Leaving August 1

Directed by Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig | 29 mins | 1976
A crucial piece of early feminist video art from the Les Insoumuses collective that documents a staged reading of would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas’s notorious misandrist call-to-arms of the same name—the acronym stands for “Society for Cutting Up Men”—in which readers Seyrig and Roussopolous emphatically recite Solanas’s treatise on the tragic consequences of “vagina envy,” then unavailable in France, while, between them, a television set flickers with news images that testify to the ubiquity of rampant violence throughout the male-dominated world.