"Les Prostituées de Lyon Parlent" 1975

Carole Roussopoulos – Vidéo Out 

Born 1945, Lausanne, Switzerland. Died 2009, Valais, Switzerland. 

 

"Les Prostituées de Lyon Parlent" 1975  

video, 46 mins  

(5-minute excerpt from the video) 

 

Courtesy of the Centre Audiovisual Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, France. 

 

 

"Les Prostituées de Lyon Parlent" was made by the French video collective Vidéo Out, which the Swiss filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos founded with her husband Paul Roussopoulos. The video documents a group of sex workers during their occupation of Saint-Nizier church in Lyon in June of 1975, where they recount their demands and their reasons for entering the sex industry. The occupation is generally considered to signal the beginning of the sex workers’ rights movement in Europe.  

 

"Les Prostituées de Lyon Parlent" was shot in black-and-white at low resolution. The video shifts in and out of focus, as well as between the interior and exterior of the church, juxtaposing interviews with the sex workers inside the church with the banners and crowd outside. The sex workers emphasise the fact that they see prostitution as a legitimate form of work. Providing for their children is frequently cited by the women in the film as a reason for undertaking sex work. They point out that in comparison to other forms of work, sex work offers better wages and the opportunity to both provide for their children financially, as well as the flexible hours required to care for them. For a week, Vidéo Out recorded interviews with the sex workers in the mornings and then screened the recordings on the outside of the church in the afternoon. Television monitors were embedded in the exterior walls of the church, so that the sex workers’ message could be delivered to the public. In this way, the video collective played a significant role in facilitating the activism of the sex workers.