Society Selections: Tracing the Wellesley Film Society’s Role in Critical Film Engagement on campus (1964 – Present)

“The film is a part of modern life which Wellesley has ignored,” announced Barbara Norr ’64, the then president of a newly formed Film Society, the impetus for its founding and its mission to bring ‘good, creative films to the campus.’

This project sets out to document the film practices of the Wellesley College Film Society, and the role student organizations had in engaging, both allowing student experimentation and engagement with film and film commentary. I was interested in the early days of the Film Society, the challenges they faced, the factors that shaped their curatorial role in campus screenings, and the influence they had on student involvement in film screening, especially in representing the taste of the student body as well as in imbuing screenings and student film-making with a social purpose and providing venues for critical discussion and debate. I did so by conducting research on the timeline of the Film Society in its inception. I also aimed to draw parallels between these earliest efforts and how the Film Society has both evolved and continue to fulfill this purpose presently.

Before the formal establishment of the Film Society, film showings on the Wellesley campus, students convened through polls sponsored by the ‘Student Entertainment Committee” to determine student film preferences.

In a December 1952 student poll in Pendleton, these selections included such films as “Blue Angels,” “Crime and Punishment, “”Birth of a Nation,” “Moon and Sixpence,” and “Tight Little Island,” and supplied by the film society in Boston.
By 1965, the Student Entertainment Committee had grown in its reach as the first endeavor of the foreign film group screened film epics like “Ivan the Terrible” swept the Jewett screen, boldly pronouncing the monumentality of the work itself and the potential of film as an art form. Director of the Theater Paul Barstow comments that as one of the great films of the time, “we can all be grateful to the new Wellesley film group for affording us the opportunity to see it.”

The new organization and its curation of film programs were expected to “add something to the whole life of the college which is of educational value” commented Professor White of the English department. Both members of the faculty and Paul Barstow, Director of the Theater, were interested in establishing film series that would showcase early works from Fellini and Eisenstein and Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin. The film society in its conception sought support from the Student Entertainment Committee as well as student support to launch film series and become a film society that would be able to obtain more films from the Boston Museum of Modern Art.

The ‘67 Film Festival sponsored by the Film Society was arranged by a handful of devoted students that culminated in a program that showcased high quality, professional work and offering workshops to view classics and discuss them with established critics (Mrs. Osborne of the Museum of Modern Art, young amateur filmmakers like Ed Chirico and professionals like Stan Vanderbeek. Student journalist Anne Murray ’67 in “Films Express Total Environment, Media’s Possibilties Inexhaustible, she writes that film was quickly becoming one of the most significant expressions in helping to sort out, assses and “re-experience our experiences in an increasingly complex world… it is consciousness-expanding, but it is more than a lark. It can be crucial.” Excitement about the possibilities of film, “new ideas, in a visual and auditory form … [and] the language of film and its environment” collide on campus and provided seemingly endless possibility.

Nevertheless, these efforts were not met without its set of challenges as the Film Society tried to remain self-supporting; with student interest and the festival’s successes in proving the interest in and potential of the films, projecting equipment to have the College back the organization with financial and professional support through the Service Organization Fund and expand existing resources. It was in the wake of the 1967 Film Festival at the College and an interest in documentary film-making however that the first “extra-curricular film course” launched with an enrollment of 32 students. The details of figuring out which department and course this first and the possibilities of teaching film in the art department were arranged by president of the Film Society, Karin Rosenthal and independent documentary film maker in nearby Brookline, Austin Lamont – who himself was president of his school’s film club at Oberlin.” Lamont arranged for students to borrow “super eight” (home movie type) cameras complete with film only, “compact little gun-handled cameras [with] limitations for serious film making… but adequate for learning.” The class provided the earliest environments for students to experiment with film themselves. Lamont would typically show a selection of 16 mm professional or semi-professional films. These films screened before class and served as fodder for critical discussion. These early attempts at documentary filmmaking on the part of students themselves, despite these limitations, broke new ground in capturing views of the Wellesley campus and in the process “breaking the ‘set’ which still photography” had until that point imposed. Experimentation with documentary film brought Wellesley students with “whirring black boxes” off-campus, in the Hay Market, the arboretum, the banks of the Charles, and beyond. Just after the festival, students Karin Rosenthal and Judy Zaimen completed their sixteen millimeter 350 projects, which was then shown at the ’”67 and the Arts,” the first production shown on campus.

The earliest members of the Film Society curated film programs in feedback with the student body, as evidenced by columns in the Wellesley News expressing opinions about the films being screened. In an opinion piece on the screening of Henry V sponsored by the Student Entertainment Committee to be shown at Jewett in addition to regular programming (such as The King and I and Three Faces of Eve), the movie despite its “epic sweep and grandeur” was “not a filmic film… unlike those movies which the newly formed film society is attempting to bring to Wellesley.” The hope for what curatorial role the Film Society should take for the future of screenings at the college appeared in letters to the editor: entitled “Filmy Request,” student Teeny King ’67, who had faithfully attended weekend screenings on campus (“as opposed to patronizing some movie theater in Cambridge),” and was hoping for films “with taste a bit more discerning.”

As members of the senior class, King urges for members of the Film Society to take notice of films of social commentary, “that beat with the generation, pulse with life, and in general broaden our horizons… movies [that seem to be] “slipping through their fingers.” Latent in these letters were a longing for a curatorial emphasis on selections that felt generationally relevant and social commentary.

The Film Society during the 1966-67 school year aimed to fulfill this role: In an article entitled “Death by Thinking? Film to Provoke Reaction,” the Film Society announced the showing of “The Seventh Seal” by controversial author-director Ingmar Bergman, who maintained that “a film is made to create reaction.”
The Film Society of 1966 continued to present programs that were experimentative both thematically and technically.
- Their November showings of Jules and Jim, considered one of the early movies of the French New Wave, was shown in Pendleton, chosen for its “New Wave technique of using technical effects, camera and especially music to achieve its artistry… [using] action not to present a moral or theory, but to portray and observe life as it is.”
- At times, students sought out these films off campus – at the Parts Cinema or the Brattle. Nevertheless, student reviews and critic corners of the Wellesley News. The film “The Graduate” (Mike Nichols” piqued student attention to the “sensitive and provocative statements” made about alienated youth and the vapidity and row ugliness of the purportedly cultured and educated society from which they are estranged.”

Flashforward to Wellesley’s present day Film Society, In a 2017 Wellesley News, article on the Film Society, The Film Society ran into many of the challenges faced by earlier generations of the society albeit with a different set of digital barriers to accessing content and in attracting students to attend. screenings at the Collins Cinema are still often organized thematically: “Film in Drag,” “Women Kick Ass” and “Childhood Live Action Faves.” The Film Society reconsidered their film selection process to collaborate with other organizations on campus to select films to more fully embody the campus’ preferences. The challenges to screening certain films were in being able to pay for distribution rights for non-theatrical release. These mirrored earlier challenges of the 1967 society at securing funding from the Student Organization Funding for screenings. “Generally we can only afford a couple big releases because they’re very expensive with distribution rights… Screening “Wonder Woman” was about $700. You have to pay for everything… Even if you have a copy from the library, you have to get the distribution rights for non-theatrical release,” Kornitsky explained. The Film Society continues to reconstitute itself to become more representative of the campus as a whole, to get representation of different types of films and filmmakers and “to reflect what its current members are looking for.”

Snippets from the Film Society (2017-2022)

“I think that it’s a really cool service that we have and that they pick really cool movies to show. I remember seeing ‘Mad Max’ right after it came out! It’s also really fun to watch the movies with Wellesley students because of the running commentary,” said Colleen Larkin ’18.
“I think each generation of the Film Society makes it what it wants it to be,” she stated. The Film Society’s current mission continues to be a place for cinephiles to come together and discuss films. “I joined film society because I wanted an opportunity to bond with other Wellesley students that love movies,” the current e-board explained, expressing that they would also like to focus on encouraging students to engage with film in a critical way and ask questions about what they’re watching.
“We want to focus on film as an educational resource… Having people think critically about film is so important. Wellesley is such a place about thinking critically, and we want to incorporate that through film,” she stated. Kornitsky, president of the society, felt that their recent screening of “Wonder Woman” on Nov. 3, which included a post-screening discussion with Associate Professor of French Codruţa Morari, was especially successful and [intended] to build upon the critical engagement she noticed there”
“You could see the audience start to think about films critically and ask questions that reflect that,” she said. The society expressed its goals looking forward to coming semesters to make the Film Society a more notable presence on campus.

In the most recent semester, the Wellesley Film Society began to reestablish its presence on campus in the wake of the pandemic, as a result of the lack of in-person screenings during which members of previous e-boards graduated, the society was reconstituted and became to hold its first film screenings back, with the most highly attended screening so far being “10 Things I Hate About You” with other notable features of “Titane” and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” for a double feature on foreign films.

“[The society is] definitely a lot more underground than it was before. I feel like beforehand, it was an institution where it was kind of a given that there would be screenings at [7 p.m.] every weekend,” White said. “We’re trying to gain the prominence that we had before.”
“We’re trying to increase the amount of diversity in the programming because we want to reflect the student body,” White said.
To broaden the scope of the films that the society screens, Appel-Riehle established a subgroup within the society called Film Cult, which is dedicated to “independent, foreign and obscure film” – recently, Film Cult screened three films directed by Gregg Araki, a Japanese American filmmaker whose work was instrumental to the New Queer Cinema movement of the ’90s.
“A lot of our submissions were pretty unique,” Projectionist Chair Magdalena Manrique ’25 said. “We have a lot of very specific genres [of] double features that we’re going to be doing. I think that’s a fun way to introduce someone to a genre that they maybe haven’t seen before.” The society’s e-board encourages anyone who is interested and continues to advocate for more members and more people to attend society screenings.

In my study, I drew parallels between the earliest forays into experimentation afforded by the film society’s efforts. As an organization, the ‘67 film society’s festival drew film-makers, judges, critics, and students from other campuses to Wellesley, giving students first-hand experience in student film making and the “film explosion” and developing the relationship of film to community and reflected back on the importance of public institutions in constructing public spheres for stimulating discussion and an active public. As examined in Rossi-Snook and Tilton in their case study, the New York Public Library, by the 1960s, just as the Wellesley Film Society had, to negotiate its relationship as a public institution and had similarly identified film as not only an important educational resource, and sought to use film to address the current issues that were more representative, would stimulate discussion, and meet the ‘educational and cultural needs of the city.’ Just as the present day cinephiles of the Wellesley Film Society found spaces to share in avant-garde or independent film, the NYPL sought to screen fresh points of view on many important social issues. Institutions also seek to create spaces filmmakers: “to contemplate and experiment with self-representation through film,” reflected back on the Film Festival and the earliest iterations of film and filmmaking seminars held by the 1967 Film Festival. Having a key public space for identifying, circulating, and sharing in film that captures the diverse tastes has a crucial role in creating an active public sphere.

In Chuck Tryon’s framework of examining campuses as unique social spaces, “equal parts public and private, domestic and nondomestic… concentrated hives of social interaction and experimentation… saturated with bandwidth and technology,” they are ideal settings for observing viewing practices and the environments in which students negotiate, access,m and engage with film and media. The shift to digital forms of viewing have also evolved the role of college film societies. Smoodin identifies some key characteristics of early school film clubs in the culture, and the social organizations that united film fans, the organization of projector operators, review committees, auteurist discourses of directorial quality, with political and industrial issues at the centerfold. While many of the characteristics of this framework remain unchanged, as a “digital generation,” students now are connected instantaneously to a far more diverse set of tastes and attitudes as a result of the way that we engage with media technologies. In this framework, as fast, cheap, and easy digital distribution methods that offer a wider range of media through subscription and transactional video-on-demand services, the standard of viewing for college students has fundamentally changed. Under Tryon’s framework “media consumption styles practiced by members of this age cohort bear little resemblance to those of older Americans.” As we compare the ways that different generations of the Wellesley Film Society have evolved to represent student tastes and stimulate important discussion, it is important to note the ever-adaptive role that student film committees have had in curating and creating these spaces.

Bibliography and Resources

Acland, Charles R. “Classrooms, Clubs, and Community Circuits: Cultural Authority and the Film Council Movement, 1946-1957,” in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, eds., Inventing Film Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 149-181.
Carlen, Tekla. “Film Society Rebuilds Following Pandemic Inactivity.” The Wellesley News, May 4, 2022. https://thewellesleynews.com/2022/05/04/film-society-rebuilds-following-pandemic-inactivity/
King, Teeny. “Filmy Request.” The Wellesley News, January 26, 1967, LX edition, No. 15.
Murray, Anne. “Films Express Total Environment, Media’s Possibilities Inexhaustible.” The Wellesley News, April 27, 1967, LX edition, sec. 23.
Murray, Anne. “Extra-Curricular Film Course ‘Clicking Results in New Views of Campus Scenes.” The Wellesley News, May 18, 1967, LX edition, sec. 26.
Rossi-Snook, Elena., and Lauren Tilton, “’Don’t Be a Segregationist: Program Films for Everyone’. The New York Public Library’s Film Library and Youth Film Workshops,” in Allyson Field and Marsha Gordon, eds., Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 252-270.
Smoodin, Eric. “’What a Power for Education!’ The Cinema and Sites of Learning in the 1930s,” in Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds., Useful Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 17-33.
Vaughan, Jane. “Film Society Plans To Diversify Movie Selection.” The Wellesley News, November 29, 2017. https://thewellesleynews.com/2017/11/29/film-society-plans-to-diversify-movie-selection/.
Wellesley Archives Collections: Publications. “Committee Announces Polls Results, To Show Third Choice Film Tomorrow.” The Wellesley News, December 4, 1952.
Wellesley Archives Collections: Publications. “Plans for New Film Series Underway.” The Wellesley News, October 31, 1963, LVII edition, sec. No. 6.
Wellesley Archives Collections: Publications. “Images, Echoes, Icons Fill ‘Ivan the Terrible ” Stunning Film Epic Sweeps Screen Tomorrow.” The Wellesley News, January 14, 1965.
Wellesley Archives Collections: Publications. “Film Society Presentation to Explore Bohemian Life.” The Wellesley News, November 17, 1966.
Wellesley Archives. “Film Society Offers Expanded Program.” The Wellesley News, September 28, 1967, LXI edition, No. 3.
Wellesley Archives Collections: Publications. “Mike Nichols’ Film Graduates with Honors.” The Wellesley News, January 18, 1968.

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