The weekend of April 23th, 1966 was “more than a happening” for Wellesley College. Founded only the year before, Wellesley College’s nascent film society organized the first ever Wellesley College Film Festival. A 1966 press release from the college notes that “the purpose of the festival is to recognize and encourage creative student film making, and to present it to people living in the Boston area student accomplishments in this field”. Film Society leaders Robin Reisig and Karin Rosenthal solicited colleges nationwide for student film submissions. “If you want to support the festival, one of the most important things you can do is to encourage people you know who are making films to enter” Rosenthal tells the Wellesley College News in its January 1966 issue.
To the delight of the Film Society, 111 student films from 48 different schools were submitted to the festival. For the festival, 75 films were selected to be screened. Prizes were to be awarded. Discussion panels and receptions were included in the programming. The judges secured speaks to the competence of the film society’s organizing abilities and the prestige of Wellesley College; the opinions of Robert Gardner, director of the Harvard Film Studies department at the time, Perter Chermayeff (an architect and filmmaker), and Paul Lee, a professor at MIT were all solicited for the determination of cash prizes. For a weekend of student films and discussions about art, it is evident from Wellesley News accounts that the festival “proved itself a whole considerably greater than the sum of its parts…and more unique than the extraordinary notion of a film festival at Wellesley might have been”.
Invited to present awards at the festival was the cartoonist Al Capp. Famous for the “Li’l Abner” comic strip, he was enormously popular and maintained a very high media profile. After presenting the awards at the Film Festival, he went on to make some “disparaging remarks” about the festival in both a a nationally broadcasted radio program and in a piece published alongside a Wellesley student’s rebuttal in the trade magazine Popular Photography. It seems that he is mistook the fact that these films were not made by Wellesley students. Included in his remarks were deprecating remarks about the sensibilities of the “modern young ladies of Wellesley” and the supposedly lurid content of the films.
“At first the screen swirled with crazy little abstract objects…And then several of the sights became unmistakably recognizable. They were crudely drawn phallic symbols…They combined and recombined making no recognizable words at all, until three of the letters happened to combine to spell a dirty word…when the film ended, Wellesley’s delighted young ladies gave it a thunderous ovation.”
“It occurred to me that if that film had been show to an auditorium of less expensively educated ladies, say a trade school or a parochial school, they would have, beyond any doubt, walked out on it, properly offended. It’s only the lucky ones who can send their daughters to this sort of college that educates them into something that considers animated-wall-scrawled nastiness as art”
The object of Mr. Capp’s derision above was one of the most popular films shown at the festival. Viva Banana, a submission by Frank Rivera and Melvyn Rosen of the University of Pennsylvania was among many of the animated films at the festival. The submissions included numerous endeavors in content, form, and technique including “direct animation” which involves drawing directly on the film strip. The provocative shapes of the film, Capp’s comments aside, “amused more than they offended” according to Anne Murray for The Wellesley College News.
One of the films from the programming at the festival was Stillborn by Jeff Sprickler at New York University. Even though it was not considered for a prize, the film drew a tremendous reaction from the audience for it’s nudity, raunchy plot, and experimentation with the negative parts of film. Anne Murray ’67 mentions Stillborn for it’s suggestive nudity in the Wellesley News, but qualifies any accusation of pornography. “I found this one of the most fanciful and genuinely beautiful portions of the program” she writes.
Mr. Capp’s commentary offers some insight as to what was so striking about the film:
“The hit of the festival was a short film about two young blond people who happen to run into each other in a canyon, so they take all their clothes off. Well now, this revealed that one is a boy and the other a girl. They’re so pleased at that, that they join hands and scamper off into the woods, and the rest of the plot is familiar to anyone who has ever been to a stag dinner”
Evident in the controversy regarding Al Capp’s comments about the festival are the contradictory expectations that are held for female spectatorship. As Shelley Stamp notes in the introduction of Movie Struck Girls, the ascendency of cinema at the turn of the century was necessitated by female audiences since “women, middle-class women in particular, embodied the same respectability tradesmen sought for motion pictures” (Stamp, 6). And yet, this did not mean that the incorporation of female or middle class audiences guaranteed ease. By looking at both the content of the films at the time—notably the “lurid” content of white slave films—and the ways in which cinema going was marketed to female audiences, Stamp argues that “women were not always enticed” at the cinema by content that was “dignified” (7). While Stamp is detailing the history of female audiences as it relates to the very beginnings of cinema, there are worthwhile parallels to be drawn to the radical-sensibilities of the 60s. As one headline in the Wellesley College News Declares: “Films express total environment; media’s possibilities inexhaustible!”. Given the circumstances of unprecedented political change issuing from the civil rights moment and American involvement in Vietnam, social changes around the anticipated roles of women, as well as the cultural and perceptive shifts, it appears that for students at Wellesley College, film offered a special means for exploring and rendering new ideas. Just as there was a recalibration in form and content around cinema at the turn of the century, the mid century also lends itself to new advances in filmmaking. As the experimental, political, and narrative ambitions of the student films at the Wellesley Film Festival suggest, new forms are met with new demands. As Capp notes in his commentary, “producing their own movies, you know, is another aspect of the revolt on campus. Out cultured young are as disgusted with the movies we made for them as they are about the way we run our foreign policy”. Given that Wellesley was one of the first sponsors of a student film festival, it is interesting to consider the associations of respectability and prestige associated with the “becoming young ladies” of the college. Even though “more than half of the audience was male”, and nearly all of the films mentioned authored by men, it is unsurprising that the femaleness of Wellesley becomes a source of derision. Any controversial or transgressive qualities associated with the films could easily be complicated by the expected properness of Wellesley students and the “lax morals of college students in general”.
As for what students themselves had to say, everyone seemed generally pretty stoked to be present to such an event. The event, for the students involved played a largely educational and enriching role for those interested in film. As Karin Rosenthal, co-chair and founding member of the film-society puts it:
“The film society has already brought to the campus a new and intriguing area of education. This film festival should make it even clearer how significant an area of concern it might be for us–just because other students are making films. It’s really a phase of education that we don’t see here and tend to believe doesn’t occur”
By bringing a film festival to Wellesley, students were contributing to the shifting attitudes in the Liberal Arts around film and education. The event of a sort functioned a a type of alternative public sphere for artists, students, and filmmakers. The event was deemed a success, and plans were made for future film festivals. The endeavor of the Wellesley Film Festival, and the later addition of an extracurricular film-making course indicates that film appreciation in the late 1960s meant far more than leisurely entertainment. Instead, film appreciation extends itself into art appreciation, politics, and the labor of film-making itself. As one editorial in the Wellesley’s newspaper notes about the festival’s audience’s knowledge and enthusiasm, “Not only were many themselves in the visual arts, but most familiar with one or another form of expression and conversant with themes of young America. The audience could be competently critical as the judges, though in a different way, could appreciate the privileged glimpse at the difficult creative process.” It wasn’t that students were merely entertained. In the enthusiasm expressed and the success of the festival, the demands of a young female learning environment aren’t merely provocative, controversial, but rather engaged with the potential for the film form to gain new ways of seeing and experiencing the world at large.