COMMUNITY VISIONS — CINEMATIC NARRATIVES BY WOMEN

My friend Laura X, founder of the Women’s History Library, sends me two and three notices a day about film screenings. A multitask-juggler of scores of feminist concerns, it is difficult for me to keep up. Which e-mails do I open and pay attention to? One I did open just the other day unfolded a gem:  Cinema Sabaya. It is the first feature dramatic film by Israeli filmmaker, Orit Fouks Rotem. She has translated her community-based film teaching experiences with women in several locales on both sides of the Middle East conflict into a cultural filmic story of how motion pictures can create allies. And enlarge our worlds.   

I know something about community-based filmmaking, especially for women and girls. In 1972, with Sheila Paige, we initiated the first-ever community film teaching program for women when we incorporated Women Make Movies. In the multiracial, economically mixed Chelsea neighborhood in New York City. Secretaries, mothers, youth workers, retirees and teens came regularly to WMM’s workshop. They learned to operate the spring-wind Bolex, to craft their ideas into a cinematic story, to  shoot their films, and to dedicate time to editing their footage. They produced the first set of cinematic women-centered stories about community women’s real concerns — lost ambition, marriage roles, aging, rape. Produced at a time when film schools barely existed and feminist filmmaking was just establishing its sea legs, these works are dramatic (re)enactments by mostly nonprofessional actors, a hallmark of many of the Women Make Movies films — whether by the community women or their teachers, WMM’s co-founders. Such filmmaking was unusual in the period when feminist works were largely documentaries. Today these first, short dramatic community films or the co-founders’ works are hardly known. A remarkable 40 productions were created under the banner of WMM from 1970 to 1980, an outstanding body of work that demands study. Now in the 50th year since the launching of this community teaching program, I am taking a handful of these works and my own films on the road.    

With funding from the New Mexico Humanities Council and the Devasthali Family Foundation I am holding a series of screenings throughout New Mexico this spring. Each program will vary as I present the philosophy, tempo and nature of WMM films with a different selection of works at each screening and lead audience discussions. New in the mix will be a handful of more contemporary films from present-day girl-centered community film teaching programs. Thus far I have discovered 27 such programs operating in the past two decades in the U.S., inheritors of the community media teaching we did in the 1970s. The need is constant and persistent, an uphill fight to counter the male dominance of mainstream media. Community media making is a global movement for women.  One of my favorite programs is the Deccan Development Society, in the Zaheerabad region of India. It started in the 1970s to serve poor rural women farmers. Later they realized that to achieve market autonomy they also needed media autonomy. Since the 1990s Deccan women have been making films and running a radio series. However, doing justice to the international scope of such community media was way beyond my capabilities of study.