VERITABLE QUANDARY NEW DINNER MENU FOOD & DRINK MON.-SAT. 11:30 am - 2 am SUN. 6 pm - 1 am 1220 SW FIRST AVE. 227-7342 ANTIQUES VINTAGE CLOTHING NORTHWEST FILM STUDY CENTER 1219 SW Park Ave. Portland, OR 97205 221-1156 SUMMER FILMS WOMAN’S EYE VIEW, a first series of important new works by women filmmakers, explores a variety of social and cultural concerns from a woman’s perspective. We are pleased to co-sponsor these programs with FILMA: A Portland Women’s Film Forum. JULY 15 THURSDAY The Creative Spirit — 8 pm Elizabeth Swados: The Girl with the Incredible Feeling, The Life and Death of Frida Kahlo and Martha Clarke: Light and Dark. 17 SATURDAY and 18 SUNDAY Burden of Dreams (1982) — 8 pm Les Blank’s documentary is the saga of the production of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. and is one of the most remarkable and absorbing studies of the creative process ever filmed. The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark 9:45 p.m. 21 WEDNESDAY An Evening with James Broughton — 8 pm San Francisco poet and teacher, author of many books and plays. 22 THURSDAY and 24 SATURDAY Women’s Animation — 8 pm 25 SUNDAY Boomerang (1947) — 7 pm The Naked City (1948) - 8:45 pm 28 WEDNESDAY Green for Danger (1947) — 7 pm To the Ends of the Earth (1948) — 8:45 pm 29 THURSDAY Explorations — 8 pm Annapurna: A Woman’s Place chronicles the historic expedition which put the first women and the first Americans on the tenth-highest mountain in the world. 30 FRIDAY Experiment in Terror (1962) — 9 pm 31 SATURDAY The Wobblies — 8 pm Rare footage of America laboring in the 1930s. With Loose Ends and Hush Hoggies Hush. AUGUST 1 SUNDAY An Evening with J. Hoberman — 8 pm Jim Hoberman, the judge for this year’s Northwest Film and Video Festival, is.a film and video critic and a filmmaker. 5 THURSDAY Older Women — 8 pm Loue It Like a Fool is a glimpse of Malvina Reynolds. With Portland filmmaker Elaine Velazquez’s Some of These Days. 7 SATURDAY and 8 SUNDAY Clarence and Angel — 8 pm Robert Gardner’s Clarence and Angel is a moving and humorous story about two boys in a Harlem grade school. 12 THURSDAY and 14 SATURDAY Christopher Strong — 7 pm Dorothy Arzner was the only female director in Hollywood in the 1930s. With Katharine Hepburn, in her second starring role. Tell Me a Riddle — 9 pm The directorial debut for actress Lee Grant. 18 WEDNESDAY Movies by Moonlight — 9:15 pm Join us in the amphitheater in Washington Park for our annual outdoor screening of new short films by Northwest filmmakers. ill.............IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIH IIIIIIU U IIIIII Tenth Annual Northwest Film and Video Festival August 20-27 New Light on women Filmmakers Annapurna: A Woman’s Place By Peggy Lindquist In 1914, early film director Alice Guy Blache pondered why more women were not filmmakers and wrote: “It has long been a source of wonder to me that many women have not seized upon the wonderful opportunity offered to them by the motion picture art to make their way to fame andfortune as producers of photodramas. Of all the arts there is probably none in which they can make such splendid use of talents so much more natural to a woman than to a man." She herself directed over two hundred films and established and operated her own production studio (Solax). She conceded that a woman’s success is “made very difficult by a strong prejudice against one of her sex doing work that has been done only by men ..." but believed that “this prejudice is fast disappearing. ” Quite the opposite was true, of course, and most of the handful of productive woman directors who took part in the burgeoning motion picture industry in the teens of the Twentieth Century were fast disappearing from the scene in the twenties. This included Madame Blache herself, who directed her last film in 1920 and could not find work in the film industry by the late twenties. Blache’s wonder at the dearth of women producing films then seems ironic in light of the situation today: there are no women directors working regularly in Hollywood now. In fact, there were more women directors at work in the film industry prior to 1920 than during any other period of its history. This does not mean that there are not working women filmmakers, however, and a series of films presented by FILMA: A Portland Women’s Film Forum and the Northwest Film Study Center happily proves this. Cindy Schumock of the Media Project formed the idea of a women’s film festival after seeing handbills from exciting-looking programs in other cities come across her desk. “It seemed that Portland was somehow left out, ” she says. “Also, I personally felt a need to see women’s films; to see what women were sayFILMA is already making plans for next year's annual women's film festival to include more early works and films by women in west Germany, Japan, Africa and elsewhere. ing about their own lives instead of what men say about women’s lives.” To this end, she began talking to women filmmakers and those interested in film, and in November they gathered for the first FILMA meeting. "We did a lot of research," said filmmaker Elaine Velazquez whose Some of These Days /s included in the festival. “We had no money to pay for previewing the films, so we had to go on what we heard from people who had seen them." Ihe series, titled Woman’s Eye View, was incorporated into the Northwest Film Study Center's ongoing summer program, and a listing of the films is^available from them. The series began appropriately with one of Madame Blache’s few remaining films, A House Divided (1913), described as a domestic farce; and The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922) by French avant-garde filmmaker Germaine Dulac. Although Dulac was extraordinarily innovative in her use of the camera, her work is seldom seen in showings of early experimental films. Women have played a major creative role in the production of all the films shown, and many of the film are about women as well. Rosie the Riveter, Malvina Reynolds, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, the first Americans on Annapurna, and a 1930s aviatrix played by Katharine Hepburn are among them. Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director to make the transition to talkies, directed Hepburn’s second starring role in Christopher Strong (1933). FILMA’s core group of organizers are all involved in film in one way or another. Most are filmmakers, and a good part of their motivation in putting the festival together was for their own encouragement and to provide a needed historical perspective for their work. Rose Bond, an animator whose film Gaia’s Dream appears in the program, explains, “It’s like taking art history. You know the Janus [art history] book? Not one woman artist in the whole book, and that’s not very encouraging. So I think we have to show these films, make a big deal out of it, to break through. ” „ For the most part, the organizers of the festival have concentrated on seldom- seen, recent, independent works by American filmmakers. But there is a wealth of films made by women beyond these borders of time and place. FILMA is already making plans for next year’s annual women’s film festival to include more early works and films by women in West Germany, Japan, Africa and elsewhere. This year’s festival promises a variety of perspective and style and Is likely to be a different way of looking at things than we are used to seeing, a Woman s Eye View. And that, says Rose Bond, is the point. “I want to see what the difference is. It’s for ourselves and for other people, too. It’s to turn a light on.” [a Clinton St. Quarterly 43
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