This Women's History Month, GME Highlights Works By Women Filmmakers We Distribute on DSL, DVD, and Blu-Ray!
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IDA LUPINO DIRECTING NEVER FEAR IN 1949. SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
This Women's History Month, GME pays tribute to Women Filmmakers from our catalogue of digital moving image publications in DSL, DVD, and/or Blu-Ray format, which we make available exclusively to academic institutions in North America in collaboration with an array of archives and boutique publishers worldwide, including Cameo Media, Flicker Alley, Index Edition, Kino Lorber, Light Cone, and Re:Voir, among others. The role of women filmmakers has been generally overlooked in the writing of film histories. GME has carefully curated a selection of works from these organizations so as to more fully represent the significant contributions that women filmmakers have made from the birth of moving pictures.
To rectify these omissions in the field of academic film studies, GME’s curated collection now affords the scholarly community a unique opportunity to revisit and revise the history of the moving image so as to incorporate these works in more robust fashion into the academic canon.
The films and videos by women filmmakers represented in GME’s distribution catalogue encompasses films from 1902 (LES CHIENS SAVANTS by Alice Guy Blaché) through to 2018 (WINTER IN PARIS by Friedl vom Gröller). Many of these DVD publications are accompanied by scholarly essays (THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN, IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?, THE PRIMAL SCENE) which attest to the significance of these artists in shaping various film movements and in challenging and subverting a male-dominated cultural ideology with the centrality of strong female voices.
Women began making films at the dawn of the 20th century, yet their contributions to the silent era have been generally overlooked in the writing of film histories. The Women Film Pioneers Project attempts to rectify this oversight, as does our release for academic use and study of the six-disc DVD/Blu-ray combo pack boxset titled EARLY WOMEN FILMMAKERS: AN INTERNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY. International in scope, this groundbreaking collection features over 10 hours of material, comprised of 25 films spanning the years 1902-1943.
Included in this edition are many titles not widely available until now, ranging from shorts to features, live action to animation, and commercial narratives to experimental works. Directors include Alice Guy Blaché, Lois Weber, Mabel Normand, Madeline Brandeis, Olga Preobrazhenskaia, Marie-Louise Iribe, Lotte Reiniger, Claire Parker, Mrs. Wallace Reid (Dorothy Davenport), Leni Riefenstahl, Mary Ellen Bute, and Dorothy Arzner. These women were technically and stylistically innovative, pushing boundaries of story, aesthetic, and genre.
GME’s distribution catalogue also features a wide array of other DSL and DVD publications by women filmmakers, many in the avant-garde vein: a domain in which their cinematic voices have predominated. Countless women filmmakers have expressed their creative visions though a diverse range of cinematic techniques, including animation (MARIA LASSNIG – ANIMATION FILMS), found footage (Abigail Child’s IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?), and optical printing (Holly Fisher’s BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST). They have also made significant contributions to the development of various film movements, including the trance film (MAYA DEREN: EXPERIMENTAL FILMS), Viennese Actionism (VALIE EXPORT: 3 EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILMS), the Zanzibar Group (Jackie Raynal's DEUX FOIS), surrealism (Germaine Dulac's THE SEASHELL AND HE CLERGYMAN), creative biopics (Martina Kudláček's NOTES ON MARIE MENKEN), dance films (MAYA DEREN: DANCE FILMS), performance (Marie Losier's HELLO HAPPINESS!), collage films (Vivian Ostrovsky's PLUNGE), portraiture (Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller's SILENCE ON THE SCREEN), films about the body (Valie Export's INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES), documentaries (Alexandra Dean's BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY), social issue films (Ida Lupino's NEVER FEAR), and experimental animation (SUZANN PITT: ANIMATED FILMS).
In addition to Germaine Dulac’s LA CIGARETTE (1919) and LA SOURIANTE MME. BEUDET (1922) featured on the EARLY WOMEN FILMMAKERS box set, we also distribute THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN (1927), generally considered to be the first surrealist film. This bilingual (French-English) box set with a DVD and a book with extended scholarly essays is an indispensable resource that offers the possibility to rediscover Dulac’s famous film in its restored version and facilitates comprehension of this avant-garde masterpiece thanks to the perspectives opened up by the various artistic and theoretic contributions of the contributors.
Filmmaker Maya Deren. SOURCE: Austin Film Society.
Maya Deren was one of the most preeminent avant-garde filmmakers of the 20th century. Her first film, the hypnotic and nightmarish MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), is the most renowned experimental film throughout all of film history (see MAYA DEREN: EXPERIMENTAL FILMS). It was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for "cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance" in 1990, was named the 40th greatest American film ever made by the BBC in 2015, and in 2022 was ranked 16th in Sight & Sound's decennial poll of the Greatest Films of All Time.
Deren became known as a major proponent of the “trance” film, and her movies are a transitional link between the European avant-garde films of the 1920s (see, for example, THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN) and the American avant-garde films of Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, and Stan Brakhage (see ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT). Deren was also a poet, and developed an interest in modern dance (see MAYA DEREN: DANCE FILMS). She also collaborated with other artists, who appeared in her films, including poet Anaïs Nin, musician John Cage, dancer Frank Westbrook, and her filmmaker-husband, Alexander Hammid.
MARIE MENKEN FILMING ON A BOLEX 16mm CAMERA. SOURCE: SIXPACKFILM.
Contemporaneous to Deren, Marie Menken was another major female experimental filmmaker who made her imprint on avant-garde film history. NOTES ON MARIE MENKEN, a creative documentary by Austrian filmmaker Martina Kudláček, traces the reminiscences of Menken’s friends and colleagues, among them Gerard Malanga (poet, photographer, and filmmaker) and Jonas Mekas (see JONAS MEKAS: THE MAJOR WORKS), fellow Lithuanian, artist, and public champion of the avant-garde. Various interviewees recount how the public, marital theatrics of Menken and her husband, filmmaker Willard Maas (VISIONS OF WARHOL), became the inspiration for the perennial battling older couple in Edward Albee's WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?. Beginning with the excavation of Marie's rusty film cans, old photographs, and papers housed in a storage locker, Kudláček brings Menken vividly back to life. She contrasts her own crisp black-and-white digital cinematography with lush color excerpts from Menken's 16mm celluloid films. The bonus feature on this DVD edition comprises four of the poetic, experimental films that Menken created between 1945 and 1966, and which are referenced in Kudláček’s documentary: VISUAL VARIATIONS ON NOGUCHI (1945), GLIMPSE OF THE GARDEN (1957), ARABESQUE FOR KENNETH ANGER (1958-61), and LIGHTS (1964-1966). Additionally, Menken’s ode to Warhol (ANDY WARHOL) is represented on GME’s release of VISIONS OF WARHOL.
FILMMAKER Martina Kudláček. SOURCE: BOMB MAGAZINE.
Martina Kudláček (NOTES ON MARIE MENKEN) is a significant woman filmmaker who over the course of her career has developed a unique cinematic legacy by creating discursive portraits of a number of experimental cinema’s key figures, including (in addition to Menken), Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid, and Peter Kubelka (FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA). According to film scholar Tom Gunning, "Kubelka's films play and work with the flow of time, compressing the continuous now and presence. His films digest the manifold things of the universe: the elemental energies of light and dark; movement and stillness; the life of animals and patterns of landscape; gesture and dance. With another mode of time Kudláček shared with us Kubelka's patient pace of conversation and listening, exploring things that mean so much to the artist: memories, souvenirs, his past and childhood, his home. All these things entered into Kubelka's films, but here they are brought to light and made part of his legacy as teacher and as artist… FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA allows us to savor, swallow and digest these lessons."
Filmmaker Marie Losier. Source: Villa Albertine.
Another contemporary woman filmmaker, Marie Losier, has created cinematic portraits of an array of avant-garde artists. Losier learned from the Kuchar brothers (SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS) about the art of making 16mm films with a Bolex camera. Fellow filmmaker Jackie Raynal (DEUX FOIS) has written that Losier is “the girl Friday with a 16mm camera, high priestess of celluloid, defending it in the face of digital impermanence.” Through her craft, she has created a unique series of engaging cinematic “dream” portraits featuring key figures in avant-garde circles.
The DVD edition of HELLO HAPPINESS! features Mike Kuchar (BIRD, BATH AND BEYOND, 2003), George Kuchar (ELECTROCUTE YOUR STARS, 2004), Richard Foreman (THE ONTOLOGICAL COWBOY, 2005), Guy Maddin (MANUELLE LABOUR, 2007), Genesis P-Orridge (SLAP THE GONDOLA, 2010), and Alan Vega (JUST A MILLION DREAMS, 2014). The release DREAMINIMALIST features Tony Conrad’s seminal minimalist film THE FLICKER, together with Losier’s portrait of the artist, TONY CONRAD: DREAMINIMALIST. She often choreographs these on-screen performances with outré, costumed characters. Her movies are imbued with both psychological acumen and effervescent flair, which extends as well to her intimate, feature-length portrait biography film, THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE (2011) and CASSANDRO, THE EXOTICO! (2018).
The Swedish-American artist Gunvor Nelson figures among the most important experimental filmmakers of her generation. She was born in Sweden, but left her native country in the mid-1950s to study painting and art history in the United States. Later, she and her husband, filmmaker Bob Nelson, settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and raised their daughter, Oona. Nelson's first film work was with her husband, then with her neighbor Dorothy Wiley, and finally on her own.
Nelson chose not to label herself, identifying as neither "feminist" nor "hippie"; she made what she called "personal" films, (a term she preferred to "experimental" or "avant-garde"). Having studied painting and art history, Nelson chose cinema to express herself, through ambiguous and poetic sound and image art that explores dreams, the use/misuse of the female body, the difficulties of communication between generations, and dislocation from one's environment of origin. Her formal investigations include animation, collage, and found footage. Four early works (1962-1973) brought together in DEPARTURES show the genesis and maturation of an artist, the crystallization of her priorities creatively, and a continuous renewal of inspiration. A second DVD edition, LIGHT YEARS, reflects a half-century of evolution in media and technique, from her first experimental films made in California to her more recent Swedish films and video.
Several of the films on both of these editions were co-directed with Wiley. The LIGHT YEARS DVD also includes a 124-page booklet comprising critical essays and an interview with the filmmaker.
The 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s saw an explosion of women experimental filmmakers, including Jackie Raynal and Rose Lowder (France), Valie Export and Marie Lassnig (Austria), Christine Noll Brinckmann (Germany), and Abigail Child and Holly Fisher (United States), all of whose creative output continued into the 21st century.
Jackie Raynal is perhaps best known as the former programmer of two of New York’s premiere arthouses: Carnegie Hall Cinema and Bleecker Street Cinema. She began her career in the 1960s as the film editor for New Wave directors such as Eric Rohmer, Jean-Daniel Pollet, and Jean Eustache. Challenged by Zanzibar patroness Sylvina Boissonnas to stop editing other people’s films and make her own, Raynal traveled to Barcelona, where she completed DEUX FOIS (1969) in a single week. One of the most enigmatic of the Zanzibar films, this experimental narrative is composed of a series of unconnected episodes, some repeated twice. The fairy-tale phrase “once upon a time” is turned on its head, as is the logic of classical film construction. With herself as the film’s “star,” Raynal announces each of the film’s sequences and proclaims, theatrically and ironically, “tonight will be the end of meaning.”
FILMMAKER ROSE LOWDER. SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
BOUQUET D’IMAGES brings together a series of five cinematic studies that filmmaker Rose Lowder meticulously created between 1978 and 1995. For many years, she has been developing an exceptional technique of weaving together images gathered frame- by-frame to form meticulous patterns of light. By oscillating the focal plane of photographs shot in the same place over time, her layered tapestries produce a new relationship between filmed reality and filmic image. From the movement of a waterwheel’s rotations, mirroring the camera mechanism, to a bouquet of flowers becoming a bouquet of images, her work demonstrates a unique means of expression. According to Light Cone co-founder Yann Beauvais: “Lowder favors scenes of nature, even though some of the sites filmed are located in the city. Through their filmic transformation, they no longer appear to be urban manifestations but natural landscapes. In this way, Lowder continues an impressionist tradition: working in nature rather than in the studio; like Paul Cézanne, working on site is the sine qua non condition in order to reveal the ‘little sensation’ and represent it.”
FILMMAKER VALIE EXPORT. SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
Austrian artist Valie Export has been an influential and provocative figure on the international art scene for over three decades. Her practice includes film, video, photography, text, and performance. Initially expanding the Actionist project to confront a complex feminist critique of the social and political body, her works achieve a compelling fusion of the visceral and the conceptual. This publication THREE EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILMS brings together works she created between 1970 and 1984.
INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES (1976) is Export’s first attempt at a feature-length narrative. Author Gene Youngblood has written that this film “is a tour de force of cinematic invention…and it reveals a prodigious talent at work. The title refers to extraterrestrial aliens called 'Hyksos,' malevolent forces that enter human bodies like incubi and initiate the decline of civilization. Not to be taken literally, the Hyksos are a poetic metaphor for the modern Zeitgeist, the apocalyptic mood of the times. Ms. Export uses this theme as a framework for some of the most audacious and amazing experiments since Jean Cocteau. The comparison is appropriate, for on one level INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES is about art and the artist, a modern BLOOD OF THE POET. To this, Export brings a fresh and intelligent sensibility, characteristically self-referential. Her visual resources include mirrors, still photography, video, dance, and films within the film, all employed with a bold and surprising inventiveness."
STILL: MARIA LASSNIG’S SELF-PORTRAIT (1971). SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
Maria Lassnig trained at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and then spent several years in Paris in the 1950s and '60s, where she was exposed to Art Informel and Surrealism. From 1968 to 1980, she lived in New York, where she did pioneering work in film and produced a series of remarkably inventive animations, many of which are collected in the DVD publication entitled MARIA LASSNIG – ANIMATION FILMS. She then returned to Vienna, where she continued to work and teach. Drawing on some of the same themes and subjects as her paintings, her filmic narratives are profound and astute observations of the complexities of male-female relationships and of the experience of being both a woman and an artist. Her most celebrated film — MARIA LASSNIG KANTATE — was produced later, in 1992, when Lassnig was 73, and is also featured in this DVD edition. It presents her life story in a 14-verse song performed by the artist in a variety of costumes and accompanied by animations that are filled with humor and wit.
In addition to these significant works by Valie Export and Maria Lassnig, we also distribute monographic DVD editions of films and videos created by other Austrian and Eastern European filmmakers: Constanze Ruhm, Dóra Maurer, Gertrude Moser-Wagner, Linda Christanell, Lisl Ponger, Mara Mattuschka, and Ursula Pürrer, all of whom are represented here.
FILMMAKER CHRISTINE NOLL BRINCKMANN. SOURCE: AUSLAND-BERLIN.
Christine Noll Brinckmann is a filmmaker, spectator, scholar, and author. Heinz Emigholz (HEINZ EMIGHOLZ: THE FORMATIVE YEARS), who in 1993 inaugurated the "Experimental Film Design" class at the Berlin University of the Arts, inspired Brinckmann to write an important text which was published in 1993, and was entitled "Experimental Film 1920-1990: Collective Movements and Solitary Thrusts." This remains the only attempt to give an overview of the history of experimental film in Germany. According to Katharine Synema: “Hidden and discarded people and places are the sediments on which Noll Brinckmann’s films rest. Peripheral places and castaway objects unfold histories and assume uncanny connections… Color and texture are leitmotifs in Noll Brinckmann’s cinema. They turn the gaze to the surfaces of things and thy give a dynamic quality to the surface of the cinematic image.”
The lavishly illustrated soft-cover book publication THE PRIMAL SCENE presents a DVD with eight films by Brinckmann, reproductions of images from the films in full-color, essay contributions, and an interview with the filmmaker. Also included are two bonus titles (STILL LIFE, 1976, by Jenny Okun, and CASTA DIVA [1st episode], 1982, by Eric de Kuyper) together with Brinckmann’s appreciation of these films.
STILL: ABIGAIL CHILD’S IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?. SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? features a DVD of the seven-part epic series of the same name, created by Abigail Child, together with extended analysis of this filmmaker’s work by noted scholars including Tom Gunning and Melissa Ragona, as well as an interview with the filmmaker herself. The filmic work of Child, borrowing strategies from found footage, Appropriation Art, Language Poetry, and experimental music, stands as a landmark in the experimental cinema of the 1980s and beyond. The processing of interruption and fragmentation inform the series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? (1981-1989), reactivating the stakes of montage applied in the aforementioned artistic practices. Her films also deconstruct issues around the margins of representation, including female identity and economic class.
During the pre-digital era of filmmaking, perhaps there has been no greater practitioner of the use of the optical printer than Holly Fisher, resulting in arresting celluloid images developed on the 16mm film emulsion. BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST is a DVD edition of a selection of her moving image works, featuring her most widely-known film, BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST (1992), together with four of her short films (GLASS SHADOWS [1976], FROM THE LADIES [1977], THIS IS MONTAGE [1978], and SOFTSHOE [1987]). In BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST, Fisher worked for four years in meticulous fashion to construct a collage of layered images, text, and sounds, as well as fragmented storylines. She weaves together images and audio from John Ford’s MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946), a western pulp writer, women working in a Maine fishery smokehouse, postcards of paintings of the female form by the great masters, and a feminist poet. Fisher thus creates a more open ended and formalist narrative that upends the story of the mythological western hero toward a feminist critique of women at work and in life.
SOFTSHOE is another optical printing masterwork, in which Fisher creates a collage of frames in motion. The filmmaker originally shot footage in Europe of people, buildings, and nature. In the optical printing process, she then fractured these narrative sequences by employing a staccato montage rhythm, which she constructed through freeze-frames, slow motion, the intrusion of the frame line, optical zooms, black frames, and revelation of the film strip. Some of the most visually arresting sequences involve the reproduction of specific imagery (blades of grass, a church, a horse and cart) into smaller quadrants of successive motion. In this manner, Fisher also pays homage to Eadweard Muybridge, whose nineteenth century motion experiments are embedded in her film.
GLASS SHADOWS (filmed in Fisher’s studio in Cambridge) and FROM THE LADIES (filmed at a Holiday Inn in NYC) are self-reflexive works, in which the artist’s presence is revealed though the reflected surfaces of windows and mirrors. Both films deconstruct the filmmaking process, incorporating images of the camera, 16mm film strips, and the motion picture projector. These two works demonstrate Fisher’s proficiency with capturing both light and shadow, which are two of the essential characteristics of the cinematic enterprise, as well as externalizing Fisher’s creative process.
Finally, THIS IS MONTAGE represents Fisher’s homage to Sergei Eisenstein and underscores the filmmaker’s formative training beginning in the 1960s as an editor. (She later edited the Oscar nominated documentary feature WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN? [1987]). Throughout her career, Fisher has successively bridged the dividing line between documentary film and experimental narrative.
PLUNGE is a double-DVD edition spanning Vivian Ostrovksy’s experimental filmmaking career. A citizen of the world, Ostrovksy has made films in Brazil, France, Israel, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
Conversant in the experimental filmmaking practices of such artists as Jonas Mekas (DIARIES, NOTES, AND SKETCHES) and Jim McBride (DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY), Ostrovsky was inspired to create her own film diaries. She developed a filmmaking technique that initially involved shooting with a silent Super 8mm camera; she loved the “gritty…indefinition” of the images that were exposed on the film’s emulsion. She continued with an intuitive editing process, adding in sound originating from vinyl records. (Later, she filmed in MiniDV so as to simultaneously be able to record image and sound together).
As her filmmaking adventures progressed, combined with her extensive knowledge of other avant-garde filmmakers’ works (including Bruce Conner and Jack Smith, as well as Jacques Tati and Jean-Luc Godard), she incorporated the cinematic forms of the film diary, found footage, collage, essay film, personal memoir, and political tract to create her own distinct filmic language. As Federico Rossin has written so succinctly in the booklet accompanying this DVD edition: "This indeterminacy, or mixing of genres, provokes a reconsideration of the language of control, of all aspects of 'Cinematic machismo'; it indicates the militant and feminist roots of Ostrovsky’s practice; her ethical and political commitment. Combining great humility with breathtakingly precise audiovisual montage, Ostrovsky creates a field of artistic expression that escapes and expands beyond its boundaries… her hybrid cinema refuses to be limited by format or convention; with each new film, she liberates powerful new forms and expands her burgeoning creative process."
The joint DVD and book publication entitled SILENCE ON THE SCREEN/Once is Not Enough (Photography and Film), features the work of Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller. She is an Austrian photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist born in London, England, in 1946. Her photographic practice has been attributed to a 20th-century movement known as Viennese Actionism. This is one of the latest publications in the series of editions published by INDEX DVD, a joint venture of the Vienna-based Sixpack Film and Meidenwerkstatt established for the publication of Austrian films and art videos. This specific release complements similar editions of Viennese Actionist filmmakers such as Kurt Kren (KURT KREN: ACTION FILMS) and Valie Export (VALIE EXPORT: 3 EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILMS). Rejecting the commodification of art, these artists enacted precisely scored “Actions” -- staged events in environmental spaces -- which paralleled activities of the Fluxus artists (see FLUXFILM ANTHOLOGY). Many of the films that these artists created focused on the body. For women artists, these moving image works also were known as “Feminist Actionism" (see also Export’s INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES).
The DVD, SILENCE ON THE SCREEN, is a selection of 19 short films by vom Gröller. These works were filmed in Austria, Senegal, Italy, and France. They focus primarily on portraiture, including faces, female breasts, and hands. Most all of these films are 1½ to 3 minutes in length.
The accompanying soft-cover book entitled ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH (in which the DVD is included) is replete with photographs that parallel the artist’s moving image works in portraiture. This hard-copy publication contains pictures of artists and filmmaker friends. They include Bruce Baillie, Hollis Frampton, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, and George Maciunas; Kenneth Anger, Bruce McClure, and George Landow; vom Gröller's former husband Peter Kubelka (FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA), George and Mike Kuchar (SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS), Stan and Jane Brakhage (ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT), Jackie Raynal (DEUX FOIS), Jonas Mekas and Hollis Melton (JONAS MEKAS: THE MAJOR WORKS), and Ken and Flo Jacobs (CYCLOPEAN 3D: LIFE WITH A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN).
This publication also features several of vom Gröller’s annual series of self-portraits , and includes two important essays: “Aging – An Ideal Condition/Photography and film in relationship to each other” by critic Dietmar Schwârzler, as well as “The Metal Bowl,” authored by filmmaker Miranda July.
FILMMAKER MARGOT DIAS, ON SET. SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
Women have also made significant contributions to documentary filmmaking. GME already distributes DVD editions of works by Martina Kudláček (see above, NOTES ON MARIE MENKEN and FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA). We are now proud to present work by Margot Dias, an important yet overlooked filmmaker through the DVD publication, MARGOT DIAS: ETHNOGRAPHIC FILMS 1958-1961. Between these years, the anthropologist Dias (1908-2001) shot 28 films in Mozambique and Angola, which belong to the Film Archive of the National Museum of Ethnology (Museum Nacional de Etnologia) in Portugal. These films were made within the "study Missions on the Ethnic Minorities of the Portuguese Overseas Territories" headed by Jorge Dias, and represent one of the first uses of ethnographic film within Portuguese anthropological studies.
This edition includes all the films shot within those fieldwork campaigns and a soundtrack composed from Dias's own field recordings. The identification and thematic organization of the films, as well as the soundtrack, is the work of Catarina Alves Costa. Also included, as a bonus feature, is a previously unreleased interview with Dias, held in 1996 by Joaquim Pais de Brito, former director of the National Museum of Ethnology.
STILL: ALEXANDRA DEAN’S 2017 DOCUMENTARY BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY. SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
In BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY (2017), Alexandra Dean weaves together live interviews with Hedy Lamarr’s children, friends, and Hollywood figures; newsreels and still photographs; graphs, diagrams, and animation; as well as newly-discovered audio interviews of Lamarr telling in her own words the background story about her life both on and off the silver screen. The documentary recounts Lamarr’s experiences, from her beginnings as the trophy wife of a weapons manufacturer for Hitler, to her escape to America, her rise to fame as a movie star, and her creation of brilliant inventions for the allies in WWII.
Dean is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and a documentary filmmaker. She produced news-magazine documentaries for PBS before becoming a series and documentary producer at Bloomberg television, producing programming about inventors who shape our world. She also wrote about invention for Businessweek magazine. She most recently produced the A&E docuseries SECRETS OF PLAYBOY. GME is proud to distribute Dean's award-winning Lamarr documentary as a DSL file, Blu-Ray, and DVD.
STILL: SUZANN PITT’S ASPARAGUS (1977). SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
Suzan Pitt (1943-2019) began her career as a painter, In 1968, she began making animated films which were inspired by her paintings. Pitt wrote: “My painted images seem to have a past and future and through animation I could imagine and dramatize their stories”. All of her films were drawn and painted by hand and filmed on an Oxberry animation stand.
Through her short film work, the artist occupied a unique position within the world of experimental animation. She drew upon the surrealist tradition of artists like Leonora Carrington, Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons, and underground comics. She was an inheritor of the animation tradition of Winsor McCay, who probed the inner world of dreams as sites for whimsy, imagination, wit, and nightmares, depicting human fears and delusions. Most significantly, though, Pitt relied upon her interior world, through which she vividly displayed her psyche on the film canvas. As renown author and animator John Canemaker has observed, “She put her undiluted, unadulterated, uncensored dreams on screen.”
Pitt’s most famous film was ASPARAGUS, a hypnotic, wordless, erotic, and jarring visual poem about a faceless women. While exploring the creative process, the character enters a theatre, where she opens a suitcase and unleashes a hodgepodge of items — a lamp, a chair, balloons, insects, and a phallic asparagus — that waft above a fascinated audience of animated clay figures. Unusual for an experimental animated film, ASPARAGUS achieved wide commercial success when it was shown at midnight screenings together with David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD (1977).
ASPARAGUS is included with four other essential films by Pitt, made between 1995 and 2013, in SUZANN PITT: ANIMATED FILMS. As a bonus feature, this publication includes a documentary on Pitt and her creative process, entitled PERSISTENCE OF VISION (2006), which was made by her son and daughter-in-law Blue and Laura Kraining.
IDA LUPINO DIRECTING SALLY FORREST. ONTHE SET OF NEVER FEAR (1949). SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
If Dorothy Arzner (DANCE, GIRL, DANCE, 1940) has been historically best-known as a pioneering woman director of Hollywood films (from the late 1920s to the early 1940s), actor-turned-filmmaker Ida Lupino predominated as the most renown woman director from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s (albeit primarily through films that she herself independently produced, through her production company The Filmmakers). Lupino was the second woman director (after Arzner) to be admitted to the Director’s Guild of America.
Lupino made a unique mark on filmmaking of the era by focusing on social issue films that dramatically brought to the fore such taboo subjects as serial killers (THE HITCH-HIKER) bigamy (THE BIGAMIST), rape (OUTRAGE) out-of-wedlock birth (NOT WANTED), and polio (NEVER FEAR).
Lupino, who herself had been stricken with polio as an adolescent, creates in NEVER FEAR is a psychologically probing look at coping with chronic illness. It was co-written and co-produced by Lupino and her partner (and husband) Collier Young. The movie is filmed in semi-documentary style and shot in black-and-white by Archie Stout, an ongoing collaborator on Lupino’s films.
Inspired by the true-life murder spree of serial killer Billy Cook, THE HITCH-HIKER is the tension-laden saga of two men on a camping trip (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy) who are held captive by a homicidal drifter (William Talman). The only classic American film noir directed by a woman, the film is compelling thanks to Lupino's ability to deconstruct her characters' macho exteriors. The captured men bicker and squabble about ways they can escape the hand of their captor, stressing that only through their commitment to one another can they both survive. For this reason, the film plays as an intense and surprisingly progressive buddy movie lacking the expected stoic glorification of heroism – more a lesson on survival in the direst of environments.
GME is proud to distribute both of these titles as DSLs, on Blu-Ray, and DVD.
Historical Compilations
In addition to the historical compilation EARLY WOMEN FILMMAKERS: AN INTERNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY, mentioned at the beginning of this release, GME also distributes other DSL and DVD compilations organized by film movements (experimental cinema, video art, performance), genre (animation), and country (Spain, Latin America, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, and the United States). Each of these digital editions incorporates moving image works by women artists. In significant measure, these digital editions begin to reshape our understanding and appreciation of film history across and within various cinematic discourses.
MASTERWORKS OF AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE EXPERIMENTAL FILM focuses on the emergence and development of the experimental film movement in the United States between 1920 and 1970. Women artists were instrumental in this era, and included in this digital edition are works by Mary Ellen Bute, Maya Deren, Anaïs Nin, Marie Menken, and Amy Greenfield. Additionally, FLUXFILM ANTHOLOGY includes works by Yoko Ono and Chieko Shiomi.
CINE A CONTRACORRIENTE constitutes another broad survey of experimental filmmaking, in this case, of Latin American cinema (including Cuba), with films made between 1933 and 2008. Elena Pardo from Mexico is represented in this DVD edition with her film JUQUILITA (2004).
FROM ECSTASY TO RAPTURE is an historical survey of Spanish Experimental Cinema, comprising films created between 1957 and 2005. These artists express passion for the medium, and demonstrate that experimental cinema has a long tradition in Spain, despite adversities in production, distribution, and exhibition during the Franco regime, and following that, in being considered as part of the artistic world. Women filmmakers are represented in this DVD edition by Eugènia Balcells (BOY MEETS GIRL, 1974) and Laida Lertxundi (FARCE SENSATIONELLE!, 2004).
APOLOGÍA ANTOLOGÍA brings together 40 years of audiovisual creation, comprising 85 works of video art by Spanish filmmakers, that date from 1974 to 2014. Organized by Hamaca (a media and video art distributor based in Barcelona), this five-disc boxset of DVDs is organized around different themes, including Conceptual Video, montage, political poetics, and the body. The women video artists included in this digital publication include Cecilia Barriga, María Cañas, Dora García, Marisa Maza, María Ruido, and Virginia Villaplana, among others.
FROM DOODLES TO PIXELS is an extraordinary compilation of approximately 50 short animated films (and one feature), produced in Spain, spanning the entire history of cinema (in this case, 1909 to 2015). These three DVDs not only reflect the diversity of techniques that make animation an art that knows no boundaries, but also offer a journey through the aesthetic evolution of a country that has lived through times of scarcity and isolation before emerging as a significant producer of animated films within the contemporary international arena. This boxed set also includes a 160-page booklet with information on each film. Women animators Rocío Álvarez , Isabel Herguera, Izibene Oñederra, and Anna Solanas are all included in this digital publication.
SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT is a compilation of British avant-garde films from the 1960s and 1970s, in which independent filmmakers challenged cinematic convention. Based at the innovative laboratory of the London Film-Makers’ Cooperative, these artists were able to control every aspect of the creative process, including printing and processing, which became vital to the form and content of the resultant films. Lis Rhodes, Annabel Nicolson, and Marilyn Halford are key artists who created moving image works within this discourse.
In similar fashion, STUDIO EEN: EXPERIMENTAL FILMS FROM THE LOWLANDS traces the output of filmmakers at the end of the 1980s who were dedicated to working against the tide of the rise of video production and the decline of the Super 8mm film format (as well as 16mm). Filmmaker Karel Doing and two of his friends from the art school in Arnheim, the Netherlands, created a new space for filming and processing small gauge film. Among the women filmmakers involved with Studio Een were Barbara Meter, Ania Rachmat, and Anet van de Eizen.
The thematic compilation AS SHE LIKES IT – FEMALE PERFORMANCE ART FROM AUSTRIA focuses uniquely on women artists from Austria. Through moving image and sound works dating from 1992 to 2004, they utilize the expressive power of voice and body to more confidently assert the female gaze, in contrast to the Viennese Actionism movement and Happenings in the 1960s and 1970s that provided a foundation for these later iterations of performance art.
These DSLs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays are currently available to universities, libraries, museums, and other educational organizations in North America (U.S. and Canada), and include public performance rights. Public performance rights extend to use in classrooms and in other non-commercial settings where no admission is charged.