Breaking Away from Reverence and Rape: The AFI Directing Workshop for Women, Feminism, and the Politics of the Accidental Archive

Tucked away in a dusty corner of the Louis B. Mayer Library at the American Film Institute (AFI) in Los Angeles are VHS tapes of some of the Directing Workshop for Women’s (DWW’s) earliest films. Founded in 1974, the DWW gave its female students money, a camera, actors, and staff so that they could gain some directorial experience as well as a tangible sample of their work. Many of these women were famous actresses, producers, and writers of their time, such as Ellen Burstyn, Julia Phillips, and Maya Angelou. Having flown to Los Angeles for the sole purpose of watching these movies, I was taken aback when the librarian pulled out a grubby cardboard box and apologetically said, “These were the only ones I could find, but I’m still looking.” She spent several hours looking for more films even after I began my research, but only a few other VHS tapes surfaced.

Though the library has the original tapes on which the films were shot, most of them were never transferred to VHS and, consequently, are lost to any researcher, myself included, as the facility no longer has the appropriate technology for viewing them.¹ Others were transferred, but not in their entirety. While watching one movie, Lee Grant’s The Stronger, the screen cut off in the midst of the climactic scene. The library assistant, an undergraduate student who shared my concern about the state of these films, used a small screwdriver to open up the tape. We both looked inside and saw that although the movie continued, the reel did not. Forty years after these women made these films, it is clear that the ones available for viewing were saved accidentally.

The inaccessibility of the DWW’s earliest works demonstrates the political nature of an archive and its materials available for scholarly research, highlighting the separate implications embedded in “preservation” and “accessibility.”² Lynne Littman, a documentary filmmaker and DWW student in 1974, attributes the accidental archive to a lack of organization rather than a concerted effort to exclude women from film industry history.³ Whether the oversight in making these films accessible was deliberate or not, the little attention that the AFI has paid to this collection manifests the same feelings of irrelevance these women directors tried to overcome.

In the first half of the twentieth century, women like Alice Guy-Blaché, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, and Maya Deren directed films in the United States and abroad, but as feminist researchers of the 1970s argue, the women’s rights movement engendered a backlash that resulted in “director” becoming a virtually all-male occupation in Hollywood; in female characters that were either whores, virgins, or spinsters; and in the prevalence of the all-male homosocial film.⁴ The backlash accentuated American society’s sexism, but nevertheless, feminists made gains in entering film. The 1970s, as Annette Kuhn argues, was a turning point for feminist filmmakers and critics. Between 1972 and 1975, the New York International Festival of Women’s Films and the Toronto Women and Film Festival began, and Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape (1974) and Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus (1973) were published.⁵ The 1970s also saw the rise of women’s film collectives and distributors, feminist film journals, and the influx of women into film production schools, such as the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Southern California; and New York University.⁶ The DWW emerged during the height of the feminist movement within an industry that has never been able to break away from the shackles of chauvinism, and within this complex context, these feminist filmmakers worked at the crossroads of race, class, and fame.

The films available for viewing compose an accidental archive of the early work of many women directors in Hollywood, but they also tell their own story about the complicated relationship the commercial film industry had with feminism in the 1970s. All of the women who participated in...