et elles étaient peu connues. Il y avait les Wonder Brass à Montréal, qui s’appelaient comme ça parce qu’il y avait beaucoup de saxophones, d’instruments à vent dans le groupe. Blue Oil, c’était trois filles, vraiment des rockeuses qui se produisaient dans les bars.

JM : Oui tout à fait, puis c’est une autre vie artistique, c’est ça qui est génial. Comme on n’a pas beaucoup de traces de ces groupes, t’as vraiment capté des choses inédites, qu’aujourd’hui on se dit, wow, c’est fou d’avoir ça !

LB: Louise Giguère was on camera, Martine Sauvageau was on sound, and we had gotten our hands on a microphone. I did the interview. We had bought a bottle of champagne and some roses. When I went to pick her up in a taxi and she got in and sat next to me, I could have died! She was my idol!

NG: When I went to meet you at the airport, you were holding the cassette!

LB: Mission accomplished! I had it! I’ll remember that moment for the rest of my life!

NG: I did the editing for On fait toutes du show business. Sylvie came too a few times, and we recorded links with texts she had written with her sister. We then sold the film to Radio-Canada. They aired it on Les Beaux Dimanches, the popular Sunday evening arts and culture program. That too was a first for Vidéo Femmes! But to have it aired on TV, we had to pay for the rights to all the songs, as well as the musicians and artists. We had just hired Régine Tremblay, who worked on that, and we did a lot of travelling with that film.

ST: We went to New York, Paris, Rimouski . . .

NG: We appeared on a lot of radio and TV shows to talk about that movie.

ST: I would love to see a sequel. That would be amazing. They’re all still alive! I recently saw Louise Portal, Diane Dufresne, Nanette, Marjo . . . They’re all still around!

LB: Nicole, if you make a sequel, I’m in charge of contacting Diane Dufresne! [Laughs]

NG: Our collaborators Alain Dupras and Pierre Pelletier were there too, along with several other members of Vidéo Femmes. It was a big team compared to the one for On fait toutes du show business, where there had only been three of us! I then shot another video, or I should say musical film, for the song “Histoire infâme” by Louise Portal.

I had met Louise Portal during the filming of On fait toutes du show business. She was an actor, but she also sang at that time. She contacted me one day and said, “I have this song, ‘Histoire infâme,’ which is nine minutes long, and I’d like to make a video for it.” The record companies didn’t make videos for songs that long. And the song was about the history of women, so it wasn’t necessarily going to be a big seller! She said, “Do you think Vidéo Femmes would be interested in doing it?” I thought it was a good idea, so Johanne and I got to work on the screenplay. It also gave us a chance to dig through the archives on women’s history. We financed the production as a musical film rather than a music video, and we shot it in the big NFB studio in Montréal, which was a great studio at the time.

NG: It was also shown at the Banff Festival. Marcel Jean told me he was on the jury, and that the film had won the Quebec-Alberta Prize.

JM: After the release of On fait toutes du show business, Je voudrais voir la mer, and Histoire infâme, did you keep working with music?

NG: I also did Les femmes me touchent, based on a song by Jocelyne Corbeil of Les Folles Alliées. It was my last production with Vidéo Femmes. After that, I did a number of music shows at Musique Plus, where I worked when I moved to Montréal.

JM: I’d now like to talk about the exodus to Montréal, which started in 1986 or 1987. What was it like to lose some of your members?

JF: Helen, Michèle, Nicole, and Louise all moved to Montréal at that time. Nathalie left, and Lucie too. Françoise was already living in the Bic. It was a kind of exodus.

LB: An exodus! I felt abandoned! [Laughs]

JF: Lynda and I were still there! [Laughs]

LB: But you left later, and I stayed until the very end! Until we merged with Spirafilm in 2015.

JF: I left in 1997.

NG: I moved to Montréal in 1986, but I still worked on a few more productions with Vidéo Femmes afterwards. Histoire infâme in 1988 was a Vidéo Femmes production, and so was Alice au pays des gros nez in 2003.

LR: It was hard, because there was more going on in Montréal than in Quebec City. However, our distribution service continued to grow. I couldn’t leave until I had taught and trained a new production team! So I set up a video lab project over eight months in 1997-1998. I had a lot of support, both from the girls at Vidéo Femmes and from the whole film and video community. People lent us cameras, microphones, booms, lighting, and even rooms to hold the workshops in, as well as editing equipment, or they rented it to us at low prices. I wanted to do that so that there would be new recruits at Vidéo Femmes, but also so that women could become professionals more quickly than we had. We’d had very little help learning how to use video. We had all taught ourselves, and I didn’t want the new people to have to start from scratch like we had. I wanted them to be able to go further, faster.

I have an article here from the Gazette des femmes [reading the title and an excerpt of the article]. “‘A Festival to Cry At,’ by Marie-Thérèse Bournival, published in September-October 1988. It is with great regret that we see this festival come to an end. The women of Vidéo Femmes, who were the driving force behind this event, have decided to devote their energies to directing, producing, and distributing films, rather than to convincing various government agencies of the need to subsidize their festival. [Louder] ‘We weren’t asking for it to be easy, we just wanted it to be possible,’ said Lise Bonenfant and Johanne Fournier. ‘Each year, we burned ourselves out organizing the festival, because we believed in it. But we’re done, we’re no longer going to play the game. The world’s oldest festival of women’s films and videos is taking its final bow.’”

LB: Oh, the final night was so beautiful! Christine Boilat [the pianist for Les Folles Alliées] was on piano, and we were all gathered around it singing the songs from our films.

JM: What was the public’s reaction? The people who attended the festival? Were they upset?

JF: Of course!

LB: The end of that festival created a void in Quebec City. It was the end of a chapter, of an era, even.

JM: Is there anything you would like to say to conclude our discussion of that period? The way I see it, the 1980s were an extremely pivotal period for you, with many successes and achievements.

NG: Those were our biggest production years. We were a great team, a big team that worked almost full-time.

LR: Years of affirmation, of becoming professionals. They were exciting, prolific years.