Maso and Miso Go Boating

Delphine Seyrig and her comrades give the misogynistic elites of French culture a proper roasting. Russian premiere as part of the Collective Cinema Festival.

Maso et Miso vont en bateau
1976, Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig, Nadja Ringart, Ioana Wieder

France
55 minutes, French with Russian subtitles

Documentary 

The UN declared 1975 the Year of the Woman. A couple of days before its end, French television aired a special episode of a programme by popular presenter Bernard Pivot. Its title read: “The Year of the Woman: Thank God! It’s Over,”. The guests included the Secretary of State for women’s rights, Françoise Giroud, as well as exclusively male experts and officials. Giroud saw nothing wrong with their sexist jokes and questions—on the contrary, she laughed and went along with them.

Still from Maso and Miso Go Boating, 1976

Maso et Miso vont en bateau combines playful editing, humor, and repetition to disrupt state-televised speech. Such disruptions recall the Situationist detournement of cinema.

—Kaira M. Cabañas, Artforum

The founders of the independent women’s video collective Les Insoumuses did not find what they saw amusing. Armed with video equipment, they carried out a satirical deconstruction of the programme. Some simple editing techniques were enough for them to plant a bomb of vicious and ruthless irony at the very foundations of patriarchy—the sort of irony that even the greatest male directors could never have dreamed of.