SURVIVA, directed by Ariel Dougherty and Carol Clement, a Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) preservation premiere, and Lisa Crafts' GLASS GARDENS, an earlier WFPF preservation, view the theme of art making and survival from different perspectives: SURVIVA, on a pragmatic level focusing on the day to day concerns of a group of women artists and GLASS GARDENS, showing the power of a woman’s artistic drive, even in the worst of times. In both films animation figures prominently.
SURVIVA, 1980, 32 minutes, the last film produced by Women Make Movies when it was a production company. Women artists play themselves as they face the issues of making, defining, and showing their art in the male-dominated art world. A document of Second Wave Feminist activity and filmmaking in the late 1970s, SURVIVA utilizes live-action and animated sequences.
Preceded by: GLASS GARDENS, 1982, 6 minutes, is an elegantly hand-drawn black and white animated film, set in the dystopian ruins of consumer society in which the protagonist has an unquenchable urge to create art and beauty out of relics and waste. Her art fuels her will to survive and forges a path to a more optimistic and hopeful future. Ariel Dougherty and Lisa Crafts will participate in a post-screening discussion and Q & A Ariel Dougherty, co-director of SURVIVA, has been a powerhouse of activism and support for women’s filmmaking since 1972 when she co-founded Women Make Movies. For the past 50 years she has promoted women’s filmmaking as an organizer, a teacher, a writer, and a lecturer. In addition to making ten films of her own, she has produced several others, most notably Denise Bostrom & Jane Warrenbrand’s Healthcaring (1976), and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Women Art Revolution (2010).
Lisa Crafts, director of GLASS GARDENS, is an award-winning animator and moving-image artist, and a Guggenheim fellowship recipient. Her interdisciplinary work addresses issues of environmental uncertainty, sexuality, creativity, and chaos.
Curated by Ann Deborah Levy
The Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT) was founded in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art in 1995 has preserved nearly 150 American-made films by women, covering almost every genre from the early days of Silent Cinema to the present and representing women makers of diverse backgrounds, points of view, and all colors.
Tickets: http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=03&year=2023#showing-55802
For more on the Women’s Film Preservation Fund, please visit: www.womensfilmpreservationfund.org or email: [email protected]