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News:

Women of the Silent Screen Film Festival presents For the Soul of Rafael

(Gaston Studios, 1920). Director: Harry Garson. Screenwriter: Dorothy Yost. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Art director: Ben Carre.

This newly discovered feature film and border subject written by Dorothy Yost, one of the most neglected woman film pioneers, is based on the 1906 novel by Marah Ellis Ryan. Actress Clara Kimball Young stars as Marta Raquel Estevan, an aristocratic Spanish girl just out of a convent facing an arranged marriage by her guardian, Dona Luisa Artega.

The original nitrate tinted positive print was preserved by AFI at L’Immagine Ritrovata Film Lab, Bologna, Italy, with a grant from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund, New York Women in Film & Television, Inc. (2003), and with AFI 1991 Challenge Grant funds.

Date: Thursday, Oct 10, 2024
Time: 4 PM
Location: Jacob Burns Film Center, 364 Manville Rd, Pleasantville, NY 10570

RSVP

Revisiting Films by Women/Chicago ’74 with Patricia Erens and B. Ruby Rich

At the center of the committee that organized the Films by Women/Chicago ‘74 festival were two of Chicago’s most formidable film scholars and programmers—Patricia Erens, then a doctoral candidate in film at Northwestern University, and B. Ruby Rich, assistant director of the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The panel they convened—like the program they helped envision—was far-reaching, fractious, and deeply engaged with debates central to the feminist movement in the 1970s.

Revisiting the Films by Women festival after decades spent transforming film studies as educators, authors, and editors, Rich and Erens will appear in conversation alongside a selection of short films by women filmmakers of the 1970s. The six films they have chosen for this program, ranging from documentary to animation to personal and experimental cinema, collectively explore the questions of sexuality, intimacy, self-image, family, and creativity which animated Films by Women/Chicago ‘74 and remain pertinent today. The series includes two films preserved by the WFPF. Betty Tells Her Story by Liane Brandon and Home Movies by Jan Oxenberg.

Program includes:

Chow Fun (Sally Cruikshank, 1972, 4 min, 16mm, print courtesy of the Sally Cruikshank and Jon Davison Collection at the Academy Film Archive)

Home Movies (Jan Oxenberg, 1973, 12 min, digital, NYWIFT’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund)

Betty Tells Her Story (Liane Brandon, 1972, 20 min, digital, restoration by NYWIFT’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund)

Women (Coni Beeson, 1974, 13 min, digital)

Women and Children at Large (Freude, 1973, 7 min, 16mm, print courtesy of the Pacific Film Archive)

The Stripper (Siew-Hwa Beh, 1971, 1 min, digital)

Learn more!

UK Screening: Women’s Film Preservation Fund presents: Liane Brandon

Watershed in Bristol, UK will team up with the NYWIFT Women’s Film Preservation Fund to present a trio of shorts by Liane Brandon, one of the first American indie women filmmakers to emerge from the Second Wave Feminist Film Women’s Movement.

Award-winning independent filmmaker, photographer and University of Massachusetts/Amherst Professor Emerita Liane Brandon was also a co-founder of New Day Films, the nationally known cooperative that pioneered in the distribution of feminist/social issue films and videos.

The films screening include:

Anything You Want To Be (1971, 8 mins)
A teenager’s humorous collision with gender role stereotypes and one of the first independent films of the early women’s movement to explore the external pressures and the more subtle internal pressures a girl faces in finding her identity.

Sometimes I Wonder Who I Am (1972, 5 mins)
This poignant brief portrait of a young mother grew out of the experiences of a group of women who found – as they haltingly expressed to one another their feelings of emptiness, anger, and fear – that they were not alone.

Betty Tells Her Story (1972, 20 mins)
In two continuous takes, a woman sitting in a chair tells a story about the purchase of a dress — twice and the contrast between the two stories reveals her deeper feeling about herself and her place in the world.

Learn more!

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The WFPF was recently featured in an in-depth interview with Production Hub. Co-chairs Kirsten Larvick and Erika Yeomans discussed the 1994 founding of the WFPF, its work to date, recently restored projects, and the importance of presevation.

Read the interview.

The Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television presents NEW YORK THROUGH HER LENS at the Jacob Burns Film Center’s

RESTORED & REDISCOVERED: A FILM PRESERVATION FESTIVAL

New York Through Her Lens, highlights four films shot in and around New York City, at key locations central to the films’ subjects and stories. These works utilize a variety of approaches including animation, dance and performance, and single, hand-held camera storytelling techniques, all of which expand on the documentary form. Preserved with support from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund and its partners.

Date: Thursday, May 16, 2024
Time: 4 PM
Location: Jacob Burns Film Center, 364 Manville Rd, Pleasantville, NY 10570

Use promo code ARCHIVE for a $5 discount off the non-member JBFC price to New York Through Her Lens (up to 2 tickets). Check burnsfilmcenter.org to learn more!

Buy Tickets

Introduction by Women’s Film Preservation Fund Co-Chairs Kirsten Larvick and Erika Yeomans. Post-screening Q&A with YUDIE (1974) director MIRRA BANK

See the full roster of films here

Kiss Grandmama Goodbye 4K Restoration Premieres at BAM in April 2024

Debra Robinson’s touching coming of age drama Kiss Grandmama Goodbye (1980) and her beloved documentary about black women in comedy, I Be Done Been Was Is (1984) will screen on April 24th, 2024, at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) with the filmmaker in attendance.

Date: Wednesday, April 24 2024
Time: 7 PM
Location: BAM Peter J. Sharp Building – 30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn
General Admission: $16 (get $5 off with discount code GRANDMAMA)

Buy Tickets

About the Films

A midwestern African-American community during the early 1960s provides the background for Kiss Grandmama Goodbye as a ten-year-old girl, Gail, resolves the death of her good friend and mentor… Grandmama. The script was adapted from a short story by Terry McMillan. This early work of Robinson’s tenderly explores multigenerational relationships and addresses the lives of Black people living in the Midwest before widespread integration. Beautiful new 4K restoration preserved by the Academy Film Archive and the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television.

In her feature debut, I Be Done Been Was Is Robinson follows iconic black women comedians including Marsha Warfield, Rhonda Hansome, Alice Arthur and Jane Galvin James as they navigate the male dominated stand-up industry and deal with the stereotypes surrounding them as African-American women comedians. Robinson remembers, “During the time I developed the idea, I was working out my path as an African-American woman filmmaker. The road seemed to be one of pioneering and invention. Through the documentary, I was able to find my voice, and the comediennes collectively expressed my perceptions when they spoke about their lives.” Digitally restored by the Academy Film Archive.

“One Hand Don’t Clap” Screening at BAM

The beautiful new 4K restoration of NYWIFT Member Kavery Kaul’s award-winning 1988 documentary One Hand Don’t Clap chronicling the titans of calypso and soca music will enjoy its one week run opening March 8th, 2024, at BAM.

March 8th, 7:00PM screening with introduction by Consul General of Trinidad & Tobago, J. Andre Laveau and post Q&A with filmmaker Kavery Kaul.

March 9th 7:00PM screening includes post Q&A with filmmaker Kavery Kaul.

Buy Tickets

NYWIFT members use discount code 1HAND

Get swept away by the infectious rhythms and exhilarating irreverence of calypso and soca music in this wonderful documentary from filmmaker Kavery Kaul. Legendary artists Grandmaster Lord Kitchener — who made calypso a hit in London — and Calypso Rose—the first woman to break through in this traditionally male sphere — lead audiences from New York recording studios, and the streets of Brooklyn, to the magic of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. There, the festivities culminate with the fiercely contested annual competition between top calypso singers for the title Monarch of the Year.

Digitally restored by the Academy Film Archive and the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television and distributed by Kino Lorber, One Hand Don’t Clap reflects the legacy of a vast West Indian-American population, the incredible entrepreneurial growth of their music industry in the US, and their ongoing ties to the traditions that flourish in the Caribbean.

“seductively rhythmic and poetic…Not just about music and musicians, but an examination of cultures. A credit to the film and its creators.”
~ New York Newsday

Learn more.

To Save and ProjecT: The 20th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation screened Mirra Bank’s Spirit to Spirit:Nikki Giovanni

BAM March 8th-15th, Kavery Kaul’s One Hand Don’t Clap

BAM April 24th, 2024, Premiere Preservation screening of Deborah Robinson’s Kiss Grandmama Goodbye.

The Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) of New York Women in Film & Television
is thrilled to be part of the 3rd Annual Sag Harbor Cinema Festival of Preservation.

Martin Scorsese presents
The Sag Harbor Cinema Festival of Preservation
November 17th-20th 2023

Sag Harbor Cinema’s Festival of Preservation –the East End’s only Festival dedicated to preserving film and its culture– returns for a third year. Pre-Code comedy, classic western, Salvador Dalí’s collaborations with Hitchcock and Walt Disney, pioneering women filmmakers of the silent era, Warner Bros’ roaring Thirties, Mexican musical melodrama, Senegalese visionary Djibril Diop Mambéty and a live presentation of William Castle’s bloodcurdling The Tingler are some of the highlights of this year’s program, together with a special exhibit of rare posters on the Cinema’s third floor, a wide variety of guests and the Preservation Panel & Brunch, featuring archivists from the major studios as well as TCM, and a presentation by the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of NYWIFT. The Sag Harbor Cinema’s Festival of Preservation will be a 4 day event celebrating cinematic history, women’s role in the film industry and the ongoing commitment from film archives and preservationists to keep cinema alive for future movie lovers.

2022:

Women’s film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film and Television presents

“Home Movie Night ” streaming Metrograph at Home

October 15th-31st 2022

Learn more

“Home Movie Night illuminates the creative and entrepreneurial spirit of women in cinema, showcasing a diverse range of home movies and amateur narratives, which have been preserved by the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women In Film & Television and edited together into one unique reel. The program shows women capturing the times in which they lived with humor and inventiveness. Highlights include the orphan recording at a ’50s lesbian bar; images from regional silent-era filmmakers such as Angela Murray Gibson and Margaret Cram Showalter; the private world of The Washington Post’s Katharine Meyer Graham’s childhood, Miami artist Conni Gordon’s 1960s painting parties, and Chicago’s Amateur Cinema League humorist and filmmaker Margaret Conneely.”

Features clips from the following home movies and amateur recordings, preserved by WFPF

Belfast Movie Queen(1935) – Margaret Cram Showalter
Elwins to Calcutta(1934) – Adelaide Pearson
Florida Vacation (1958) – Sklar Family
French Quarter, New Orleans (2000-2005) – Helen Hill
Eugene & Agnes Meyer Home Movies (1920s) – Agnes Meyer, Eugene Meyer
Mona’s Candlelight (c.1950) – Unknown
Artist Conni Gordon (1961) – Conni Gordon
Arrested For Life (1923) – Angela Murray Gibson
Mister E (1959) – Margaret Conneely

Curators: Erika Yeomans, Kirsten Larvick
Program editor: Amy Aquilino
Narration: Erinn Ruth

Thank you to the following archives and preservationists:
Academic Film Archive of North America
Bill Snyder Films
Chicago Film Archives
Harvard Film Archive
Kino Lorber
Library of Congress
Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives
Northeast Historic Film
State Historical Society of North Dakota

THE WOBBLIES RESTORATION WORLD PREMIERE AT METROGRAPH

2021 Library of Congress National Film Registry Inductee

A Film by Stewart Bird & Deborah Shaffer

Kino Lorber Presents a New 4k Restoration of the Landmark Labor Movement Documentary

OPENS APRIL 29 IN NYC AT METROGRAPH

NYWIFT members receive discounted tickets at box office

MAY 2 WFPF SCREENING & RECEPTION EVENT

Introduction and Q&A by the Women’s Film Preservation Fund with filmmaker Deborah Shaffer. Post reception in lobby bar to follow. Screening at 6:45p.m.

FILMMAKER STATEMENT
When we started production on The Wobblies in 1977 our goal was to rescue and record an almost completely neglected chapter of American history as told by its elderly survivors. We never imagined then that the themes of labor exploitation, anti-immigrant legislation, and racial and gender discrimination would resonate as strongly today. We couldn’t be prouder to have the film included last year in the National Film Registry, and to have Kino Lorber present the new MoMA restoration nationwide on International Workers Day.

– Stewart Bird & Deborah Shaffer

The Wobblies was originally preserved to film by the Women’s Film Preservation Fund in 2003. The new beautiful digital restoration is getting re-released in theaters in NYC and online via the Metrograph streaming service, as well as nationwide on May 1^s^t.

Watch the re-release trailer for Bird & Shaffer’s doc The Wobblies.

Discounted $12 tickets are available to members who use the code NYWIFT at the box office. To purchase a Metrograph trial membership, which grants access to its streaming platform and $10 member tickets use code NYWIFT at checkout.

Visit https://metrograph.com/membership/

2021:

June 2021 – In celebration of Juneteenth, we will be programming That Man of Mine (1947) a musical revue film starring a young Ruby Dee. It will stream on HERFLIX.com beginning June 1.

April 2021 – AMIA selected a film we preserved – Sheila Paige’s Women’s Happy Time Commune (1972) as part of their annual conference which highlights important preserved films. http://www.amiaconference.net

March 2021 – For Women’s History Month HERFLIX released the Trailblazers of Early Cinema program along with a bonus program of the recorded Q&A panel discussion. Register for free to stream on HERFLIX.com.

January – Feb 2021 – NYWIFT streamed Trailblazers of Early Cinema: a silent film program of pioneer filmmakers Angela Murray Gibson, Grace Cunard, Lois Weber and Alice Guy-Blaché | Q&A Moderated by WFPF Founder Barbara Moss with guest panelists Kim Tomadjoglou and Buckey Grimm.

2020:

Women’s Film Preservation Fund Films are currently streaming on several channels:

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C:

Collecting, Restoring: Archival Focus, focusing on important preserved films that are often overlooked:

Julie Dash’s Illusions, 1983, 34 minutes, about a Black woman producer passing as white in 1940’s Hollywood. The film touches on issues of both racism and sexual harassment that have special relevance today.

Through July 21st, free at:
https://www.nga.gov/film-programs/archival-focus.html.html

On the Criterion Channel in the series “Tell Me” that is showcasing documentary films by women:

Liane Brandon’s Betty Tells Her Story
Julia Reichert and Kevin Klein’s Growing Up Female
The Newsreel Collective’s Janie’s Janie
Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio’s Inside Women Inside

https://www.criterionchannel.com/tell-me-women-filmmakers-women-s-stories

2019:

Attica (1974) directed by Cinda Firestone
80min.
16mm.

Saturday, November 16th, 2019
Sunday, November 17th, 2019
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street, New York, NY 10002
1:30PM

In September of 1971, more than half of the 2,800 inmates at the correctional facility in Attica, New York rose up and took staff hostage, demanding address of their pleas for better treatment. Firestone’s investigative film retraces the peaceful petitioning that led up to this standoff and the bloodbath that followed when negotiations broke down. One of the greatest examples of filmmaking journalism, and an outraged eulogy whose poignancy has only increased in the intervening years.

Preservation of this film was made possible by a grant from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film and Television.

More information and tickets.

WILL (1983) Screening

Saturday, October 20th, 2019
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street, New York, NY 10002
2pm

Filmmaker, Jessie Maple, will be available in person for a Q&A following the screening.

Written, produced, and directed by Jessie Maple, WILL depicts a man, Will (Obaka Adedunyo), a former All-American basketball player, trying to kick his drug habit. He and his wife take in and nurture a homeless boy called Little Brother. A New Yorker, Maples also pictures Harlem and its street life in the early eighties as part of a lively, complex neighborhood without the sensational violence or melodrama of contemporaneous Blaxploitation movies.

More information.

Archivist’s Round Table of Metropolitan New York’s 2019 Outstanding Support of Archives Award

Sunday, October 21, 2019
Brooklyn Historical Society, 128 Pierrepont St, Brooklyn, NY 11201
6-8pm

The Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) of New York Women in Film & Television is honored to receive the Archivist’s Round Table of Metropolitan New York’s 2019 Outstanding Support of Archives award this October 21st, 2019. WFPF steering committee member and former NYWIFT Executive Director, Terry Lawler and NYWIFT Board President, Jamie Zelermyer will attend to make introductions and accept the award for WFPF.

The Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television, founded in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art, has been working closely with archives, filmmakers, and preservation specialists since 1995 to preserve nearly 150 American made films by and about women. These important films, many made by independent pioneers and under-represented voices, span silent era to contemporary works of all genres that would have been lost from cinema history without preservation.

Archivist’s Round Table 2019 Awards Announcement

Two films by Barbara Hammer, preserved by the WFPF will screen in the retrospective: Barbara Hammer, Superdyke

Saturday, July 20th
Museum of the Moving Image – Bartos Screening Room, 36-01 35 Avenue, Astoria, Queens

2:00pm:
SISTERS!, 1973, Barbara Hammer, 16mm, color, sound, 8 minutes
Will screen in the program “Declarations of Identity,” introduced by KJ Reith and Mark Toscano

4:00pm:
Bent Time 1984, Barbara Hammer, 16mm, color, sound, 20 minutes
Will screen in the program “Ecstatic Subjectivity,” introduced by KJ Reith and Mark Toscano.
(The original film-to-film preservation was funded by the WFPF, but the new 4K restoration made by the Academy Film Archives will be screened.)

from SISTERS!

More information on Barbara Hammer.

SELECTED EXPERIMENTAL AND ANIMATED WORKS FROM THE WOMEN’S FILM PRESERVATION FUND

June 21-22, 2019

Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue at 2nd Street, New York City

HOMAGE TO MAGRITTE, Anita Thacher, director

Since 1996 the Women’s Film Preservation Fund has preserved a number of significant experimental and animated works by American women, many of which reflect pioneering approaches and unique voices. These include works by Storm de Hirsch, Barbara Hammer, Peggy Ahwesh, Bette Gordon, and Helen Hill among others.

The filmmakers approach their films from many directions and a range of sub-genres within experimental film and animation that include structuralist cinema, surreal films, experimental documentaries, improvised comedies, feminist films, and unedited footage. They utilize optical printing, stop action and hand-drawn animation, hand-altered negatives, as well as live action and documentary footage. A selection of these works is featured in three programs, including films preserved in collaboration with Anthology Film Archives.

The screening series was guest-curated for Anthology by Ann Deborah Levy, Co Chair of the Women’s Film Preservation Fund.

AN ALGORITHM, Bette Gordon , director

June 21st at 7:30pm

Program I: Expanding Notions of Time, Space, and Reality

The makers of these films have manipulated time, space, and/or motion to give us a broader view of reality. Their varied approaches include optical printing, animation, drawing and scratching on the film negative itself, editing choices, and moving camera.

Divinations, 1964, Storm de Hirsch, 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes

Utilizing hand-altered film stock and live footage, negative and positive images of daily objects, a chant of Maori medicine man and music performed on Jews harp, the film takes the viewer to a psychic, ritualistic place.

Bent Time, 1984, Barbara Hammer, 16mm, color, sound, 20 minutes
A film constantly in motion, it journeys across the US linking disparate historic and geographic places, past and present, and using optical printing single frame to slow down and speed up motion to “bend” time.

Meditation on Violence, 1948, Maya Deren, 16mm, b/w, sound, 13 minutes
As a Chinese martial artist performs, time and space become fluid through moving camera, editing, and rearrangement of the sequence of movements.

Homage to Magritte, 1974, Anita Thacher, 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes
A woman’s interior monologue is evoked through optically printed juxtapositions of images of water and interiors, and of glimpses of a woman, the sky and the universe seen through a window and a mirror.

Traveling Light, 1985, Jane Aaron, 16mm, color, sound, 2 minutes
Sunlight from a window moving through the interior of a house during the course of a day ends with an unexpected revelation in this animated film.

An Algorithm, 1977, Bette Gordon, 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes
In this structuralist film, the arc of a dive into a swimming pool is dissected and repeated through optical printing to examine the relationship between diver and space and time and the nature of motion itself.

Program running time: 63 minute

WOMAN’S HAPPY TIME COMMUNE
Sheila Paige, director

June 22nd at 5:45pm

Program 2: Reflections, Dreams, Experiments

These films represent changing ideas on the possibilities of womanhood from different viewpoints.

Windy Day, 1967, Faith and Jon Hubley, 35mm, sound, color, 9 minutes
In this animated film, two young girls view love and marriage through fairy tale fantasies.

Doppelganger, 1987, Peggy Ahwesh, 16mm, color, sound, 5 minutes
An experimental portrait of a woman reflecting on her past and looking to the future.

Women’s Happy Time Commune, 1972, Sheila Paige, 16mm, color, sound, 42 minutes
In this “improv-Western” a group of women go to the Old West to start a commune where they will live without men.

SISTERS!, 1973, Barbara Hammer, 16mm, color, sound, 8 minutes
A collage of documentary footage, poetry, and dreams envisions a new future for lesbians.

Desire Pie, 1976, Lisa Crafts, 16mm, color, sound, 5 minutes
A woman and man are depicted in hand drawn animation in a humorous and joyous romp that shows what female desire can be.

Program running time 74 minutes

Strip of negative from HELEN HILL’S HOME MOVIES

June 22nd at 8:00pm

Program 3: Marie Menken and Helen Hill: Camera Rolls

Unedited footage of two distinctive filmmakers, provides insight into each maker’s thought process and what informs her completed works.

The Grave Diggers from Gaudix, 1960’s, Marie Menken, 16mm, b/w and color, silent, 45 minutes

In 1958 Marie Menken traveled to Spain in the company of Kenneth Anger. They visited the Alhambra in Granada where she shot her film Arrabesque for Kenneth Anger. The gorgeous Kodachrome footage in this compilation was shot at the same time for this Menken-titled yet unfinished project. In 2003, Martina Kudlácek discovered the original, unedited reels among Menken’s belongings held by the family. Gravediggers is a remarkable example of Menken’s fluid handheld movement as well as an instructive peek at how she intuitively conceived her work behind the camera.

Helen Hill’s Home Movies, 2000-2005, original format super 8, preserved on 16mm, b/w and color, silent, 23 minutes

These unedited rolls of live-action footage shot by the animator capture images of New Orleans rituals and events and glimpses of several neighborhoods both before Hurricane Katrina and in its aftermath. The footage, too, was a victim of the storm and despite preservation shows clear signs of water damage.

Program running time 68 minutes.

Tickets available at the Anthology Film Archives box office nights of the screenings:

$12 general admission, $9 for students, seniors & children, $7 for Anthology and NYWIFT members.

for more information please visit: http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/51020

TWO WOMEN’S FILM PRESERVATION FUND PRESERVATIONS:
PRISON IMAGES: INCARCERATION AND THE CINEMA

Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue at 2nd Street, New York City

June 27, 2019 @ 6:30pm

Inside Women Inside, 1978, Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio, Color, 28 minutes

How does a woman cope with such common occurrences as illness, pregnancy and family conflicts when she is sent away to prison? At the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women and the Correctional Institute for Women at Rikers Island, a number of women answer these questions quite candidly.

June 30, 2019 @ 6:30pm
July 8, 2019 @ 9:00pm

Attica, 1974, Cinda Firestone, Color, 1 hour 20 minutes

From September 9-13, 1971, prisoners at Attica Correctional Facility in New York took control of sections of the prison. Uniting across lines of race and ideology, they created a manifesto of practical demands for the improvement of prison conditions, and after four days of negotiations, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered state police and the National Guard to retake the prison by force. Forty-three men were killed in the government-sponsored massacre, including twenty-nine inmates shot by police bullets, and surviving prisoners were beaten and tortured. Cinda Firestone documented the events, and her film testifies to the need for opposition to the state violence that makes up the very fabric of the prison system.

from ATTICA (1974)

For more information please visit Anthology Film Archives

Meredith Monk performing in QUARRY, photo by Johan Elbers

QUARRY
Meredith Monk & Amram Nowak
1975/77, 82 min, 16mm-to-DCP

Screening Monday May 20

7:30 PM at Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue at 2nd Street, NYC

WORLD PREMIERE OF NEW RESTORATION!

Composer, singer, director/choreographer, and filmmaker Meredith Monk created QUARRY: AN OPERA IN 3 MOVEMENTS as a live stage work between 1975-76 – with her company, The House – as a mosaic of music, images, movement, dialogue, film, sound, and light. A meditation on WWII and recurring cycles of intolerance, fascism, and cruelty in history, QUARRY centers on a sick American child (played by Monk herself) whose world darkens as her illness progresses. This film version, shot in the Lepercq Space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1977, was directed by Amram Nowak and supervised by Monk, and includes her 1975 short silent film of the same name. Considered a masterwork of the 20th century, the piece is as prescient today as it was 40 years ago. It is at once a myth, a documentary, and a memorial.

Preserved with funds from the National Film Preservation Fund, the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television, and individual donors.

Meredith Monk will attend for a Q&A following the screening!

Quarry received the WFPF Grant in 2001.

Bette Gordon’s An Algorithm screening in the program:

Still from AN ALGORITHM, Bette Gordon, director

Monday, April 8, 2019 at 7pm

Light Industry, 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn

Tickets – $8, available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm.

Before Bette Gordon made her 1983 feature Variety, she made several short experimental films influenced by feminist theory in the 1970s. One of these is An Algorithm, a structuralist film of a female diver making three dives, shows her on going fascination with women as desired object and eroticism. The mathematical frame by frame printing and male and female voices reciting frame counts, frustrates the male gaze at this potentially sexual subject, never allowing the diver to complete her dive.

An Algorithm was preserved by Anthology Film Archives, with funding from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund.

Sheila Paige Women’s Happy Time Commune screening in:

Still: Women’s Happy Time Commune, Sheila Paige, Director

Excavating Feminist Film Histories:  Early Productions from Women Make Movies

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

6:00 PM

Free Admission

Michelson Theater, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway, NYC

In the late 1960s and 1970s, numerous media organizations arose driven by the desire to give voice to those ordinarily marginalized by the mainstream media. Among this wave was Women Make Movies, a female-led, community-based media education center founded in New York in 1969 to empower women to tell their own stories by teaching them the technical production skills to pursue their own film and videos projects.

While Women Make Movies, Inc. has since become one of the most impactful and important distributors of independent film produced by women, its early origins as a production and community-based teaching group have been largely forgotten.

Films:

The Women’s Happy Time Commune, Sheila Paige, Director, Ariel Dougherty, Producer; (1972), 47 minutes, digital projection, film preserved with help from Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television
Sweet Bananas (1974), Ariel Dougherty, Director, 30 minutes, digital projection, not yet preserved.
A Street Harassment Film (1975), Sheila Paige, Director, 12 minutes, digital projection

A roundtable discussion moderated by Tanya Goldman, Cinema Studies PHD candidate, will follow the screening. The panel will include Women Make Movies co-founders Ariel Dougherty and Sheila Paige, and Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, Chair of the Film Department, Brooklyn College, CUNY.

For additional information: https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/events/spring-2019/excavating-histories-women-make-movies?fbclid=IwAR2zFmrgYk7WtbtMO-HWL9aRehlW5APuGbCLZ8tnNjfWsxjGynrjOrm_et4

2017-2018

The most recent Women’s Film Preservation Fund grant cycle closed June 15^th, 2018.

https://www.nywift.org/womens-film-preservation-fund/wfpf-grant-application-guidelines/

ARTISTS AND ACTIVISTS:

Second Wave Feminist Filmmakers
June 2-3, 2018

The Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) brings a series of six programs of Second Wave Feminist films, mostly WFPF preservations, to screen at the Barbican Centre, London, on June 2nd and 3rd.

The Women’s Movement of the 1970’s in the United States spawned an increase in women making films. Their focus, women’s experience, had rarely been a topic for the screen before. Along the way, they reshaped filmmaking in ways that have impacted it even today.

Finding it difficult to attain creative positions in the film industry, women made films on the outside. Largely uncensored, they sought new means of expression, utilizing innovative approaches to storytelling and introducing dream imagery, diary excerpts, poetry, animation, and experimental techniques in films of all genres.

Artists and Activists features WFPF’s roster of feminist preserved filmmakers: Julie Dash, Lourdes Portillo, Bette Gordon, Barbara Hammer, Lisa Crafts, Julia Reichert, Maxi Cohen, and the Newsreel and Kartemquin Films collectives. Other important feminist voices are included: Joyce Chopra, Su Friedrich, Amalie Rothschild, and Madeline Anderson whose works have not been preserved by the WFPF.

Curated by: Ann Deborah Levy and Kirsten Larvick, WFPF Co-Chairs,
with programming assistance from Susan Lazarus and Amy Aquilino.

To see the entire film schedule, please click here.

That Ice Ticket (1923), Angela Murray Gibson

April 11^th – 14^th, 2018
Orphan Film Symposium
Museum of Moving Image, Queens, New York

Professor and author, Marsha Gordon and independent researcher, Charles “Buckey” Grimm present Camerawoman Angela Murray Gibson Films Herself into History, 1921-1925 at Orphan Film Symposium.

Included in their study on silent era North Dakotan filmmaker, Angela Murray Gibson, the recent Women’s Film Preservation Fund and Kino Lober preservation of THAT ICE TICKET (1923) will screen for symposium attendees.

https://wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/program/

The Women’s Film Preservation Fund: Four Experimental Films

January 22, 2018 7:15 p.m.
Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York

Newly restored films from Women’s Film Preservation Fund and its preservation partners.

Sisters! 1974. USA. Directed by Barbara Hammer. 8 min.
Metroliner. 1975. USA. Directed by Victoria Hochberg. 35 min.
Doppelganger. 1987. USA. Directed by Peggy Ahwesh. 8 min.
The Women’s Happy Time Commune. 1972. USA. Directed by Sheila Paige. 47 min.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/3951

Closing Panel for From The Vault: Women’s Advocacy on Film:

Introduction to Archiving and Preservation for Film and Video

UnionDocs, Brooklyn, New York

Now that you’ve finished your documentary feature and it is a file on your hard drive, have you thought about how to make sure it will last? Do you have a movie, shot on film, that can no longer be shown because the print is in tatters and no one is screening 16mm anymore? Do you have a documentary master on an obsolescent videotape format? Have you ever wondered if storing your film, video or digital work in your home or studio is a good idea, and why placing it in an archive will ensure its longevity?

Join Women’s Film Preservation Fund, UnionDocs and other archival and preservation collaborators to get answers to some of these questions in an introductory presentation on archiving and preserving film and video. This event offers a basic overview and first steps for the long-term safeguarding of motion pictures, making work accessible for exhibition and monetization over a lifetime.

https://www.nywift.org/event/from-the-vault-introduction-to-archiving-and-preservation-for-film-and-video/

2017:

Growing Up Female (Julia Reichert & Jim Klein)

FROM THE VAULT: WOMEN’S ADVOCACY ON FILM

Co-presented with UnionDocs Fall 2017 through Spring 2018.

To view the full program schedule please click here.

In celebration of NYWIFT’s 40th Anniversary, the Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) and UnionDocs present the film series From the Vault: Women’s Advocacy on Film which features restored documentary films by women filmmakers. All films in the series were preserved by the WFPF.

Documentarians reveal the impact of events and contexts for changing attitudes that affect our communities, society, and the world. From the Vault: Women’s Advocacy on Film presents nonfiction films that have shaped movements and provided perspectives on political, environmental, and human rights issues; and ideas around gender identity and roles, sexuality, health and family, all from a woman’s perspective. These explorations of story and truth, their innovative approaches to documentary film-making, and their subjects continue to be relevant today to filmmakers, activists, and media consumers creatively effecting change.

UnionDocs and the WFPF invite filmmakers and cinephiles to consider what can learn from our past explorers of story and truth, and how the film’s subjects and their filmmaker’s methodologies remain important and therefore essential to preserve and keep watching.

To see the full program schedule please click here.

This series is curated by WFPF Co-Chair Kirsten Larvick, with programming assistance from Co-Chair Ann Deborah Levy and Raquel Salazar-Foster.

2016:

November 5th and 8th, 2016 — Celebrating filmmaker, animator, Jane Aaron at the 14th Annual To Save and Project Series at The Museum of Modern Art. Set In Motion (1980) and Interior Designs (1986) are short animation pieces preserved by NYWIFT’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund and will screen under the series’ Animation and Experimental Cinema category. Both works exhibit Aaron’s unique stop-motion animation and live-action footage collages that became her signature. (more info)

The five-Blu-ray box set titled, Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers, produced and distributed by Kino Lorber will include approximately twenty hours of material – showcasing the work o, under-appreciated filmmakers, while illuminating the gradual changes in how women directors were perceived (and treated) by the Hollywood establishment. The collection will include some of the Women’s Film Preservation Fund’s most significant silent era preservations. Check out the project’s campaign, which ends on November 18th.

September 24th, 2016 — Visions: TV Dramas by Maya Angelou and Momoko Iko in the series Changing the Picture, presented by Museum of the Moving Image, in collaboration with the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film and Television. (more info)

June 1st, 2016 — WFPF Grant Application Deadline.

May 5th, 2016 — Ann Deborah Levy writes about the Women’s Film Preservation Fund on NYWIFT’s blog. Read “Protecting the Legacy for Over 20 Years”here.

April 14th & 27th, 2016 — Variety screened at MoMa in Modern Matinees: Six New York Independents. (more info)

March 11th, 2016 — Student Nurses screened at The Metrograph with director Stephanie Rothman. (more info)

March 27th, 2016 — You Are Not I, Underground USA: Indie Cinema of the 80’s Cinefamily Showcase. Sara Driver’s film was awarded the WFPF grant. (more info)

Janurary 30th, 2016 — Re-Visions: Bette Gordon, Program 1, Anthology Archives.This eclectic selection of films includes her masterful early feature Variety, alongside other works restored by Anthology. The programs also include WFPF brand new scans of recently uncovered early experiments .(more info)

January 21-31, 2016 — Committee Member Susan Lazarus screens Sophie and the Rising Sun at Sundance 2016, a film she co-produced.

2015:

Jane Aaron (1948 – 2015)

Sadly, we lost our friend and grantee, Jane Aaron, on June 27th. A Jane Aaron Fund has been set up by the WFPF. Funds collected will be used to preserve a film by a woman filmmaker in Jane’s memory. Jane Aaron was an internationally recognized award-winning animator and a best-selling children’s book illustrator. Jane’s independently produced experimental films have been shown around the world,including in the Whitney Biennial and the Museum of Modern Art, and are in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Walker Art Center. The Women’s Film Preservation Fund preserved five of Jane’s films.

December 2015 — WFPF Co-Chair Kirsten Larvick announces first recipients of the Al Larvick North Dakota Grant . The fund’s purpose is to promote the preservation of amateur and home movies. (more info)

November 4-25, 2015 — To Save and Project: The 13th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation. These films join dozens of others in a three-week overview of the exciting work being done to reclaim endangered films and revive forgotten treasures. (more info)

Sept 2-4, 2015 — WFPF Co-Chair Kirsten Larvick screens films preserved by The Al Larvick Conservation Fund, which she founded in honor of her grandfather. This grant provides support to individuals and organizations for the conservation, digital transfer and exhibition of home and amateur movies which were recorded in North Dakota State.

April 21, 2015 — On Restoration Panel, Tribeca Film Festival WFPF Committee Member Susan Lazarus will join the preservation panel.

March 25, 2015 — WFPF Committee Member Ann Deborah Levy screens her film “On the Train to Kutná Hora” at Another Experiment by Women Film Festival, at Anthology Film Archives.

March 24, 2015 — NYWIFT Preservation Fund Screening: The Last To Know

March 21, 2015 — Suzanne Pancrazi, NYWIFT WFPF Committee Member passes away.

February 2 -13, 2015 — Carte Blanche: Women’s Film Preservation Fund—Women Writing the Language of Cinema

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Established in 1995 by New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT) and The Museum of Modern Art, the Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) is the only program in the world exclusively dedicated to the preservation of the cultural legacy of women in the film industry.

Since 1995 the WFPF has provided support for more than 100 American short and feature films. The fund’s core mission is to identify and preserve works in which the role of women was fundamental to the production; to present the preserved films in a public forum; to encourage scholarship about women in film history; and to partner with organizations demonstrating similar goals. The WFPF is especially respected at MoMA as a former Chief Curator of the Department of Film, Mary Lea Bandy (1943–2014), was a founder.

In celebration of WFPF’s 20th anniversary, MoMA has invited the WFPF programming committee to select films that reflect the essential role of women in the continuing development of cinema as an art form.

Organized by Anne Morra, Associate Curator, Department of Film, MoMA, with WFPF programming committee members Ina Archer, Kirsten Larvick, Susan Lazarus, Raquel Salazar-Foster, and Kim Tomadjoglu.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1497

2014:

October 31, 2014 — The Real Indies – A Close Look at Orphan Films Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, at New York University and the Orphan Film Symposium.

2013:

October 1, 2013 — The WFPF received numerous applications for the 2013-2014 Grants Cycle.

Oct 13, 2013 — Committee Member Susan Lazarus presents screenings and introduces panelists at the 10th Anniversary Screening of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving & Preservation(MIAP) program, at NYU Tisch Cinema Studies. (more info)

February 2013 — WFPF launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise money to preserve Seven Women Seven Sins (1986) directed by Maxi Cohen, Helke Sander, Bette Gordon, Chantal Akerman, Valie Export, Laurence Gavron, and Ulrike Ottinger. (more info)

2012:

August 2012 — WFPF unveiled a new video highlighting its preservation work. The video included footage from Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning documentary Harlan County U.S.A. (1976), That Man of Mine (1947) starring Ruby Dee, and You Are Not I (1981) by Sara Driver, among many others.

July 1, 2012 — Susan Lazarus represented the WFPF at the celebration of the birth of the first woman director, Alice Guy Blache, and the unveiling of a new grave marker from the Fort Lee Film Commission in NJ. (more info)

June 25, 2012 — WFPF was proud to be honored by Anthology Film Archives at its annual Film Preservation Honors.

2011:

November 2, 2011 — MoMA’s Save & Project Series, at Museum of Modern Art. (more info)

October 6, 2011 — New York Film Festival ‘11 Masterworks: Sara Driver’s You Are Not I, The Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center. (more info)

October 24, , 2011 — Restoration Premiere Screening of Make Out, Growing Up Female, and Janie’s Janie at The Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Tribeca Film Festival ‘11 — Independent Women: 15 Years of NYWIFT Funded Film Preservation. (more info)