Anthology Film Archives and Polish Cultural Institute NY present the program Avant-Garde Films By Polish Female Artists of the 1970s that includes short films by Izabella Gustowska, Iwona Lemke-Konart, Jolanta Marcolla, Natalia LL, Ewa Partum, Jadwiga Singer, Teresa Tyszkiewicz. Total running time is about 100 minutes.

The 1970s represented a period of revival in Polish art, which manifested itself in artists’ interest in new media, among other aspects. An especially striking feature of the art of the period was a strong tendency to engage with the moving image, and in particular with the nascent medium of video, which made its appearance within the realm of Polish art in 1973.

Women were pioneers in the fields of both avant-garde film and video, despite the extremely limited access to film cameras (and especially portable video cameras) in Poland under communism. Notwithstanding these obstacles and the fact that art academies in Poland did not offer the possibility to work with the medium of film, women artists succeeded in developing their own, original filmic language. They created both analytical and conceptual works – structural films and impressionistic pieces devoted to the question of gender, approaching womanhood and its experience from a variety of perspectives. This program embraces films representing both these tendencies and features recently re-discovered films, such as ARTA by Teresa Tyszkiewicz, which had not been digitized until 2020, as well as films by Jadwiga Singer, whose archive has been in the custody of the Arton Foundation since 2018.

This program is curated by Marika Kuźmicz, this program has been organized in collaboration with the Arton Foundation.

More: The program details, list of 21 films included in the program as well as tickets can be obtained at the ARTON site here.

Tickets are $8 for the whole program (all shorts) or for individual films; tickets are for a 72-hour streaming period.