Our missions

 

Disseminate, preserve and enrich audiovisual collections

The Center’s primary mission continues its creators’ aims: disseminate, preserve and add to the very rich audio-visual documents, mainly composed of videos involving the history of women, their battles and their creations.

Disseminating and enhancing or enriching the archive first involves showing the films and attending festivals and meetings. The archive catalogue and film extracts, as well as the data base also have to be accessible to a wide audience on line. Moreover, researchers have to be able to view films at the Center. Lastly, it must be possible to rent and sell films or extracts. .

Preserving means fighting the ravages of time and being up on technological advances by transposing documents made with obsolete methods to long-lasting systems. This part of the work is carried out in relation with institutions like the Bibliothèque de France and the Forum des Images in Paris.


Enhancing or enriching the catalog
is an ongoing aspect of the Center’s work by being in contact with today’s creation and integrating new productions that their directors or creators ask the Center to disseminate and distribute. Enriching is also a question of filming and recording feminist events..

Read an image; fight stereotypes and suggest alternatives

This work has to do with fighting discrimination linked to gender and sexual orientation and uses a variety of audiovisual documents, analyzing stereotypes that they carry and suggesting alternative ways of seeing.
This work can be suggested by the Center’s team or can come about through other organizations and institutions. Each type of audience involved – schools, associations, activists, prisons, businesses – receives a made-to-order program.

Participate in contemporary creation

The Simone de Beauvoir Audio-visual Center values working with artists and has created the collective Travelling féministe. The underlying idea is to promote the archives by making them available to artists who want to use them for inspiration. This collective regularly organizes research workshops and seminars open to artists, researchers, militants, academics and those who love them.