Revisiting Films By Women/Chicago ‘74 with Patricia Erens and B. Ruby Rich

(Multiple Artists, 1971-1974, multiple formats, approx. 60 min plus discussion)

At the center of the committee that organized the Films by Women/Chicago ‘74 festival were two of Chicago’s most formidable film scholars and programmers—Patricia Erens, then a doctoral candidate in film at Northwestern University, and B. Ruby Rich, assistant director of the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The panel they convened—like the program they helped envision—was far-reaching, fractious, and deeply engaged with debates central to the feminist movement in the 1970s.
Revisiting the Films by Women festival after decades spent transforming film studies as educators, authors, and editors, Rich and Erens will appear in conversation alongside a selection of short films by women filmmakers of the 1970s. The six films they have chosen for this program, ranging from documentary to animation to personal and experimental cinema, collectively explore the questions of sexuality, intimacy, self-image, family, and creativity which animated Films by Women/Chicago ‘74 and remain pertinent today.

Program includes:

CHOW FUN (Sally Cruikshank, 1972, 4 min, 16mm)

BETTY TELLS HER STORY (Liane Brandon, 1972, 20 min, digital, restoration by NYWIFT's Women's Film Preservation Fund)

THE STRIPPER (Siew-Hwa Beh, 1971, 1 min, digital)

WOMEN (Coni Beeson, 1974, 13 min, digital)

WOMEN AND CHILDREN AT LARGE (Freude, 1983, 7 min, 16mm, print courtesy of the Pacific Film Archive)

HOME MOVIE (Jan Oxenberg, 1973, 12 min, digital, NYWIFT's Women's Film Preservation Fund)

About Patricia Erens

Patricia developed her critical eye during the 10 years she attended the Saturday matinees in the local theaters of Washington, DC. After receiving her M.A. in English lit at UChicago in 1963, she jumped ship, enrolling in the newly minted Ph.D. film program at Northwestern University, graduating in 1981 while raising two young children at home. Her first teaching job was at Rosary College where she remained until 2018. She took opportunities to teach at San Francisco State, Hebrew University, as well as utilizing grants to lecture in Japan and through the Fulbright Teaching Fellowships to travel to Brazil and Hong Kong. In 1994 she joined the Faculty of Hong Kong University where she stayed until after the handover. Among her publications are: Sexual Stratagems: the World of Women and Film; The Jew in American Cinema and Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Patricia has served as editor of The Journal of Film and Video and director of students abroad for Dominican University. Locally she has been active on the advisory board of the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Asian Art Council at the Art Institute. In addition, she collects photography by women and once owned a Cindy Sherman. Among Patricia’s seven grandchildren, one graduated from Northwestern with a major in film.

About B. Ruby Rich

B. Ruby Rich began her career selling tickets on opening night of the Film Center in January 1973. After five years, she left, wrote for the Reader, taught at SAIC, and began curating . She left Chicago for New York in 1981, where she directed the Film Program at the NY State Council on the Arts, wrote for the Village Voice, and co-organized a show of US independent films “ La Otra Cara” for the Havana film festival. Arriving in San Francisco in 1992, she taught at UC Berkeley, became a professor at UC Santa Cruz (retiring in 2020), and served on multiple festival juries and panels, and as a guest programmer/director for the Toronto and Telluride film festivals and the ICA London film/video biennial. She wrote for the Guardian (London) and Sight & Sound. She is the author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Duke, 1998) and New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut (Duke, 2013). She was Editor in Chief of Film Quarterly in 2013-23. She was honored in 2017 in London with an exhibition “Being Ruby Rich” at the Barbican and panels at Birkbeck. A member of the Academy (documentary branch), she lives in San Francisco and Paris.

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