Elena Gorfinkel’s has been announced as the recipient of a Creative Practice Catalyst Seed Fund for her project “Restoring Women’s Minor Cinema: Learning from Barbara Loden’s 16mm Educational Films THE FRONTIER EXPERIENCE and THE BOY WHO LIKED DEER (1975)”.
The project considers the lessons that can be learned for feminist film history in the preservation of two 16mm educational films made by independent filmmaker Barbara Loden in the years after her now feminist landmark Wanda (1970). Collaborating with film restorationist Corpus Fluxus/Ross Lipman, who restored Wanda in 2010 at the UCLA Film Archive, this collaboration probes the legacies of women’s work in minor and marginal industries outside of the Hollywood feature film, examining the domain of the educational film field as a harbour for women’s creative labours. The grant will support the work of preliminary digital restoration and colour mapping of faded 16mm extant prints of both films, as well as seeding further fundraising for a complete digital and celluloid restoration, as well as research activities around women’s film work in the long 1970s.
The project follows a BFI season on Barbara Loden curated by Elena Gorfinkel, who last year also published the BFI classics book on Wanda, Barbara Loden’s only feature film.