Brandon’s Films to be Featured in New York, London

Image

Groundbreaking films directed in the early 1970s by Liane Brandon, professor emerita of education, will be featured in upcoming series in New York and London.

Her 1972 work, “Betty Tells Her Story,” will be shown May 5 as part of “A Different Picture: Women Filmmakers in the New Hollywood Era, 1967-1980” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“This series is a redress to the established Easy Riders and Raging Bulls narratives; women from coast to coast radically altering film form, film subject and film power structures,” says the academy’s announcement. “This series spotlights the prodigious work of female filmmakers in the United States from 1967-1980.”

“Betty Tells Her Story” and 1971’s “Anything You Want To Be” are also part of “From the Vault: Women’s Advocacy on Film,” a series presented by the Women’s Film Preservation Fund at UnionDocs in New York. “Anything You Want To Be” will be shown May 20, while “Betty Tells Her Story” screened April 22.

Both films also will be screened June 2 at London’s Barbican Centre in a retrospective titled “Second Wave Feminist Filmmakers.”

Brandon was one of the first independent women filmmakers to emerge from the women’s movement. At the time she started making films in the late 1960s, there were few women making films and even fewer who were dealing specifically with women’s political issues. Her films were distributed widely, and established that women had an important role to play in the predominantly male independent film movement. Her titles have become milestones in the women’s movement, have been screened extensively in festivals around the world, and continue to be used in school and university film and social studies curricula.

She is a co-founder of New Day Films, a nationally known social issue cooperative that pioneered the distribution of films and videos about women. A number of the films slated for screening at the Brooklyn and London events are distributed by New Day and many of them have been preserved by the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television, says Brandon.

Brandon taught in the School of Education from 1973 until her retirement in 2004.