ABSTRACT
This chapter has two points of departure. The first is my teaching of film theory and practice; the second is the availability of women's films – specifically within the educational context but also within the wider context of distribution and exhibition. It seems to me that we are experiencing two new kinds of omission of women filmmakers:
1 In addition to the many lost films by women from the earliest period of the cinema, we have also lost a disturbing number from the 1970s. For example, when I was putting a festival program strand together on pioneer women documentary filmmakers,1 I could not get hold of the prints of films by the London Women's Film Group2 or of Heiny Srour's The Hour of Liberation (Lebanon 1974). The filmmakers themselves were not entirely aware that their films were no longer in distribution.3 Many more recent films are often available only during brief cinema runs, and only a few of these find their way onto video; even fewer will be widely available on video.
