B. Ruby Rich: Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (1998)

“If there was a moment during the sixties, seventies, or eighties that changed the history of the women’s film movement, B. Ruby Rich was there. Part journalistic chronicle, part memoir, Chick Flicks—with its definitive, the-way-it-was collection of essays—captures the birth and growth of feminist film.

For over three decades Rich has been one of the most important voices in feminist film criticism. Her presence at film festivals, her film reviews in the Village Voice, Elle, Out, and the Advocate, and her commentaries on the public radio program “The World” have secured her a place as a central figure in the history of what she deems “cinefeminism.” In the hope that a new generation of feminist film culture might be revitalized by reclaiming its own history, Rich introduces each essay with an autobiographical prologue that describes the intellectual, political, and personal moments from which the work arose. Travel, softball, sex, and voodoo all somehow fit into a book that includes classic Rich articles covering such topics as the antiporn movement, the films of Yvonne Rainer, a Julie Christie visit to Washington, and the historically evocative film Mädchen in Uniform.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1998
ISBN 0822321211, 9780822321217
448 pages

Review (Linda Mizejewski, Women’s Review of Books, c1998)
Review (Susan Lord, Film Studies, c1999)
Review (Felicity Collins, 1999)

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EPUB

See also Women and Film Project initiated in 2013 by Clarissa Jacob and Kate Wieteska.

Brandon Stosuy (ed.): Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (2006)

“Sometime after Andy Warhol’s heyday but before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers, guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it became known simply as “Downtown.“ Willfully unpolished and subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel Piñero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and music that breathed the life of the street.

The first book to capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up, But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992. Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and photographs of people and the city, many of them here made available to readers outside the scene for the first time. The book’s striking and quirky design—complete with 2-color interior—brings each of these unique documents and images to life.

Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark’s Bookshop, unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker’s short fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content, sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of real life.

With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years of New York City’s smartest and most explosive—as well as hard to find—writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.”

With an afterword by Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles
Publisher NYU Press, 2006
ISBN 9780814740118
500 pages

Downtown Collection at NYU’s Fales Library

Reviews: Ed Halter (Village Voice, 2006), Meghan O’Rourke (New York Times, 2006), Tim W. Brown (Columbia Journal of American Studies, n.d).
Commentary: Cynthia Carr (New York Times, 2006), Peter Cherches (2006).

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PDF (39 MB, updated on 2019-8-23)

Mutually: Communities of the 1970s and 1980s / Navzájem: Společenství 70. a 80. let, catalogue (2013) [EN/SK/CZ]

Catalogue for an exhibition held in March-May 2013 at tranzitdisplay in Prague and The Brno House of Arts, Czech Republic, curated by Barbora Klímová, Daniel Grúň and Filip Cenek.

The selected fragments in this exhibition, borrowed from the archives of Moravian, Slovak, and Hungarian artists, reference different communities within the framework of “unofficial culture” during the period of Czechoslovak normalisation in the 1970s-80s.

Publisher tranzitdisplay, Prague, and The House of Arts, Brno, 2013
44 pages
via Academia.edu

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