In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Archival News
  • Ina Archer

The Women’s Film Preservation Fund Restores Jessie Maple’s 1981 Film Will

In the expanding field of film archiving, preservation, and restoration, The Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF), a division of New York Women in Film and Television, is a unique organization, the only one of its kind in the world. Established in 1995 in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the WFPF awards cash and in-kind services for the preservation of American films in which women play key creative roles, both before and behind the camera, above and below the line. These films are edifying, historic, and often entertaining. The WFPF’s goal is to contribute to the archival stability of women’s films and to build public awareness of women’s cinema. The Fund’s mission has always been to redress the omission of women’s significant and varied, and often groundbreaking, contribution to all aspects of the film industry.

The eighty-plus movies in the WFPF “collection” are from different genres and eras that include formal, narrative, experimental, and documentary. This rich variety covers political, personal, and social documentaries such as the collective production, The Women’s Film (1970), as well as Barbara Koppel’s Oscar winning Harlan County USA (1976), and noted Magnum photographer Eve Arnold’s Behind the Veil (1972). There are films by animators like Mary Ellen Bute and Faith Hubley; experimental works by artists ranging from Maya Deren to Storm de Hirsch, and the “intermedia” pieces of artists like Meredith Monk. Included are orphaned works as unusual as Deliverance (1919) written by Helen Keller or the madcap narrative, The Movie Queen (1939), by itinerate director Margaret Cram Showalter; home movies, theatrical screen tests, and commercial shorts; plus features from lesser or unknown names such as Mrs. Beta Breuil as well as from important, established auteur/director/producer/studio heads like Lois Weber and Alice Guy Blaché.

WFPF, from the outset, has restored films in which women of color have played a crucial part, thus the Fund takes an active role in redressing the long cinematic history of black stereotypes and/or invisibility and the possibility of seeing black people as human and humanely portrayed on screen. One of [End Page 197] the Fund’s initial projects was a silent film by the prolific Guy-Blaché, A Fool and His Money (1912). This is thought to be the first black cast film, a comedic short about gambling shot in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the location of Blaché’s Solax Studios. Pearl Bowser comments in a WFPF informational short that Blaché kept a sign on the set of A Fool and His Money (and on the sets for all her films) that instructed the players to “Be NATURAL.” Bowser suggests that the direction asked “not to be natural blacks, just be natural.” Emma Knowlton Lytle’s Raisin’ Cotton, a beautiful color document of a Mississippi plantation shot in the late 1930s, shows the reality of sharecroppers’ lives. The Women’s Film incorporates black and Latina women’s experience of oppression into a feminist portrait of all women’s lived conditions. Equally open, The International Sweethearts of Rhythm (1986) reveals a hidden musical history of an all-woman, interracial swing band that performed in the 1940s. The band also appears in one of two “race” features (black cast independent movies made primarily for black audiences, starring noted African American performers) funded by WFPF. That Man of Mine (1945) is the first major film of legendary actress Ruby Dee. The crowd-pleasing Dirty Gertie from Harlem USA (1946), one of many films directed by actor/director Spencer Williams, stars vibrant Francine Everett, an African American who was active in WPA Theater Projects and the Negro Actor’s Guild and who refused to play stereotypical roles.

In 2008 the WFPF was pleased to award a grant to the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University for the restoration of Jessie Maple’s film, Will (1981). Will, the first independent feature film to be directed by a black woman, is also the first film supported by the WFPF in which an African American woman is behind the camera. Shot in...

pdf

Share