First International Festival of Women's Films.
New York City: N.P., 1972. 28¾” x 23”. Poster printed one side. Very good plus: folded as issued, with a few hints of toning and/or creasing at folds and a couple of tiny soil spots.
This is a poster advertising the “First International Festival of Women's Films.” According to a number of scholars, this was the first major festival devoted to films created by women. The event was held over two weeks in June, 1972 at The Fifth Avenue Cinema at 66 Fifth Avenue in New York City. The theater closed the following year, and the building now houses the New School’s Parsons School of Design.
According to contemporary press releases the purpose of the festival was to “encourage women film-makers, who are said to suffer from notorious discrimination . . . [and to] provide an outlet for selected works, and to serve as a forum for the exchange and dissemination of the woman's 'point of view.'” The festival was sponsored by The Film Culture Non-Profit Corporation (which published the periodical, Film Culture) and The New York State Council on the Arts in association with The Women's Interart Center (WIC). The WIC was founded in 1971 by members of both the Women Artists in Revolution and Feminists in the Arts. The best concise description we've found of the event comes from Phoebe Chen in an online New York Review of Books article in June, 2020:
“In June 1972, on a corner of Greenwich Village just off 13th Street, the now-vanished Fifth Avenue Cinema was briefly home to a historic showcase: the First International Festival of Women’s Films. Across the hundred and twenty films that screened, a critic for Women & Film noticed a trend: a fount of documentaries that highlighted the vexing banalities of women’s lives, drawn from the candor and fury of their everyday. If, as scholar and socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham wrote in Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, 'all revolutionary movements create their own ways of seeing,' then these early feminist documentaries also created a way of speaking. Grounded in second-wave feminism’s axiomatic 'the personal is political,' many of these films offered variations on a then-radical form: women telling their stories to a camera, their voices no corrective afterthought, but the creative principle itself.”
The poster contains one or two sentence descriptions of several dozen shorts that were exhibited during the festival, as well as longer descriptions of 17 feature length films. The feature films included Barbara Loden's Wanda (which premiered at the 31st Venice International Film Festival) as well as a tribute to Dorothy Arzner with the screening of her 1929 film, The Wild Party. There was a second festival held in 1976: a 17 day event, with 125 films and a reported attendance of 10,000. We have been unable to determine if there were subsequent festivals by the same promoters.
A large and detailed event poster for an important feminist first. OCLC locates no copies; we handled another several years ago. Very good +. Item #7525
Price: $950.00