To celebrate 2018 International Women’s Day, the Peeping Archivist has compiled for you a list of archival and curatorial projects about female filmmakers.
Enjoy!
The Woman Behind the Camera
The Woman Behind the Camera project is a collaboration between the Northeast Historic Film, the Chicago Film Archives, and the Lesbian Home Movie Project that aims to bring to life home movies and amateur film and video made by women in the 20th century, and to make this material accessible online and to researchers.
The project includes 58 collections of film and video shot by women filmmakers, and represents over 300 hours of unique footage. Over the next several months we will digitize and describe the material, making digital copies available for viewing online, and providing finding aids for those interested in learning more about the films and the filmmakers who made them. The digital copies will be available on this website.
The project is an important effort to highlight these women-made films, and to challenge the notion that women were simply the subjects of home movies and amateur film, rather than filmmakers themselves. The films nominated for digitization, each created by a female amateur filmmaker active in the twentieth century, are diverse in subject matter and provenance. They document families and friends and include the travels, home lives, interests, and some significant moments in each woman’s history.
Fundación Patrimonio Filmico
The Fundación Patrimonio Filmico (Colombia) celebrates women’s month with interviews of female Colombian filmmakers. The first video is available on their Facebook page.
En el mes de la mujer, queremos hacer un homenaje a las mujeres cineastas de Colombia. Empezamos con Camila Loboguerrero y Clare Weiskopf, dos importantes directoras que aceptaron nuestra invitación a la sede de Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano para que nos cuenten sobre cómo es hacer cine en este país. #SomosPatrimonio#MujeresDelCineColombiano
The Irish Film Institute is proud to celebrate the 100th birthday of Ida Lupino with a season of films dedicated to her work behind the camera.
Lupino was born in London in 1918 and had her first film role at the age of 13, before being discovered by Paramount and moving to America and becoming associated with a kind of ‘bad girl’ role throughout the 1930s. She later impressed in titles like They Drive By Night and High Sierra opposite Humphrey Bogart before her interests turned to behind the camera.
Together with her husband Collier Young, Lupino created independent production company The Filmakers which kicked off a period of intense creativity. The company produced 12 feature films, with Lupino taking on directing duties on six between 1949 and 1953.
Full program available here.
Anthology Film Archive
The NYC Feminist Film Week presents its second annual film program committed to increasing the visibility of women and all trans and gender non-conforming filmmakers. The festival aims to foster critical dialogue among filmmakers and the general public, using queer/trans/feminist approaches to interrogate cultural constructions of gender, sexuality, race, class, age, and dis/ability.
Organized around the ongoing theme of feminist film genealogies, the series asks the following questions: What might a genealogy of feminist film look like in its ethics and aesthetics? How do feminist film practices function as forms of political and critical intervention? What strategies do they employ to unsettle and dismantle racism, heterosexism, transphobia, classism, and stigmas around sexuality, illness, and dis/ability? And how do feminist film and media practitioners articulate queer, trans, POC, working class, immigrant, dis/abled, and other marginalized experiences and identities?
The festival takes place at the Anthology Film Archive March 6-11th. Full program available here.
National Film and Sound Archive of Australia
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia has also put women under the spotlight this month:
In this article, they celebrate firsts for females in Australia from their Television News and Current Affairs Program (Newscaf), which is 30 years old this year. They selected three news stories about significant moments of recognition for women in the political, sporting, cultural and religious spheres.
They also made available online (!) a collection of films with Winifred Atwell – ‘The Amazing Miss A’ -, one of the most popular ragtime musicians and best-selling artists of her time. In the 1950s, she had two UK No. 1 singles and 11 Top 10 hits, and spent 51 weeks in the Top 10 across the decade. She was the first black artist to sell a million records in the UK.
At the Peeping Archivist, we especially love the first video, where construction workers at the Sydney Opera House site seem amazed to see Atwell playing the piano for them!
Centre Audiovisuel Simone De Beauvoir
Founded in 1982 by feminist filmmakers Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig (from Chantal Akerman’s 1975 groundbreaking feminist work Jeanne Dielemann, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles!) and Ioana Wieder, the Centre Audiovisuel Simone De Beauvoir (France) supports and archives audiovisual documents about Women’s Right Movements:
Le Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir a été créé en 1982 par trois militantes féministes, toutes trois impliquées dans la pratique vidéo, qui ont mis au cœur de leurs objectifs la conservation et la création des documents audiovisuels pouvant alors être recensés concernant l’histoire des femmes, leurs droits, leurs luttes, leurs créations. Elles ont également poursuivi leur propre travail de réalisatrices.
Le Centre a retrouvé une nouvelle vie en 2003, sous l’impulsion d’une nouvelle équipe et avec des objectifs plus larges. A la vocation initiale, toujours prise en compte, s’est ajoutée une dimension d’éducation à l’image et de lutte contre les stéréotypes liés aux représentations sexuées dans l’audiovisuel.
The Centre still produces audiovisual works today through its artists’ collective Travelling féministe and making its archives available to female filmmakers.
Our crush: Agnès Varda
We idolâtre the only French New Wave female filmmaker at the Peeping Archivist because, besides being a talented director, she has also made an amazing work helping pass on the memory and films of her late husband Jacques Demy – including through her own films (Jacquot de Nantes, 1991; L’univers de Jacques Demy, 1995). Her hard work was even rewarded with a FIAF Award in 2013!
On top of that, 2018 is once again her year: nominated for an Oscar for her latest documentary Visages Villages (France, 2017, in collaboration with artist JR), she rocked the red carpets like no one else…
…even when she could not make it!
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