Lesbian Feminist Cinema's Archive and Moonforce Media's National Women's Film Circuit

Lesbian Feminist Cinema's Archive and Moonforce Media's National Women's Film CircuitAuthor(s): Roxanne SamerSource: Feminist Media Histories, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 2015), pp. 90-124Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.2.090 .

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ROXANNE SAMER

Lesbian Feminist Cinema’s Archive and Moonforce Media’sNational Women’s Film Circuit

ABSTRACT This essay offers a microhistory of the feminist film distributor Moonforce Media.

Between 1975 and 1980, Moonforce Media built the National Women’s Film Circuit, a lesbian

feminist distribution system that circulated preconstituted packages of multigeneric feminist

films through as wide a nontheatrical feminist U.S. market as possible. Drawing on the organ-

ization’s records and ephemera, now located in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College,

and oral histories with its founders, this analysis of the development of Moonforce Media—its

distribution policies, programming choices, and exhibition strategies—and audiences’ recep-

tion of the National Women’s Film Circuit provides insight into how feminist media workers

strove to change society through the ongoing learning process of relating to one another and

to their audiences. It also offers an opportunity to return to the emergence of cultural feminism

and to rethink the economic and affective labor of lesbian feminist organizations and lesbian

feminist cinema in particular. Often thought to have redirected second-wave efforts away from

radical feminism’s earlier revolutionary challenges of systemic sexism and toward the more

retreatist and capitalist creation of a female counterculture, here cultural/lesbian feminism

does not delimit political possibility, but instead supports a range of political practices in its

variegated conception of lesbian media and deployment of said media across geographies and

ideologies. In its exhibition, lesbian feminist cinema brought together diverse audiences with a

wide range of expectations and demands for its feminist films, and, in turn, these cinematic

encounters constituted an affective archive of 1970s U.S. feminisms. KEYWORDS film

distribution, lesbian archives, lesbian feminist cinema, Moonforce Media, National Women’s

Film Circuit

As feminists working collectively in film and video we see our media as an ongoingprocess both in terms of the way it is made and the way it’s distributed and shown.We are committed to feminist control of that entire process. We do not accept theexisting power structure and we are committed to changing it by the content andstructure of our images and by the ways we relate to each other in our work and withour audience. Making and showing our work is an ongoing cyclical process, and we

90

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are responsible for changing and developing our approaches as we learn fromthis experience.We see ourselves as part of the larger movement of women dedicated to changing

society by struggling against oppression as it manifests itself in sexism, heterosexism,classism, racism, ageism, and imperialism. Questioning and deepening our understandingof words and how language itself can be oppressive is part of the ongoing struggle.Within this struggle we want to affirm and share the positive aspects of our experienceas women in celebration. “AN ONGO ING MAN I F E S TO , ” F E B RUAR Y , 1

At the start of February , WomenMakeMovies—a feminist film education,production, and distribution organization located in Chelsea in Manhattan—organized the two-day Conference of Feminist Film and Video Organizations.2

Representatives from over forty feminist media organizations from across theUnited States as well as fromCanada and Australia participated in its workshopsand screenings.3 At an afternoon workshop on the second day, twenty-twoof these women signed the manifesto quoted above.4 Titled “An OngoingManifesto,” it was intended as a starting point, an initiation of the collectivesharing of ideas among feminist media workers. At this time, Frances Reid andCathy Zheutlin, two of its signatories, were organizing the Feminist Eye Confer-ence at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles for late March, and after the NewYork conference they circulated the manifesto to registered Feminist Eye attend-ees with the declared hope that “the values and ideas expressed in this manifestowill be discussed, expanded, or further definitions will be made in the spirit ofthe ‘On-going’ nature of the manifesto.”5 The two conferences were initiallyorganized independently, but upon discovering each other, they joined forces soas to reduce excess labor and “creat[e] a national feminist media network.”6

One project to emerge from these conferences, with the goal of continuing tobuild such a network, was Moonforce Media’s National Women’s Film Circuit(NWFC; –), a lesbian feminist distribution system that circulated pre-constituted packages of multigeneric feminist films through as wide a nontheat-rical feminist U.S. market as possible.

This essay offers a microhistory of this brief but ambitious and imaginativeproject. Drawing on the organization’s records and related ephemera, nowlocated in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, as well as oral historiesI conducted with its founders, my analysis of the development of MoonforceMedia out of these conferences—addressing its distribution policies, pro-gramming choices, exhibition strategies—and audiences’ reception of the films’materialization as the NWFC provides insight into how feminist media

Samer | Lesbian Feminist Cinema and Moonforce Media’s NWFC 91



workers put the tenets of the manifesto into practice and worked tochange the existing power structure through the ongoing cyclical learning pro-cess of relating to one another and to their audiences. It also offers an opportu-nity to return to the emergence of cultural feminism in the mid-s and torethink the economic and affective labor of lesbian feminist organizations andlesbian feminist cinema in particular. Moonforce Media was founded by the es-tablished lesbian photographer Joan E. Biren (JEB) and her partner, Mary LeeFarmer, a women’s music distributor and the manager of theWashington, DC,women’s bookstore and community center Lammas Books. As such, the medianetwork Moonforce was helping to build was also part of the larger wellspring oflesbian feminist cultural organizations emerging across the United States andCanada at this time. Often thought to have redirected second-wave efforts awayfrom radical feminism’s earlier revolutionary challenges of systemic sexism andtoward the more retreatist and capitalist creation of a white female countercul-ture,7 here lesbian/cultural feminism does not delimit political possibility,but instead supports a range of political practices in its variegated conception oflesbian media and deployment of said media across geographies and ideologies.

I return to this history of lesbian feminism in the United States and look tothe case study of Moonforce Media’s NWFC in order to make the argumentthat lesbian feminist cinema did a surprising number of things. BarbaraHammer and Jan Oxenberg’s lesbian films may have been picked up for distri-bution and rented predominantly by other white lesbians, many of whom,much like the filmmakers, felt an urgent need for self-representation.8 However,in its exhibition, lesbian feminist cinema also brought together diverse audien-ces with a wide range of expectations and demands for its feminist films, and, inturn, these cinematic encounters constituted an affective archive of s U.S.feminisms. As the NWFC traveled around the country, feminisms venturedforth as well. Onscreen, the California lesbians of Hammer and Oxenberg’sfilms commingled with the subjects of the other feminist shorts that Moonforceprogrammed alongside them, including the two women serving twenty-five-year sentences in the Missouri State Correctional Center for Women inTomato Productions’ Like a Rose and the New England women’s health advo-cates in Women Make Movies’ Healthcaring: From Our End of the Speculum.In the women’s centers, college auditoriums, and union halls where MoonforceMedia’s packages were screened, each of these filmic subjects came face toface, so to speak, with factory workers in Minnesota, southern dykes, andfeminists of various sorts all over. Their meetings may have been brief, but

92 FEMIN IST MEDIA H ISTOR IES SPR ING 2015



the questionnaires Moonforce collected from local circuit producers suggestthat the films had lasting effects on their audiences. I contend that the converseis true as well. Lesbian feminist cinema, and the histories of feminist, lesbian,and queer cinema in turn, cannot be understood without looking to the affec-tive labor of lesbian films’ earliest audiences. I start, however, with the very reallabor that made this emotional and intellectual work possible.

IR IS F ILMS

Before Moonforce Media became Moonforce Media and implemented theNWFC, it was “Iris East,” the East Coast half of Iris Films (later the Iris FeministCollective, Inc.). Founded at the New York and Los Angeles conferences,Iris was initially set up as a bicoastal lesbian feminist film distribution organiza-tion. At the Conference of Feminist Film and Video Organizations in New YorkCity that February, Frances Reid and Cathy Zheutlin—both of whom had beenworking in film production for a few years and who had recently become friendswhen walking off the set of a misogynist Hollywood film director together9—met Joan E. Biren, who had been supporting herself as a freelance photographer,documenting the women’s movement for the Washington Blade, Post, and Staras well as off our backs,Ms., and other feminist publications since her rather infa-mous expulsion from the living, working lesbian separatist collective TheFuries.10 The three hit it off, and when they reunited less than two months laterat the Feminist Eye Conference, Reid, Zheutlin, Biren, Reid’s partner LizStevens, and Biren’s partner Mary Lee Farmer formed Iris Films. While Reid andZheutlin brought experience working in film to the group, Biren and Farmercontributed extensive organizing experience, and both had a number of contactswithin the women’s movement that would prove useful in distributing feministfilms, Biren as a photographer and Farmer as a women’s music distributor andwomen’s bookstore manager.11 By collaborating, the five put the “OngoingManifesto” into practice and envisioned changing the content, structure,and producer-audience relations of cinema.

Developing how they “relate to each other in [their] work,” however, was alsopart of the task outlined by the manifesto. For Iris, there were particular chal-lenges in this regard, and they got creative in their attempts to overcome them.Reid, Stevens, and Zheutlin lived in LA and Biren and Farmer in DC, whichmeant that the five conducted most of their business through correspondence.Long-distance phone calls were expensive and letters limiting, so the group soonbegan to supplement these more traditional forms of communication with




audiotapes that they mailed back and forth with their letters. These allowedthem to communicate more thoroughly. They also provided a more personalway to get to know one another as they developed their collective. On the tapes,the group gossiped about relationships, family, pets, and local women’s move-ment politics, wished one another well when one was feeling sick, and sang oneanother “Happy Birthday.” On the few occasions when they were able to meetin person, they also taped their discussions. The tape the group made at the Fem-inist Eye Conference records them brainstorming12 about what women coulduse most in terms of a new film organization and how such a bicoastal endeavorwould work. Reid and Zheutlin were interested in returning to productionand had ideas of films to make with Iris, including a women’s music filmwith Olivia Records and a documentary about lesbian mothers, who, likeStevens, were currently facing unprecedented challenges in custody battles.However, they all eventually agreed that a strong, national, and explicitlylesbian distribution effort was of most immediate importance. Together thefive came up with the idea of the NWFC as a way to get feminist films tointerested audiences.

Before they could get films out to women’s communities across the UnitedStates, however, Iris wanted to get a clearer sense of all the women’s films thatthey might distribute. They knew that many women’s films were hiding away indrawers, never having been seen by anyone other than the filmmaker’s friendsor perhaps those in a class she may have made the film for.13 Iris therefore de-cided to produce a festival at the end of August in DC where they mightscreen as many of these films as possible and select which to send out on thecircuit afterward. In May , they put out a call for films, describing the needfor feminist film distribution thus: “Film communicating women’s ideas andfeelings are being made, but, unfortunately, not enough people are seeing them.While the need to define and expand women’s culture is greater every day, com-mercial distributors either reject or neglect films made by women that expressthe realities of our lives and visions.”14 Iris advertised that in addition to orga-nizing this festival, they would be selecting from the festival’s submissions thefilms that they then would distribute as part of a nationwide series of filmscreenings called the National Women’s Film Circuit. They promised to try toprogram all submitted films. The only restrictions to submissions were that theybe on mm film and not be sexist, classist, or racist.15

Although they had to wait until after the festival to put together the variouspackages for distribution along the circuit, Iris wanted the turnaround time tobe quick and thus began reaching out to possible producers in various cities

94 FEMIN IST MEDIA H ISTORIES SPR ING 2015



across the country and planning routes and schedules for the films’ circulationthat fall. This took a lot of coordination between Iris West and Iris East, as thetwo halves of the collective split the responsibilities and shared their work viapostal service. They tried to figure out the finances for the operation: budgetsfor shipping prints, paying projectionists and renting spaces and projectors inthe various cities, admission costs, and how to split the filmmakers’ pay. At thispoint, Iris had yet to incorporate as a nonprofit or receive any grants, and theywere financing the operation completely by themselves. For this reason, one pairof their tapes was dedicated to each coast’s detailing of their personal finances sothat they might all gain a clearer sense of how much they had to work with andhow much they would need to fundraise.16 These tapes also gave them the op-portunity to acknowledge that there were class differences within the collective,which meant varying means in terms of contributing both money and time.Tensions often ran high in these tapes, and these only escalated as the groupcame to realize that they did not share the same attitudes toward many of theirdecisions (for example, East advocated for as wide a circuit as possible, whileWest thought it perhaps best to begin in cities closer to their two home basesin case of emergencies) and that they took varying approaches to their discus-sion through audiotape. East processed their thoughts on the business mattersat hand and then recorded their conclusions, while West used the tapes to pro-cess their thinking, which made for much less organized and longer-windedtapes—a difference that reflected East and West Coast feminist attitudes, butalso was partially due to the fact that West was made up of a couple and anindividual, who arguably had to exert more time and effort in such processing.17

These differences and disagreements also led to the expression of bigger con-cerns, such as whether East trusted West with their half of the responsibilitiesand the uneven division of labor due to the festival being held in DC. Amongother things, Biren and Farmer worked with friends who were law students atGeorgetown to find an auditorium for the festival. They were also prescreeninghundreds of festival submissions whenever they could, sometimes with friendsor their softball team, in Biren’s living room.18 At one point, Reid and Stevensentertained the idea of not attending the festival at all, for financial andpersonal reasons—the two would be sacrificing their vacation time as a couple,and flying across the country was more expensive than the camping trip theyhad been planning. Throughout these discussions, each of the Irises (as they hadcome to call themselves) tried to speak as individuals in order to be as specific aspossible and responsible to one another as equals. However, disagreements—often between the two couples, with Zheutlin awkwardly in the middle—kept




arising.19 Ultimately, however, they did come to a number of important agree-ments about the NWFC, including that the pricing of tickets probably shouldvary from town to town and that this and other decisions—such as whetherscreenings should be mixed or “for women only”—ought to be left to eachindividual producer, who would know her town, its women, and their expect-ations for such events and means to pay for them better than Iris in LA andDC could.

THE WASHINGTON, DC, FESTIVAL OF THE NATIONAL WOMEN ’S F ILM

CIRCUIT , THE DISSOLUTION OF IR IS EAST, AND THE FORMATION OF

MOONFORCE MEDIA

The DC Festival ran from August to , , with two to four programs aday that together screened approximately one hundred films by more thanseventy women (figure ).20 All had been made over the preceding six yearsacross the United States, England, Canada, and Australia, and many were pre-miering for the first time anywhere.21 Every screening was different, and no filmwas shown twice. An audience discussion of the films followed each screening,and surveys on each of the films were collected. At the top of the festival sched-ule (figure ), a header read, “These films were made by women. They examinethe world we all live in. They analyze the situation of women in this world.They imagine a different world and inspire us with their vision. These films arepart of a process of changing the world. The process continues as you use thefilms.”22

This dual function of critique and imagination is what reviewers picked upon in their analyses of the films. In her review for the DC underground paperGrass Roots, Beth Stone writes, “In today’s culture, where we are constantlyassaulted and insulted by negative images of women peddled by the commercialmedia, the better films of the festival served as an affirmation for women whoare seeking strong role models and new images as individuals.”23 Among the sixfilms she profiles are four that would end up in circuit packages: Kathleen Shan-non’s Would I Ever Like to Work (), a short about a mother on welfare;Cambridge Documentary Films’ Taking Our Bodies Back: TheWomen’s HealthMovement (), which critiques for-profit medicine’s devastating effects onwomen’s health; Tomato Productions’ Like a Rose (), a documentary abouttwo women serving twenty-five-year sentences in the Missouri State Correc-tional Center for Women; and Donna Deitch’s Woman to Woman (),which Stone likes for its “free-flowing raps,” which “glide between hookers,housewives, mothers and friends.”24 Meanwhile, in her review for the women’s




FIGURE 1. Washington, DC, Festival of the National Women’s Film Circuitflier, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.




art and culture journal Sibyl-Child, Pat Dowell seems to predict the Circuitpopularity of Oxenberg and Hammer’s films, claiming they offer festival audi-ences a “new dispensation” in women’s art for “women moving confidently andjoyfully into a new culture.”25 While Dowell contrasts this to an “old dispensa-tion” that examines women’s oppression, indicating a progression that she

FIGURE 2. Washington, DC, Festival of the National Women’s Film Circuitschedule, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.




wishes for women’s cinema, she considers the programming of both kinds offilms together—which the NWFC would continue to do—to be a strong pointof their exhibition.26

These same reviews also picked up on the festival’s emphasis on process.Stone writes, “Much of the festival’s excitement came from audience participa-tion,” elaborating that the “discussion forums enhanced our experiences byallowing us to share our responses to the visual messages.”27 Stone also notesthat these discussions were tape-recorded, and her speculation that they wouldbecome both part of the historical record and part of the process of sparkingnew ideas in the development of the movement is interesting, as it demonstratesboth the historical nature of the event, as perceived in the moment, and thefuture-oriented thinking that such programming generated. Dowell’s reviewechoes these sentiments. Having attended every screening, she describes the fes-tival as “occasionally grueling, with scarcely time to stand up between programswithout missing something.” She continues, “I felt like I was settled in for a longcampaign, and it was worth it, not only for the films I saw but for the experienceof the festival itself, which was organized along principles different from thoseI have come to expect in film events.”28 She, too, makes note of the surveys andthe discussions, and though she found the discussions to be cramped for time,she writes that they were nonetheless “quite stimulating, providing an energeticexchange of ideas.”29 Dowell commends Biren and Farmer for providing timeat the end of the festival for self-critique, writing, “Their responsive attitude to-ward the audience was precisely what made this festival special beyond the filmsthemselves,” and she adds that the audiences’ participation in discussions of thefilms and the festival “indicated that an audience will respond just as intelli-gently as they are treated.”30 She concludes her review by predicting that whatthe NWFC will offer feminist audiences, as indicated by this initial festival, is“real participation,” a right denied to audiences by commercial film exhibitionand even most expert-run university and museum exhibition.31

After the DC festival in August , Iris Films split into two independentorganizations. Negotiating decision-making between LA and DC had becometoo complicated, and their method of mailing the cassettes of their meetingsback and forth, although innovative, caused delays. At the festival, the twocoasts learned that they had a difficult time making decisions even in person,and they came to the conclusion that their recurring disagreements about howto run the company were irresolvable.32 Reid, Stevens, and Zheutlin’s organiza-tion retained the name Iris and went on to distribute women’s films as well as toproduce their own documentary about lesbian mothers, In the Best Interests of




the Children (). In addition to their own films and those of BarbaraHammer and Jan Oxenberg, Iris distributed Joint Productions’ We’re Alive(), “a production of solidarity and love” made over the course of aneight-month weekly video workshop at the California Institute forWomen; theSanta Cruz Women’s Media Collective’s Wishfulfilming (), a black-and-white “docu-drama about a women’s film collective making a movie [that]explores new ideas about non-hierarchal work, and visions of a society based onneeds, not profit”; Lois Tupper’s dramatic short about female adolescence, OurLittle Munchkin Here (); and Linda Klosky’s animated short about defor-estation, And Then There Were ().33 Biren and Farmer in DC, meanwhile,quickly incorporated as the nonprofit Moonforce Media and continuedthe work of the NWFC. Immediately following the split, Reid, Stevens, andZheutlin briefly entertained running a separate California circuit, feelingresponsible to the West Coast producers they had worked with in preparationfor the NWFC,34 but they soon decided against it and cordially facilitatedintroductions between Moonforce Media and West Coast producers. Zheutlinproduced the circuit whenever it came to LA, but otherwise, beginning onSeptember , , the two organizations developed independently.

MOONFORCE MEDIA AND THE NATIONAL WOMEN ’S F ILM CIRCUIT

Like Iris and other U.S. feminist film distributors in the s—namely,Women Make Movies in New York City and the Women’s Film Co-op inNorthampton, Massachusetts—Moonforce Media held nonexclusive contractswith their filmmakers, meaning that Moonforce was but one company to dis-tribute these films. Unsurprisingly, a number of the films that Reid, Stevens, andZheutlin selected for Iris came from those they had screened with Biren andFarmer at the festival, and Iris’s initial distribution offerings overlapped withthose of Moonforce Media. Moonforce also included theWomenMake Moviesproductions Livia Makes Some Changes () and Healthcaring: From OurEnd of the Speculum () in two different packages. Unlike these other femi-nist film distributors, however, Moonforce Media did not rent out individualfilms. Instead, they curated packages of five or six short films, representing therange of recent feminist filmmaking, and collaborated with local “producers” inthe exhibition of their town’s NWFC screenings. As a result, in addition tomore popular titles available through Iris, Women Make Movies, and/or theWomen’s Film Co-op, Moonforce rented out, in its packages, a number of filmsthat were either unavailable to rent, such as Sharon Madden’s Friends ();could only otherwise be rented directly from their filmmakers, such as Deitch’s

100 FEMIN IST MEDIA HISTORIES SPR ING 2015



Woman to Woman; or had to be rented from a foreign institution, such asShannon’s Would I Ever Like to Work, which was coproduced by the NationalFilm Board of Canada.

As had been their plan with Iris, Biren and Farmer reached out to theirwomen’s movement contacts across the country, and as a result the NWFCtraveled to approximately fifty different locations, including big cities and smalltowns in every geographical region from the South to the Pacific Northwest.35

NWFC screenings were produced by cinema clubs, women’s community cen-ters, lesbian task forces, unions, women’s studies departments and studentassociations, the National Organization for Women, women’s bookstores,production companies, music stores, and restaurants.36 Nontheatrical exhibi-tion was typical of much women’s movement media at this time.37 However,the number and range of local producers with which Moonforce Media part-nered was extraordinary and possible only due to their unique method of com-bining distribution, programming, and exhibition support. Their packages, assmall collections of women’s recent work, provided greater access to feministmedia to those outside of metropolitan hubs and nonmedia workers, as theymade it easier for women’s groups to program entire evenings of women’s films.While Reid and Zheutlin had been trained by working in film production andexpressed reservations about women with little experience exhibiting NWFCpackages,38 Biren and Farmer, as recently self-taught media workers themselves,were more confident in women’s abilities to learn on the spot, and with eachpackage they included detailed instructions about how to organize and run afilm screening for those local producers doing it for the first time. As a result,women across the United States were able to access films made by other womenwhile also gaining media skills of their own.

Moonforce remained committed, as did Iris, to serving women’s communi-ties as an explicitly lesbian feminist organization.39 However, what their lesbianfeminist programming would include and how they would facilitate its audien-ces’ engagement with it were far from predictable. Biren and Farmer marketedthe circuit to all feminist groups, left decisions about whether audiences wouldbe women-only to the local producers, and programmed lesbian films alongsidefilms with other subjects. In doing so, both the original NWFC and the recordsand ephemera in its archive today demonstrate how the circuit’s meaningemerged, as Ann Cvetkovich writes in the context of lesbian popular culturearchives, “from the queer sensibility of its collector.”40 While the call for theAugust festival had welcomed all films made by women as long as theywere not sexist, classist, or racist, the films selected for packages were feminist




in a more specific sense. Each selected film was not only made by women, butalso, as Biren told an interviewer in , included a “critique of the society thatwe’re living in now” as well as “a vision of how that might change in such a wayto make that society better for us all to live in.”41 Biren elaborates that this didnot necessarily mean that the films had to be documentaries, but they did haveto somehow practice this dual critique/vision within the parameters of theirfilmmaking. In fact, all the NWFC packages included fiction films and docu-mentaries, and a couple even included animation. All the packages also covereda variety of women’s issues, from healthcare to imprisonment to sexuality. Withthis purposeful but also permeable selection of feminist films, MoonforceMedia sought to reach as many women as possible and empower them as local-ized, politicized subjects who might or might not be lesbians, wives, mothers,daughters, healthcare patients, workers, prison abolitionists, and/or antiracistprotesters as well as feminists and film viewers. By naming such collections offilms and their programming “lesbian,” Moonforce offered its audiences a“lesbian” that was not only not separatist, but also explicitly intersectional.Within this framework, Moonforce highlighted women’s sexuality as a topic ofdiscussion for feminist film audiences—an apt choice considering feminist filmtheory, which was burgeoning simultaneously, would centralize questions ofsexual desire and cinematic pleasure but do so with substantial heterosexual andmale-oriented blinders on.42

Immediately after the August festival, Biren and Farmer put together thefirst two NWFC packages from films that had played well at the festival.43 Overthe course of the festival weekend, they had collected approximately one thou-sand surveys, which they used to make their selections for the NWFC packages,balancing the festival’s most popular titles with others that also had fared well,which they thought would pair nicely in terms of subject matters, genres, andlengths. The fliers for the circuit announced that the films were drawn “fromover festival entries—the best in feminist filmmaking today” or declaredthem “ of the nation’s best feminist films” (figure ).44 Such promotional strat-egies were intended to solicit audiences and get people in seats (whether thosewere actual theater or classroom seats or lesbian diner booths and bookstorecouches); however, making more money than actually was needed to run thecircuit itself was never the goal. Moonforce Media was not a lucrative endeavor,nor did they especially try to be. They did not rent out their films for a fee.Whoever wanted to produce a NWFC screening could do so. Moonforce sim-ply asked producers to charge minimal admission fees (however much seemedfit for their town) to cover the costs of screenings (shipping fees, projector,

102 FEMIN IST MEDIA HISTOR IES SPR ING 2015



screen, and/or space rental). Producers could keep percent of the grossreceipts from ticket sales as compensation after these costs had been covered.Not every screening made a profit, but percent of whatever profits Moon-force did make went back to the filmmakers, and the rest they used to maintainthe operation. They never paid themselves a salary,45 and the organization’s

FIGURE 3. National Women’s Film Circuit flier, Sophia Smith Collection,Smith College.




largest annual income was in , when they made just over $,.46 Thesesmall profits allowed them to curate two more packages in the spring of after another survey screening of seventy new films in Washington, DC.47 Thenew packages traveled to both prior circuit destinations and new destinations,and the first two packages continued to circulate to new destinations as well.

Each package included not only its five or six films and instructions for run-ning a film screening, but also a set of discussion questions about each film anda questionnaire for the producer to fill out about the audiences’ responses. Ofthe Women’s Film Project’s Emerging Women (), a documentary aboutthe history of the women’s movement, Moonforce Media suggested asking,“What lessons can be drawn from it as to the effectiveness of separatist vs. coa-lition politics and reformist vs. radical politics? What do you feel can be done tounite within one political movement women of different races and classes?”48

For Tomato Productions’ Like a Rose, they prompted audiences to discuss whatwomen outside of prison can do to help women on the inside. When it came toBarbara Hammer’s Women I Love (), they asked viewers to compare andcontrast their own daydreams about past lovers with those in the film and thento discuss how the filmmaker’s style affected the tone and emotional quality ofthe film and whether such explicit representations of lesbian sexuality couldhelp to dispel homophobic prejudices inside and outside the women’s commu-nity.49 In these discussion guides, they provided a list of resources for those in-terested in learning more about lesbianism, domestic violence, women’s health,and so forth. Moonforce Media, however, did not conceive of this work as atop-down endeavor. Contrary to Annette Kuhn’s claim that s independentfilm distribution served the primary function of helping political filmmakersdirect their films toward specific audiences and delimit interpretations,50

Moonforce selected films with a wide range of critiques and visions, taughtwomen how to run film screenings, and put together discussion guides preciselyin order to encourage critical engagement with their programming.

AFFECTIVITY ’S EPHEMERA: LABOR IN THE ARCHIVE OF MOONFORCE

MEDIA ’S QUESTIONNAIRES

In The Folklore of Consensus (), Marcia Landy demonstrates that the labortime invested in “the consumption of cultural narratives, images, and sounds,”including the reception of cinematic texts, is necessary for “the maintenance ofsocial life under capitalism.”51 Affectivity, as this labor, fuses the spectator andthe film she is watching, but the fusion is not total. Thus, through the sortingout of her simultaneous involvement and detachment, the spectator participates




in the production of the film’s social value.52 Moonforce’s carefully tendedlesbian programming, distribution, and exhibition of feminist films via theNWFC recognized that this participation in the commodity’s productionthrough consumption is significant for a feminist subculture resistant to butnonetheless working within a capitalist system. “‘Alternative distribution,’”Freude notes in a Camera Obscura article, “is a misnomer albeit a handyone.”53 She elaborates, “In a capitalist society fueled by advertising and packag-ing the most effective means of distribution are through established, acceptedchannels of merchandising. As a result, most distribution, whether done by alarge commercial company or by a filmmaker self-distributing her/his ownwork, will employ similar methods.”54 After putting together these packages,complete with projection instructions and discussion guides, and “placing filmsbefore audiences” through their “mail-order business,” as Freude rather flatlyputs it,55 Moonforce Media turned the labor over to NWFC audiences.

However, affectivity, as these audiences’ labor, was labor of an entirely differ-ent sort than that of Biren and Farmer, which got the film packages before them.As Kara Keeling explains while elaborating on Landy, affectivity is a form oflabor that “does not yet register in the economic sense as labor.”56 Instead, it isthe labor integral to producing reality and, especially for subaltern or marginal-ized and oppressed groups, surviving that reality.57 While Moonforce—by gath-ering producer questionnaires and responding to recurring criticisms andrequests in the programming of their later packages—could be seen as tryingto “capitalize” on this labor in the most generic sense, I argue, following JoséEstebanMuñoz, that these questionnaires would better be understood as ephem-eral evidence of what this lesbian feminist media did and the queer acts—whether epistemological or social—that it initiated.58 These questionnaires indexthe anecdotal, as local producers record their impressions of different audiences’responses to the films. The forms, usually handwritten often immediately after ascreening, sometimes reflect the strong prejudices of the individual producer, butmore often than not they relay fleeting moments of reception—audiences’ dis-cussions, reflections, and comments—afterward. As such, they can be seen as pre-serving affective value, as Cvetkovich describes gay and lesbian archives doing,59

in that they record emotional responses to the films. However, these same com-ments also offer “traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things”60 as evidence ofthe affectivity, more along the lines of Landy and Keeling, taking place duringand after variously situated collective engagements with these films. In doing asmuch, these questionnaires give us a sense of the work that lesbian feministcinema (by which I mean not just Oxenberg and Hammer’s films and their




production, but also their distribution, exhibition, and reception) did within,across, and between certain s feminist geographies.

In certain places, often in the South or rural areas, producers would use theirquestionnaires to highlight the importance of such media in sustaining local les-bian or women’s communities. In these places, the existence of lesbian groupswas tenuous and often dependent upon the ongoing organizing efforts of a fewcommitted women. In October in New Orleans, for example, the packagethat included Deitch’sWoman to Woman, WomenMake Movies’ Livia MakesSome Changes, Tupper’s Our Little Munchkin Here, Oxenberg’s Home Movie,Hammer’s Menses, and Cambridge Documentary Films’ Taking Our BodiesBackwas programmed twice, once for a lesbian group and once at an arts center,gathering a total of only forty-eight viewers.61 Across her questionnaire, Casey,the local producer, makes a number of contrasts between the “dyke” and “liberalart center” audiences before making a case for the former’s need for more filmprogramming such asMoonforce’s. Casey writes that the dyke audience was notamused by Livia Makes Some Changes (a docudrama about a stay-at-homemother returning to the workforce), while the liberal art center audiencethought it was “cute.” The dykes foundMenses “comic,” while the liberals were“horrified” by the blood. Both audiences, however, loved Home Movie, thedykes getting “really rowdy” during its screening and the liberals “chuckl[ing]heavily.” Casey concludes that, although the low attendance perhaps would bediscouraging to Moonforce, she thinks it is important that the NWFC keepcoming, and quickly, too, as “the dyke South needs to get films that are current,not years later.”62 Mary, the producer from Athens, Georgia, similarly writes,“The women’s community was very excited about the films and want to see an-other package!”63 She elaborates that, while having seventy people in attendancemight not seem “worth it” to Moonforce, for the Athens women’s communitythe circuit could prove vital in helping to sustain the growing local lesbianactivity, which in the last few months had just expanded to include a regularmeeting group and newsletter. In her questionnaire, the producer from MamaPeaches Restaurant in Chicago expresses similar sentiments, writing that theChicago women’s community was struggling to maintain coherence and thatevents such as the NWFC provided integral moments of strength.64

In many cases, however, the reception of the NWFC exceeded any coherentsense of a local community, as many hundreds of people showed up for itsscreenings, bringing a wide range of perspectives and debates to its discussions.In January , people in Minneapolis–St. Paul saw the Woman to




Woman/Livia Makes Some Changes/Our Little Munchkin Here/Home Movie/Menses/Taking Our Bodies Back package over five screenings in the course of aweekend.65 Kathleen Laughlin, the local producer, notes in her questionnairethat the films drew rather mixed audiences, including fewer lesbians and moremen then she had expected, as well as plenty of students and factory workersand increasingly racially diverse audiences each night, suggesting that word ofmouth after the first couple of screenings had been responsible for bringingmore people of color to the program.66 Laughlin makes a number of notesabout the general reactions that each film garnered, as well as a few pointedaudience critiques that stood out to her—such as one woman telling her after-ward that she and her friends thought Taking Our Bodies Back was a downer forthe program to end on, especially due to what they found to be its simplifiedtakes on childbirth and abortion, which surprised Laughlin. She then exclaims,“But who can ever speak for a ‘whole audience’s’ reaction?!”67 With the excep-tion of a few particularly small audiences, such as those noted above, locationstypically brought in between one and three hundred viewers across two or threescreenings. On these forms, too, producers often reflect on the challenges ofrecording such audiences’ responses (in Lexington, Kentucky, the audience isdescribed as including everyone from “grandmothers to local leaping lesbians”).68

As a result, they often note where local interest seemed particularly acute. InSt. Louis, for example, Sue Hyde mentions that much of the -personaudience had first-hand experience with the Tipton, Missouri, prison ofLike a Rose, which led to an engaged and productive discussion of the film.69

Across these questionnaires and their attendant geographies, however, a fewcommon threads can be identified. Notably, although Moonforce included onlyone explicitly lesbian film in each package (Jan Oxenberg’sHome Movie, BarbaraHammer’s Dyketactics or Women I Love, or Christina Mohana’s Ninja), it wasthese films that often provoked the strongest reactions, especially in mixed-genderaudiences. A few producer questionnaires note that people walked out of screen-ings after these films were shown, and in a couple of places the packages werecensored after local politicians learned of their lesbian content.70 Everywherethat it did show and for those audiences who did stay, however, Oxenberg’sHome Movie—an autobiographical documentary about lesbian childhood andfinding community in the women’s movement in Los Angeles—appears tohave been enthusiastically received (figures –).71 Comments in producers’questionnaires suggest that many lesbians found Oxenberg’s story of growing upgay with an otherwise “typical” (middle-class, American, white) childhood and




teenage life relatable. Many audience members, lesbian and nonlesbian alike,seem to have found her tale of being a cheerleader in order to spend more timewith other girls charming. A few found the conclusion, which cut together foot-age of a lesbian football game and that of a gay pride march to a Debra Quinnsong about women’s freedom, to be a hopeful indicator of what was to come.The producer in Makawao, Hawaii, writes of audiences’ responses to Home

FIGURE 4. Jan Oxenberg as a young cheerleader in Home Movie().

FIGURE 5. “, , , , Lesbians are mighty fine” in Home Movie.




Movie, “Many comments on seeing the usually macho, murderous game offootball played lovingly. Everyone felt the glow from this one.”72 Meanwhile,the producer in Norman, Oklahoma, writes, “The Darling of them all! Neverhas slow motion football been so acclaimed—also, I think a few women got themessage that lesbians are everywhere and it’s OK.”73

The same questionnaires, however, suggest that Barbara Hammer’s films,including Menses but more so Dyketactics and Women I Love, garnered the

FIGURE 6. Gay pride picnic in Home Movie.

FIGURE 7. Lesbians playing football in Home Movie.




greatest debate and vitriol. A common theme in their circuit reception seems tohave been discussion of what constitutes lesbianism and how it ought to befilmed. Although NWFC audiences constantly debated whether women’s loveor their sexual desire for one another ought to take precedence, oddly they didnot come to a consensus on which of these Hammer’s films offer. Some foundDyketactics, which Hammer and Moonforce advertised as a “lesbian commer-cial,”74 to be too pornographic, while others thought the sex was too clinical andnot sexy enough (figures –). Women I Love, a highly experimental film thatcuts together footage of time spent with past lovers with stop-motion anima-tion of yonic plants and vegetables, was “too abstract” for the Student Associa-tion for Women in Normal, Illinois (figures –).75 At the premier of thethird and fourth packages at the Ontario Theater in DC, where individualseach got their own questionnaire, a number of audience members commentedon how exciting they found Women I Love’s use of experimental techniques.A few, however, noted that they want to see more of the relationships in thefilm, one person writing, “Little redeeming values except perhaps the vegeta-bles.”76 On their feedback form the National Organization of Women in DC,meanwhile, simply declares that the women’s movement is not “ready ‘for thatfilm’ yet.”77 When discussing the future of the circuit in Amarillo, Texas, theproducer there comments that while she is relatively comfortable showingHome Movie because she thinks it “reaches gay and straight women,” she wouldbe uncomfortable showing Women I Love, as in her opinion it is “made for

FIGURE 8. Lesbians washing each other’s hair in Dyketactics ().




lesbians” and she does not think it reaches straight women at all.78While some ofthe more resistant responses to these films are clearly indicative of ideological bat-tles going onwithin the women’s movement at this time,79 others suggest the verystrangeness of seeing lesbianism onscreen, even for feminist audiences. Oxenberg

FIGURE 9. Barbara Hammer and Poe Asher making love inDyketactics.

FIGURE 10. Barbara Hammer, former lover, and cat in WomenI Love ().




andHammer’s films never seem to have received critiques of didacticism, as more“straight” documentaries in NWFC packages often did. In fact, whether posi-tively or negatively received, the lesbian films were often singled out as offeringsomething that all audiences—gay, straight, women-only or mixed—had neverseen before.

FIGURE 11. Artichoke unfurling in Women I Love.





These films’ NWFC reception demonstrates the dynamic nature of slesbian feminist cinema. While early gay and lesbian media scholars writing inthe s were quick to draw on Hammer’s own writing about her films andmake connections between her ideas in making them and the essentializingand romanticizing ideology of much cultural feminism (so much so that it


FIGURE 14. Barbara Hammer and former lover in Women I Love.




has become practically reflexive for queer film scholars to do so since),80 thework of lesbian feminist cinema, these surveys reveal, did not end with its film-makers or even its distributors. Recently Greg Youmans has done excellentwork in complicating Hammer’s own relationship to cultural feminism. Bylooking to new queer media artists’ returns to Hammer’s early oeuvre and byhighlighting the sexiness and humor they find there, Youmans makes the casefor a more performative reading of Dyketactics’, Menses’, and Women I Love’sessentialist tropes.81 He also cites Hammer as saying she never insisted onwomen-only screenings, although cultural feminist venues were the most com-mon places that her films were screened into the s.82 However, left intactby Youmans is the sense that most of Hammer’s audiences were drawn to herfilms and appreciated them for their uncritical conception of “woman” as bio-logical being. These films were cherished as the first films made by “out” lesbianfilmmakers, and their attempts to address the concerns and lives of contempo-rary women were appreciated; however, their representations of “lesbian” andMoonforce’s advertising of the circuit as such were never taken as the be-all andend-all in the matter. Instead, these films offered women’s communities acrossthe United States a starting point, an initiation of lesbian possibilities to betaken up, extended, and critiqued in reception. These questionnaires provideephemeral evidence that NWFC audiences did as much. Reading records of themyriad responses generated at any given screening can be dizzying, as local pro-ducers, trying to account for all the reactions, write in just brief strings of wordsor phrases. Of Dyketactics, the Albuquerque producer writes: “‘a beautiful filmof humans loving humans’ ‘filth’ ‘it’s about time we were out of the closet’‘I don’t want anyone to know what my lover and I do’ ‘there’s more to us thanjust our sexuality’ ‘beautiful’” (figure ).83 In fact, each of these lesbian films wasonly one in a five- or six-film program billed as “lesbian,” and audiences alsoevaluated and anticipated a lesbian cinema in response to the entire program.

At the bottom of these questionnaires, Moonforce asked producers whetherthey think the circuit should return to their town; if so, how often; and “Whatdo people want to see?”One recurring and resounding answer to this last ques-tion was that audiences wanted to see more films by and about women of color.In particular, they wanted more Black, Chicana, and Native American filmsthat were lesbian films and fun films, rather than just the few fairly serious doc-umentaries in the packages that did address women of color’s lives. The pro-ducer of the January Albuquerque screenings writes, “There were noreal criticisms of the films until the Saturday night all women’s show. Thesewere aimed primarily at ‘The Emerging Woman’ and ‘Dyketactics.’ Many




women felt that once more Chicana and Native American women wereignored” (figure ).84 Because of this, she concludes, “Many women will notcome back to another showing.”85 Nonetheless, the NWFC did return toAlbuquerque, this time with theWoman to Woman/Home Movie/Menses pack-age, and the same producer notes that those who had resented Emerging

FIGURE 15. Albuquerque producer questionnaire, Sophia Smith Collection, SmithCollege.




Woman and Dyketactics appreciated Deitch’s film, which humorously drewconnections among the lives of working women of different classes and races,including suburban housewives, sex workers, imprisoned women, a lesbian psy-chologist, and a telephone operator. Audiences in Athens, Georgia, concurred,the producer writing ofWoman to Woman, “People liked seeing Chicanas and

FIGURE 16. Albuquerque producer questionnaire, Sophia Smith Collection, SmithCollege.




Black women as well as the usual whites.”86 While the history of lesbian cinema,as it is typically written by way of filmmaker and representation in the mostmimetic sense, appears to be exclusively white until the s, when MichelleParkerson’s shorts debuted, the NWFC’s reception reveals that at least itsaudiences’ aspirations were otherwise from the start. The presentation of anec-dotal and ephemeral evidence, Muñoz writes, “grants entrance and accessto those who have been locked out of official histories and, for that matter,‘material reality.’”87 In this case, local producer questionnaires reveal that in thediscussions following NWFC screenings, Black, Chicana, and Native Americanaudiences courageously practiced what Audre Lorde called the “transformationof silence into language and action.”88 As early as the first white lesbian films’releases, these women demanded lesbian of color films. In the face of thespecifically white lesbian feminist reality placed before them, they articulatedtheir own, refusing to remain silent.

Biren and Farmer kept track of and engaged with audiences’ recurringcriticisms in their programming of later packages. They were not involved inproduction and could distribute only what was produced and submitted for con-sideration, but one common critique of their first two packages that they did feelconfident in meeting with the third and fourth packages was audiences’ desiresfor “slicker” women’s films. In the questionnaires, producers often note thataudience members were disappointed in the technical quality of the films, espe-cially considering that they had been advertised as some of the “best” feministfilms. The producer in Cleveland, for example, writes that some audience mem-bers had come expecting “to see professional Hollywood-type films that hadbeen made by women.”89 While Biren and Farmer would continue to place valueon showing women’s first films and to see their packaging system as a way tofeature new feminist filmmakers as well as those more experienced, their secondselection screening in DC did include more technologically sophisticated films;thus, prior to their premier at the Ontario Theater, they could tell an interviewerwith confidence that “these two packages of films really, from end-to-end, arejust gorgeous, well-made films.”90

Biren and Farmer also, however, received requests from local producers aswell as filmmakers that they could not meet due to the scale and budget of theirorganization. Moonforce Media, much to the disappointment of a number ofinterested fledgling female filmmakers who inquired, distributed only mmfilms. They were dependent upon NWFC producers to find projectors andprojectionists in each of the circuit’s locations, and Biren and Farmer believedthat combining formats within packages—such as mm, Super- or video in




addition to mm—would lead to too many complications.91 Similarly, Moon-force received requests for international screenings. Most were from Canadianorganizations, but some hailed from as far away as Hong Kong.92 To each ofthese, Biren and Farmer wrote back that they would love to distribute interna-tionally but that at the time they could not risk the delays and expenses ofshipping the films to these places.93 As a result, the farthest the circuit traveledwas to Makawao, Hawaii. Though interest in the NWFC never waned, Birenand Farmer’s business model did not allow them to hire employees, and whenthe couple broke up in , the circuit came to an end as well.94 WhileWomen Make Movies was developing its distribution wing at this time and, asa feminist media organization with a better eye for business, would continue toforge long-distance relations with feminists across the country and around theglobe,95 nothing quite like the NWFC would ever replace it.

CONCLUSION

To say that this essay has drawn heavily on the Moonforce Media recordsnow located at Smith College would be an understatement. It has beencompletely dependent upon these materials’ existence and is, at the veryleast, a first report on their contents. That these questionnaires as well asmany of the early Iris audiotapes and Moonforce budgets, brochures, andfliers exist is in great part due to the people who thought to make them inthe first place, especially Joan E. Biren, who saved them for many years anddonated them as a small portion of her extensive collection of cultural workand related files. “Against the traumatic loss of gay and lesbian history,” asAnn Cvetkovich writes, “documentaries and archives serve a vital task ofcultural memory.”96 And yet, such work is not always easy, as even “its pleas-ures are often attached to other more painful emotions.”97 In paying closeattention to a single archive and its accumulation of ephemeral evidenceacross feminist geographies, I have sought to reveal how the affective processof lesbian feminist cinema—through distribution, exhibition, and reception—varied by audience and often included an amalgamation of responses,both critical and celebratory. I have done so with the goal that this ampleexample might, in turn, contribute to complicating our own contemporaryaffective relation to s feminisms.

Queer history and queer theories of temporality and historiography haveconsistently turned to pre-Stonewall periods to think about the ways in whichnonnormative sexualized and gendered subjects have lived in time and how andwhy we might relate to them, their lives, and their work now.98 Only recently




has queer studies begun to look at its s histories,99 resistant to the pride andpositivity that are often seen as having quickly calcified into homonationalist,neoliberal identitarian politics so divergent from their “homosexual” or “invert”subcultural pasts as well as the perhaps “queerer” present. And yet the s, asa liminal period, can be quite fascinating. Its archives could surprise.

In this case, lesbian feminist cinema is revealed to have done more than onemight have expected. The lesbian feminist cinema of Moonforce Media did theimportant and necessary work of financially supporting female filmmakers andcirculating some of the earliest lesbian films to anticipatory lesbian audiences.However, Moonforce was also part of a broader effort of feminist media work-ers striving to change society through the ongoing learning process of relating toone another and to their audiences. With their contribution to the building ofa national feminist media network through the creation of a lesbian feministdistribution system, Biren and Farmer facilitated critical engagements withfeminist critiques and visions. NWFC audiences engaged with these films inorder to make sense of and articulate, for themselves and with one another,their lesbian realities. The ephemera of these cinematic encounters do not grantresearchers today total access to what these women thought, said, or imagined asa part of this process, but they do provide faint and yet potent evidence of theperiod’s tenuous sense of possibility and change.

ROXANNE SAMER is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Studies and the Russell Endowed Fellow at theUniversity of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Her dissertation, “ReceivingFeminisms: Media Cultures and Lesbian Potentiality in the 1970s,” conducts an archaeology of1970s feminist media counterpublics in order to reimagine the relationship between queer andwomen’s movement politics. She has previously published in Jump Cut and Ada: A Journal ofGender, New Media, and Technology, and her essays in each can be found online.

NOTES

I would like to thank Joan E. Biren,Mary Lee Farmer, Frances Reid, andCathy Zheutlinfor offering their reflections and memories, without which wading through these materialswould have been significantly more difficult, never mind much less fun. Thank you to theSophia Smith Collection at Smith College for a generous travel grant and the assistance of awonderful team of archivists. Maida Goodwin has been especially helpful and patient.Thank you to Robin Blaetz, Julia Lesage, Shira Segal, and the critical and insightfulaudience members at our panel “Unfamiliar Feminisms: Alternative Narratives ofWomen and Experimental Cinema,” at the meeting of the Society of Cinema andMedia Studies. Their comments have been integral to the development of this researchand writing for publication. Thank you also to Jennifer DeClue, Raffi Sarkissian, and ananonymous reader, all three of whom offered generous and instructive readings. Thankyou to Laura Serna for encouragement, guidance, and support. All mistakes are my own.




. “An Ongoing Manifesto,” February , , Box , Ariel Dougherty Papers, Arthurand Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, RadcliffeInstitute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (hereafterDougherty Papers); and Box , Joan E. Biren Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, SmithCollege, Northampton, Massachusetts (hereafter Biren Papers).

. The event itself, because of its size, was held at the International House on RiversideDrive above Columbia University. Ariel Dougherty, interviewed by author, November ,.

. “Report on the New York Conference of Feminist Film and Video Organizations,”Box , Biren Papers.

. Signatories were TracyWard, Barbara HalpernMartineau, Sharon Karp, Joan Robins,Lorna Rassmussen, Marge Smilow, Ariel Dougherty, Tayloe Ross, Joan E. Biren, MarionHunter, Gretchen Bruskewicz, Vasiliki Stidiotis, Rena Hanson, Cathy Zheutlin, AliceSkinicke, Joan E. Nixon, Frances Reid, Carol Clement, Rebecca High, Phyllis Gomperts,Laurel Siebert, and Sheila Page. Copies of the signed manifesto can be found in both Box of the Biren Papers and Box of the Dougherty Papers.

. Undated letter, Frances Reid and Cathy Zheutlin to Feminist Eye Conferenceattendees, Box , Biren Papers.

. Undated announcement of Feminist Eye Conference, Frances Reid and CathyZheutlin, Box , Biren Papers. See also Frances Reid and Cathy Zheutlin, “Statementof Relation,” March , , Box , Biren Papers.

. Alice Echols’s writing on the hegemonic shift from radical to cultural feminist in theUnited States between and is most exemplary of this. Alice Echols,Daring to BeBad: Radical Feminism in America, – (Minneapolis and London: University ofMinnesota Press, ), –.

. For example, Frances Reid recently said of Iris Films, “I feel at that point, lesbians inparticular were really hungry for images of themselves. . . . We were very explicitly a lesbiancollective. . . . We wanted to have a visibility in that way. That didn’t mean all the films wewere distributing were lesbian films, but the highest-profile ones definitely were lesbianfilms.” Frances Reid, interviewed by author, October , . Joan E. Biren has similarlysaid of the National Women’s Film Circuit, “Sometimes this is the first time lesbians lookeach other in the eye, when they get in here and see a Jan Oxenberg film, and it’s incrediblyvalidating and incredibly exciting because they get that reflection of themselves in the filmand then they get the community that they live in. . . . All kinds of things spring from that.”Joan E. Biren andMary Lee Farmer, interviewed by author, November , .

. Reid, interviewed by author, October , .. For more on the Furies, see Anne M. Valk’s chapter “Lesbian Feminism and

Separatism,” in Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation inWashington, D.C. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, ), –; aswell as Genny Beemyn’s section on the Furies in A Queer Capital: a History of Gay Lifein Washington, D.C. (New York: Routledge, ), –.

. Biren and Farmer, interviewed by author, November , .. About two-thirds of these tapes from Iris’s first six months are in the Biren Papers

at Smith. Because this is Biren’s collection, a vast majority of these are the West Coast




tapes, which she received, rather than those she sent. Unless noted otherwise, theinformation summarized in the following couple of pages was gleaned from these tapes.

. Reid, interviewed by author, October , .. Letter, May , , Iris to “Dear Sister Filmmaker,” Box , Biren Papers.. Ibid.. In order to avoid as much awkwardness as possible, for their June tape on the

subject of their personal finances, the West Coast group interviewed one another andthen presented one another’s finances on the tape, Zheutlin describing Reid andStevens’s combined finances and Stevens describing Zheutlin’s. Unfortunately, accordingto the July West Coast tape, the East Coast personal finance tape was stolen in aburglary on Reid and Stevens’s house, but they were able to listen to it once, and theJuly tape includes a few general reflections on its content.

. Cathy Zheutlin, interviewed by author, December , .. Biren and Farmer, interviewed by author, November , .. Correspondence between Cathy Zheutlin and Joan Biren and Mary Lee Farmer

after dissolution of Iris East, Box , Biren Papers; as well as correspondence betweenZheutlin and Ariel Dougherty, Box , Dougherty Papers. Also Zheutlin, interviewed byauthor, December , .

. Washington, DC, Festival of the National Women’s Film Circuit flier and IrisFilms press release, Box , Biren Papers.

. Iris Films press release, Box , Biren Papers.. Festival schedule, Box , Biren Papers.. Beth Stone, “Nat. Women’s Film Circuit Makes Powerful -Movie Debut,”

Grass Roots , no. (October–November ): –, quote .. Ibid., .. Pat Dowell, “Iris Film Festival,” Sibyl-Child , no. (): .. Ibid., .. Stone, “Nat. Women’s Film Circuit Makes Powerful -Movie Debut,” .. Dowell, “Iris Film Festival,” .. Ibid., .. Ibid.. Ibid., .. Correspondence, September , between members of Iris West and Iris East, Box

, Biren Papers.. Iris Feminist Collective, Inc., catalogue, Box , Biren Papers.. Correspondence between Cathy Zheutlin and Ariel Dougherty, Box , Dougherty

Papers.. The cities and towns outside DC where the NWFC traveled were Tucson (twice);

Los Angeles (twice); Santa Barbara, California; Santa Cruz, California; San Diego;Denver/Boulder (twice); Gainesville, Florida; Bloomington, Indiana; Fort Wayne,Indiana (twice); Minneapolis (twice); St. Louis; Omaha (twice); Albuquerque (twice);Durham, North Carolina (twice); Albany, New York; Huntington, New York;New York City; Stonybrook, New York; Cleveland (twice); Columbus, Ohio (threetimes); Norman, Oklahoma (twice); Dayton, Ohio; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; Athens,




Georgia; Atlanta (twice); Makawao, Hawaii; Chicago; Normal, Illinois; Milwaukee (twice);Lexington, Kentucky; New Orleans; Boston; Lynn/Salem, Massachusetts; College Park,Maryland; Blacksburg, Virginia; Lansing, Michigan; Greensboro, North Carolina; Tulsa,Oklahoma; Philadelphia; Memphis; Amarillo, Texas; Houston; Dallas; and Kingston,Rhode Island. Producer contracts, questionnaires, and accounting information,Boxes –, Biren Papers.

. Ibid.. Julia Knight and Peter Thomas, Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of

Alternative Moving Image (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Ltd., ), –.. The topic of producers’ capabilities was an ongoing debate between Iris West and

East on their audiotapes in the spring of . “Iris West” tape (May , ) and “IrisEast” tape (June , ), cassettes –, Biren Papers.

. In fact, Moonforce was one of the first organizations with “lesbian” in its missionstatement to apply for tax exemption, and it had to appeal an IRS rejection in order to getapproved. Biren and Farmer, interviewed by author, November , .

. Ann Cvetkovich, “In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings: Documentary and PopularCulture,” Camera Obscura , vol. , no. (): .

. “Feminist Radio Network—Moonforce Media Interview” (May ), cassette ,Biren Papers.

. For a discussion of feminist film theory’s heterosexism written not too long after thistime, see “Lesbians and Film,” special section, Jump Cut – (): –. This is nowonline with the rest of Jump Cut’s issues at www.ejumpcut.org/archive/index.html.

. One package was composed of the Women’s Film Project’s Emerging Woman(), Linda Klosky’s And Then There Were (), Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics(), Tomato Productions’ Like a Rose (), Jean Shaw’s Fear (), Doe Mayer’sA Foot in the Clouds (). The other included Donna Deitch’s Woman to Woman(), Women Make Movies’ Livia Makes Some Changes (), Lois Tupper’s OurLittle Munchkin Here (), Jan Oxenberg’s Home Movie (), Barbara Hammer’sMenses (), and Cambridge Documentary Films’ Taking Our Bodies Back ().NWFC pamphlets and fliers, Boxes –, Biren Papers.

. NWFC fliers, Boxes –, Biren Papers.. Biren and Farmer, interviewed by author, November , .. Moonforce Media quarterly reports, Box , Biren Papers.. One of these was made up of the Twin Cities Women’s Film Collective’sMy People

(), Barbara Jabaily’s On a Cold Afternoon (), Kathleen Laughlin’sMadsong (),Christine Mohana’s Ninja (), and Elizabeth Barret’s Quilting Women (). Theother included Jane Meyers’s Getting Reading (), Sharon Madden’s Friends (),Kathleen Shannon’s Would I Ever Like to Work (), Barbara Hammer’s Women ILove (), and Women Make Movies’ Healthcaring: From Our End of the Speculum(). NWFC pamphlets and fliers, Boxes –, Biren Papers.

. “Discussion Leader Guide,” Box , Biren Papers.. Ibid.. Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London and Boston:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), –.




. Marcia Landy, The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Cinema,– (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), xii.

. Ibid., xiii, –.. Freude (pen name), “Notes on Distribution,” Camera Obscura –, nos. –, –

(): –, quote .. Ibid, .. Ibid.. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image

of Common Sense (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, ), .. Ibid., –.. José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,”

Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory , no. , issue (): –.. Cvetkovich, “In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings,” –.. Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” .. Casey, the local producer, speculates that the low attendance at the lesbian event

was partially due to the Daughters of Bilitis organizing a Halloween dance that samenight. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.

. Ibid.. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. Ibid.. Ibid.. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. My findings thus concur with those of Michelle Citron, who writes in her

article on Jan Oxenberg’s films, “Oxenberg’s films have had an enthusiastic reception bylesbian and feminist audiences. . . . The films have been programmed over and overagain and have achieved a feminist and lesbian cult reputation.” Michelle Citron, “TheFilms of Jan Oxenberg: Comic Critique,” Jump Cut – (March ): –, quote .

. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. Goddess Films sales and rentals brochure, Box , Biren Papers.. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. Audience survey, Box , Biren Papers.. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. For a history of the “gay-straight split” in the U.S. women’s movement in the

s, including the National Organization for Women’s resistance to discussing, nevermind affiliating itself with, lesbianism, see Echols, Daring to Be Bad, –.

. Most notably Richard Dyer, Now You See It (London and New York: Routledge,); and Andrea Weiss, “Women I Love and Double Strength: Lesbian Cinema andRomantic Love,” Jump Cut – (March ): . For a synthesis of these early




critiques and critical analysis of their historical and theoretical repercussions, see GregYoumans, “Performing Essentialism: Reassessing Barbara Hammer’s Films of the s,”Camera Obscura , no. , issue (): –. Thank you to the anonymous readerwho introduced me to Youmans’s essay.

. Youmans, “Performing Essentialism.”. Ibid., .. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. Ibid.. Ibid.. Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” .. Audre Lorde, “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in Lorde,

Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, ), –.. Producer questionnaire, Box , Biren Papers.. “Feminist Radio Network—Moonforce Media Interview” (May ), cassette

, Biren Papers.. Letter, August , , JoAnn DiLorenzo to Moonforce Media; and letter,

September , , Joan Biren in response to JoAnn DiLorenzo; as well as letter,August , , Norma Bahia to Moonforce Media, among others, Box , Biren Papers.

. Letter, October , , K. K. Ho to Moonforce Media, Box , Biren Papers.. Letter, November , , Mary Farmer for Moonforce Media to K. K. Ho, Box ,

Biren Papers.. Biren and Farmer, interview by author, November , .. For more information on Women Make Movies, see Kristen Fallica, “Sustaining

Feminist Film Cultures: An Institutional History of Women Make Movies,” PhD diss.,University of Pittsburgh, . A shorter version of her scholarship on Women MakeMovies can be found in a forty-year special section on the company in Camera Obscura:Kristen Fallica, “More Than ‘Just Talk’: The Chelsea Picture Station in the s,”Camera Obscura (): –.

. Cvetkovich, “In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings,” .. Ibid., .. For example, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities,

Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, );Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC, and London: Duke UniversityPress, ); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History(Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, ); and ChristopherNealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Durham, NC,and London: Duke University Press, ).

. For example, see Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, QueerHistories (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, ); and VictoriaHesford, Feeling Women’s Liberation (Durham, NC, and London: Duke UniversityPress, ).




Lesbian Feminist Cinema's Archive and Moonforce Media's National Women's Film Circuit

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