Feminism 101: The New York Women's Video Festival, 1972-1980

Melinda M. Barlow

Dec 1, 2003

Description

Barlow, Melinda M. "Feminism 101: The New York Women's Video Festival, 1972-1980"
Camera Obscura (Dec 1, 2003) vol. 18, no. 54, pp. 3-40.

This exhaustive 37-page essay on the history of the Women's Video Festival addresses the fact that the Festival has been largely ignored since the 1970s. The essay was published in 2003 in Camera Obscura, a journal dedicated to feminist perspectives on film, video, and television. The author of this study is Melinda Barlow, associate professor of film studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, specializing in women's film and videomaking. In her study, Barlow recounts a thorough description of the Women's Video Festival, discussing the importance of this venue in the early 70s and the situation for women working with video at the time. Barlow focuses on the 1975 and 1976 editions of the Festival, when the organizers created three thematically distinct viewing environments.