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First Fiction Fridays: From the Archives of Vidéo Populaire
Emerging in the mid-1970s from the post-Centenary primordial soup—that potent mix of nationalism, Marxism, feminism, pacifism and, in la belle province, a wallop of Quebecois identity politics— the (fictional) Montreal video production group Vidéo Populaire was inspired and repeatedly almost undone by the creative tension between art and agitprop.
Anne Golden is an independent curator and writer whose programs have been presented at Musée National du Québec, Edges Festival and Queer City Cinema, among others. She has written for FUSE and Canadian Theatre Review. She contributed a chapter to the book Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade. Golden has participated in numerous panels on curatorial practices, independent distribution and, more recently, horror films. She is Artistic Director of Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV), and currently teaches in the Media Arts Department of John Abbott College. Golden has made twenty videos including Fat Chance (1994), Big Girl Town (1998), From the Archives of Vidéo Populaire (2007), and After the Experiment (2014).
Why you need to read this now:
Emerging in the mid-1970s from the post-Centenary primordial soup—that potent mix of nationalism, Marxism, feminism, pacifism and, in la belle province, a wallop of Quebecois identity politics— the (fictional) Montreal video production group Vidéo Populaire was inspired and repeatedly almost undone by the creative tension between art and agitprop. Videos for the revolution. Forty years after the group’s inception, with VidPop’s history now shrouded in myth (there’s a murder, ghosts, inexplicable phenomena, notorious blowups), the author interviews 38 people associated with the group, including its four founders, some of whom no longer speak to one another. Their spliced-together transcripts tell the story of Vidéo Populaire and in the process bring into question the nature of this archive referenced in the title. In its style (pure voice), narrative arc and all-in commitment to the book’s conceit, Vidéo Populaire brings to mind Michael Winter’s The Death of Donna Whalen.What other people are saying about From the Archives of Vidéo Populaire:“A smart addition to the genre of documentary fiction.” —Jade Colbert, Globe & Mail* * *Thank you to Pedlar Press, especially Beth Follett, for sharing this new work in the genre of documentary fiction.
