Independent Women
This amazing program features work, dating from 1950 to 1984, by women experimental filmmakers who played one of the most forceful parts in American avant-garde cinema.
This event offers a panoply of talent and includes narratives, personal documentaries, and abstract animation.
PROGRAM FILMS
Pastorale, 1950, made by pioneering animator Mary Ellen Bute, this film animates Bach’s "Sheep May Safely Graze." A major ‘60s and ‘70s figure, filmmaker Storm De Hirsch saw Divination, 1964, as a "film poem that records a psychic event in color, shape and sound." Faith Hubley’s Windy Day, 1967 interprets a couple’s fantasies about love, marriage and life as voiced by their children, and was hailed as “a midget masterpiece” in Newsweek. Marie Menken, the legendary talent who influenced American avant-garde film in ways second only to that of Maya Deren, made her abstract film on light, Zenscapes, in 1969. Anything You Want to Be, 1971, is Liane Brandon’s effective, sardonic, independent film of the early women’s movement that explores the intense external pressures and the more subtle internal pressures a girl faces in finding her identity. The lush, evocative, Homage to Magritte, 1974, by Anita Thacher, was composed on an optical printer before the general use of digital tools. Bette Gordon’s Michigan Avenue, a 3 minute road movie from 1973, represents work from the powerful structuralist film movement of the '70s. Caroline and Frank Mouris made Coney in 1975, a wild, five minute pixilated tour of New York's amusement park, replete with an experimental soundtrack.Desire Pie, 1976, is animator Lisa Crafts’ explicit, humorous, warm and fantasy-filled celebration of lovemaking, with a magnetic jazz score. Remains to Be Seen, 1983, is one of animator Jane Aaron’s award winning, inventive, meticulous stop frame and line drawing animations that delight in life. Bent Time, 1984, inspired by the idea that time might bend in ways similar to light rays, is Barbara Hammer’s optically printed, single-frame film, set to Pauline Oliveros’s score.
Panel to follow with directors Liane Brandon, Lisa Crafts, Barbara Hammer, Jane Aaron, Bette Gordon, as well as Bute films curator/collector Cecile Starr, animator Emily Hubley, and Tribeca's experimental film programmer Jon Gartenberg.
Moderated by Drake Stutesman, Co-Chair of The Women's Film Preservation Fund and editor of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media.
The Women's Film Preservation Fund, a division of New York Women in Film and Television, founded in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art in 1995, has preserved or restored, to date, 90 American films in which women have played a significant role, as director, animator, producer, writer, actor animator and more.
For more information about this event and about WFPF films and filmmakers, click here