On Saturday, March 2, RWC will host the Cincinnati Women’s Film Festival, which will be from one to nine o’clock in Muntz Hall. The event is co-sponsored by The UC Center for Women’s Studies and RWC, with assistance from Friends of Women’s Studies and the Women’s Film Project.Andrea Kornbluh is the director of the event, whose beginning can be traced to the early 1990s. There is a dizzying array of films being shown, but they all fall in to three broad themes: Women in the Muslim World, Classic Women’s Films, and Potpourri.
Of the Women in the Muslim World, the films by Elizabeth Fernea, entitled “A Veiled Revolution,” and Saira Shah’s “Beneath the Veil: A Personal Journey” seem the most significant. Fernea’s work tells the story of the gradual emancipation of women in Egypt-both political and cultural.
The Egyptian women were the first to receive free secular education, to take off their veils publicly, and to demonstrate for political causes. Then the next generation of Egyptian women gave up these hard fought-for rights, retreated to a docile existence, and again donned Islamic dress.
In “Beneath the Veil: A Personal Journey,” Saira Shah tells of her personal exploits inside Afghanistan in Spring 2001. As a journalist for Independent Television News in London, she had the opportunity to enter the world of the Taliban. Having heard her father tell her of the beauty of his native land, she wished to wittness firsthand the devastation.
What she found was, in her words, “.a Kafkaesque nightmare-a world in which the lunatics have taken over the asylum.”
She tells of entering Kandahar, the Taliban’s home base, and seeing bright new Toyotas with tinted windows, zipping around town. The men inside had the officious title “The Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue.” They were the secret police.
Saira Shah also recounts her visit to her father’s hometown of Paghman. From her father’s description of a pastoral setting of well-tended gardens with beautiful trees and fountains, she found instead a town decimated by war.
The classic women’s film section is curated by Michael Sanders, and it shows his ability to find early pioneers in the history of cinema. The pioneers, who were both women film directors, were Alice Guy-Blache and Ida Lupino.
In the film “The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blache,” the story is told of this legendary film director. While working as a secretary for Gaumont, she directed her first film, “La Fee Aux Choux,” in 1896, which was produced to help market the motion picture projector. This made her the first director to make a narrative film.
This film was so successful at the International Exhibition in Paris that she was made head of Gaumont’s film making production. While directing films for Gaumont, she invented many of the cinematic techniques attributed to Melies, a rival film director. Some of the techniques she developed were masking and double exposure.
After marrying an American, she moved to Cleveland and then New York, settling in to happy domesticity. Growing bored after several years, she decided to go back to directing. She started a film company with her own money. She called it Solax and used a blazing sun as its logo. Under her stewardship, it produced 325 films between 1910 and 1914.
The enterprise grew so fast that she was able to build a huge motion picture plant in Fort Lee, New Jersey, at a cost of $100,000. The facility included five stage sets, laborotories, and projection rooms. At least 35 of the films that Solex produced were directed by its founder.
In her lifetime spanning 93 years, she was able to rise from a humble secretary at Gaumont to an independent film director/producer who owned her own production company.
Ida Lupino started her own production company, The Film Makers, with her second husband, Collier Young, because, as she said, “Someone else seemed to be doing all of the interesting work.” She chose films with a social conscience that dealt with subjects like rape, bigomy, and unwed motherhood. The films also do not offer clean, cut and dried resolutions. She also controlled all aspects of film production, including direction and development of the screenplay. These films were all made within a meager budget of $160,000 per film, and had no “stars.”
Because of her choice of subject matter, she became known as “the darling of the tough guy’s school of directing.” She was ranked alongside fellow craftsmen such as Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang, and William Wellman. Her penultimate tough-guy thriller is “The Hitchhiker.” The film runs for 70 minutes and tells of the disasterous consequences when two men pick up a demented hitchhiker.
Another segment of the “Classic Women’s Film” is a ten minute survey, “The Image of Women in Film Noir.” This is a compilation of the images of the femme fatale in this important cinematic genre.
The final division of the Women’s Film Festival belongs to experimental and avant- films and is called potpourri. It is curated by Sharon Moony and Laura Herman Curate, both students of the E Media Tech program. Some of the works shown will be by Eve Sandler and Louise Leroux.
Eve Sandler is an acclaimed multi-medial artist who has shown her artwork at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Froms Hals Museum in Holland. The title of her film is “The Wash: A Cleaning Story,” and is billed as “an autobiographical video narrative.”
Louise Laroux started her career as a modern dancer (for six years), and honed her skills as a documentary filmmaker at the National Film Board. She has also worked on Jacques Godbout’s films (as co-writer for Fate of America). In the film “Stiletto,” she studies the cultural underpinnings to the allure of this classic pump.
The keynote address will be given by Amber Hollibough at 7:30, which will be follwed by “The Heart of the Matter,” her documentary film. Ms. Hollinbaugh has been active on human rights issues with the United Nations.”
“The Heart of the Matter won the Freedom of Expression Award at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, and explores feminist issues, including racial stereotypes and the woman’s need to please others.
This women’s film festival shows the broad contours of feminist concern. And because of its multi-disciplinary approach, it also demonstrates the success that is possible in a university setting. And finally the program provides great role models for the future.