NOW PLAYING: Women Filmmakers
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Adrienne Mancia was a fearless advocate and personal friend of innumerable women directors who pioneered new and challenging forms of filmmaking throughout the 20th century. A particularly formative experience for Mancia was seeing Maya Deren’s MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943) — now widely regarded as one of the most influential avant-garde films of all time — at a screening presented by Deren herself. As remembered by Ron Magliozzi, Film Curator at MoMA, in a recent interview for Screen Slate:
Meshes of the Afternoon made a huge impression on Adrienne when she first saw it. She went to a screening of the film in the late ’50s or early ’60s, at which [Maya] Deren presented the film. It might have been at Cinema 16. And it made a huge impression on her understanding of what it meant to do an independent film, what an artists’ cinema meant. Particularly how artists’ films and independent films could be liberating. She said… Deren was wearing black slacks and a very blousy white blouse that you could see through, so you could see Maya’s breasts through the blouse when she spoke to introduce the film. Adrienne said people were saying, “You can see her breasts!” You know, whispering in the audience. And seeing the film after having Maya introduce it that way made a huge impression on her, in terms of the notion of making films being a liberation for the filmmaker and for the audience.
This selection of short films highlights the work of groundbreaking women filmmakers Maya Deren, Faith Hubley, Agnès Varda, and Shirley Clarke that Adrienne programmed and championed throughout her career.
MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943) by Maya Deren (B&W, silent, 14 minutes)
“A large flower, the silhouette of a figure briskly walking away, a house key, a bread knife, a telephone receiver resting off the hook, and a spinning phonographic turntable define the shifting functional elements in MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON, from which the film's evolving, malleable construct — the fragile and tenuously interconnected mesh of actual and perceived reality — is intriguingly (and ingenuously) mapped.” —The Film-Makers’ Cooperative
Selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for “cultural, historic, [and] aesthetic significance,” Maya Deren’s death-dream avant-garde opus MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943) remains, arguably, the most influential experimental film ever made. A swirl of haunting imagery co-created with her first husband, filmmaker Alexander Hammid, MESHES would give rise to the New American Cinema movement and shape the work of such filmmakers as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and David Lynch.
THE ADVENTURES OF * (1957) by Faith and John Hubley (Color, sound, 11 minutes)
Mancia was a friend of Faith and John Hubley’s and often programmed their work, including this whimsical animated short from 1957, which was featured in MoMA’s 2023 In Memoriam tribute to Mancia. Along with contemporaries like Walt Disney, the Hubleys are regarded as pioneers of animation in America and were acclaimed for the emotional complexity of their work.
John Hubley in fact worked for Disney, and during the company’s animator’s strike in 1941, he left to join United Productions of America (UPA) where he created (among other famous animated characters) Mr. Magoo. Later, John and Faith co-founded their own production company, Storyboard Studios, and made more than 20 films together. Following John’s death in 1977, Faith went on to direct over 30 of her own animated shorts.
THE ADVENTURES OF * tells the story of a giggling, rambunctious toddler — in the form of an asterisk — who bothers his serious father with his playful nature and curiosity.
L’OPERA-MOUFFE (DIARY OF A PREGNANT WOMAN) (1958) by Agnès Varda (B&W, sound, 17.5 minutes)
Mancia was a close friend of Agnès Varda’s, who was widely regarded as the foremother of the French New Wave. Four years before directing CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 (1962) — the feature film that would put her on the map as a major figure of the French New Wave — Varda directed this diary-style documentary short, in which she took a young pregnant woman as her point of departure to shed light on Paris’ Rue Mouffetard. When she made the film, Varda herself was pregnant.
L’OPERA-MOUFFE (DIARY OF A PREGNANT WOMAN) was featured in MoMA’s 2023 In Memoriam tribute to Mancia. Click the image above to view Varda’s film.
BRIDGES-GO-ROUND (1959) by Shirley Clarke (16mm to digital, color, sound, 7.5 minutes)
Mancia was a close friend of Shirley Clarke’s, an independent filmmaker and video artist who was one of the co-founders of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and among a number of the women directors (including Marie Menken and Storm de Hirsch) who were in the vanguard of the New American Cinema movement. Clarke’s IN PARIS PARKS (1957) — an unscripted cinema verité short shot in a park in Paris — was screened in MoMA’s 2023 In Memoriam tribute to Mancia.
BRIDGES-GO-ROUND, made two years after IN PARIS PARKS, remains one of Clarke’s best-known and widely-screened works. As noted in The New York Times by critic Howard Thompson: “By my standards, Miss Clarke's picture, an eerie close-up of the metropolitan bridges, is extraordinary. A film that captures the bizarre magic of man-made spans with the movement of a lightning clap and with the same terrible beauty.”