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ABSTRACT
Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV) is a Montreal-based distribution company “dedicated to the promotion of works made by women (in the most inclusive definition).” Founded in 1975, for almost five decades, GIV has supported a vast range of video works by and for women from Quebec and Canada, as well as from an international context. Over the years, GIV has promoted its catalogue to different communities through curated programs screened locally or at national and international festivals. More recently, this mandate has found a new venue and greater amplitude due to the use of two streaming platforms, Vimeo and VUCAVU. In this essay, I explain GIV’s recent discourse on the use of streaming platforms as reflective of the organization’s investment in video technology as a form of feminist intervention since the 1970s.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to the members of GIV for according me their time and believing in my research through their continuous enthusiasm and support. I want to thank my supervisor Professor Rosanna Maule, the members of my doctoral committee, all my colleagues at in the Film Studies and History departments at Concordia University, and the anonymous reviewers that helped me improving this article with their intellectual rigour.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. To conduct interviews for this research, I received ethical approval from Concordia University Human Research Ethics Committee (certification number: 30012097). Participants provided consent by signing a form.
2. As discussed by (Balsom Citation2016), Vdrome is a curated online platform initiated in 2013 by Milan-based art curators that cyclically makes available a selection of works by contemporary artists. Arts.film is a “virtual art centre” (FIFA website) spawned in 2021 by the Montreal-based Festival International du Film sur l’Art (FIFA), which, in line with the festival’s mandate, streams films on art and media arts year-round in Canada. The collective Arnait Video Productions, founded in 1991, produces films and videos that focus on the articulation of gender issues from the perspectives of Inuit women. Some of the works produced by this collective are available on the online portal Isuma.tv (MacKenzie and Westerståhl Stenport Citation2016). Women Make Movies periodically offers programs of films from its catalogue to watch for free online in North America. The feminist film journal Another Gaze has created a free streaming service called Another Screen, which showcases programs of rare films deemed of interest for feminist film criticism (Another Screen, “About”).
3. A case in point is OTV|Opent Television, the “nonprofit platform for intersectional television” founded in 2015 by scholar Aymar Jean Christian and Elijah McKinnon. Conceived to support Chicago-based independent media producers and artists by providing them with assistance at various phases of production and an online digital space for the distribution and exhibition of their work, OTV showcases independent web series targeted to minority sexual and racial communities, especially in Chicago. The creation of this original streaming platform originated within Christian’s larger research project on “open television,” defined as Internet-based television distribution opposed to traditional “legacy television”—broadcast, cable, or premium networks. (Christian Citation2018, 20).
4. The notion of remediation is indebted to Bolter and Grusin’s theorization of the term as “the representation of one medium in another” (2000, 45) to describe in particular digital media’s relation to their analogue counterparts (2000). In the case of streaming platforms, the term is used by Brunow to stress the ways in which archival audiovisual material is made available against the obsolescence of films and electronic video with the explicit aim of diversifying an established cultural memory.
5. The “Quiet Revolution” or revolution tranquille has come to define a period of modernization of Québec during the 1960s.
6. The first portable video recording system was the Portapak, available at the NFB since the late 1960s and then commercialized in 1967.
7. Vidéographe was founded in 1968 by Robert Forget and became an independent organization in 1973 (MacKenzie Citation2004, 13).
8. Other video groups mentioned by Mackenzie are Vidéo-Vehicule (founded in 1976 and which later became PRIM), Vidéo Tiers-Monde, Cinéma Libre, GRAAV, and Maximage.
9. The first deconstructs dominant bourgeois ideology conveyed in mass media; the second documents the international meeting of women’s health centres held in Rome in 1977. Both videos are available on VUCAVU at https://vucavu.com/fr/rechercher?yearrangeid=6&distributorid=16463&orderby=date.
10. La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, https://www.lacentrale.org/.
11. Marchessaults mentions a number of autonomous women’s groups, including Théâtre des Cuisines, The Women’s Health Centre of the Plateau Mont-Royal, the Feminist Documentation Centre, and Les Éditions du Remue-Ménage.
12. Translated from French by the author.
13. Progressively, Vimeo has introduced and implemented its technological protocols in the direction of fostering quality content delivery. These technologies include 4K, adaptive bitrate streaming, 360-degree video support, high-dynamic-range video, and AV1.
14. The SaaS subscription licenses web-based software for video creation, editing, and broadcasting (Jaakola Citation2020). This is in contrast to YouTube, the most widely used video sharing site, which is free for creators, but generates its revenue through advertising.
15. Sangini (Nancy Nicol, 2015); And Still We Rise (Nancy Nicol and Richard Lusimbo, 2015); Dancing For Change (Shahrzad Arshadi, 2015).
16. Users on VUCAVU can choose between three types of account: a free account that allows access to screening programs on rotation; a rental account that allows the rental of videos according to different fees for 48 hours; and a professional account, that allows licensed professionals 3 months temporary access to all works on the platform, or researchers 1- or 3-month unlimited access through a subscription fee of $15 to $25.
17. In 2019, VUCAVU has implemented its scope through the “VUCAVU Expanded” program (VUCAVU Citation2022), whose main advantage is the possibility offered to “programming partners” to host their own curated programs on the platform (without necessarily drawing on the collection of the platform itself). Moreover, in particular since the pandemic, VUCAVU has made works from its catalogue “accessible for remote teaching and in educational library databases” (VUCAVU Citation2022, 8).
18. Treasure Hill is a squatter settlement in Taipei, Taiwan, whose spatial organization, symbiotically integrated with the natural environment, and social cohesion were exploited to transform the illegal settlement into a co-living artist village, which ultimately led to the departure of many residents.
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Ylenia Olibet
YleniaOlibet is a PhD Candidate in Film and Moving Images Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. Her research is funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et Culture.