Recognizing Woman's History Month, the March issue of The Independent Film & Video Monthly takes as its theme "Women in Film," while the New York Public Library/Donnell Media Center has been co-sponsoring a related series of programs. These are but two among many assessments, and surely not the only ones to address uncertain progress and remaining problems in the area, but it is significant that both have felt called upon to consider the real and continuing marginalization of female filmmakers.

Representing African-American Women in Cinema on the library's final-program panel discussion, Jessica Ann Peavy is just two months shy of her BFA. Her recently completed fourteen-minute Rose's Brew was one of five shorts shown beforehand, and while she believes that she has received good group support, "so definitely a lot has changed," other panelists nevertheless spoke of the difficulty in commanding respect and financing. UMass professor and TV filmmaker Liane Brandon, whose 1971 eight-minute anything you want to be none too gently satirizes social stereotypes of and expectations for girls, recalled that when she started out, Boston's only two female cinéastes were not independent but worked for others and that she herself was granted access to a college camera only after the football team was done with it. Women might be hired in the field but not allowed to touch expensive equipment and were the objects of what she termed men's "hostility" but might equally have been called "paternalism": "Why do you [a woman] want to make movies?" Mastering one's craft was not made any easier by male insistence on doing it for her instead of letting a woman do it herself, make mistakes and thus learn hands-on.

An article by Erin Torneo ironically points out that The New York Times has classed 2003 a "good year for women in film . . . because five and a half films out of how many hundreds of studio, specialty, doc, and foreign films released were directed by women." Reinforcing such irony, panel moderator producer-director-teacher and CineWomen NY board member Elizabeth Foley mentioned that, insofar as Hollywood films are concerned, only four percent are by women directors, a one-in-twenty-five ratio that is currently on the decrease.

Jennifer Wollan, film, TV and video editor whose visual effects credits include Die Hard with a Vengeance, Judge Dredd and Eraser, represented New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT) on the panel and is co-chair of that organization's Women's Film Preservation Fund. Women have been part of industry history since its infancy, as emphasized by a WFPF promotional short that included clips from pioneer work by Alice Guy-Blaché (A Fool and His Money, 1912, notable for possibly the first full use of African-American actors), Emma Knowlton Lytle (Raisin' Cotton, 1938-41), Nell Cox (Liza's Pioneer Diary, 1976) and Meredith Monk (Ellis Island, 1981), followed by Color Rhapsody, Mary Ellen Bute's 1948 Fantasia-Bach "Toccata & Fugue"-esque abstract set to Liszt and shown in its five-minute entirety.

Once in a great while, it was granted, there is some breakthrough into mainstream spotlight, as occurred with Barbara Kopple's 1977 Oscar-winning non-fiction, Harlan County, U. S. A. (In the rush, no one brought up that director's American Dream, also an Academy Award documentary feature twelve years later, nor was mention made of Liz Garbus' prize-winning television and bigscreen work or of the obvious Sofia Coppola.) In any case, since the majority of films by women are of necessity indies and thus not inside the system, it is less likely that studios will ante up money to preserve them. Saving such neglected "orphan films" for posterity often falls to the WFPF, its funding coming from concerned individuals and companies, some of which, like Cineric and Kodak, may furnish hard cash and/or in-kind matériel.

At nineteen minutes the longest of the evening's rarely screened pieces, Confession from Women Make Movies (WMM), was the last shown, a 2004 b&w which consciously insists on itself as non-fiction yet whose moments of film-directed humor are overwhelmed by emotion and memory. The filmmaker, Marina Petroskaia, flies to Stuttgart to face an aged aunt, forcing to the surface the Second World War, DP camps and a painful family skeleton of a post-war job.

In response to an unintentionally ambiguous question -- soon clarified -- from the audience, relating to women's being restricted to "only documentaries," Brandon raised an eyebrow to question the "only," defended the genre as of no lesser importance, and noted that her cooperative New Day Films deals entirely with social-issue movies.

Experimental video- and filmmaker and CineWomen NY member Amy Greenfield added that, in her case, the pure joy and dollars-and-cents innocence of the beginning have in ways been toned down by the hard present reality of scant funding available for short films, for which, she ventured, the DVD may somehow, someday, provide an answer. Digital distribution on the Web or in theaters or wherever, in Brandon's closing opinion, will inevitably bring great changes in coming years, arguably the most important of which will be reduction of overhead (and thus more freedom). "Film projection is a wonderful thing, but it's only a step on the way."