History is not only written. It is also kept — and someone always decides what is worth keeping. For women in film, that someone has, for thirty years, been a single quiet program in New York.
Established in 1995 by New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT) together with the Museum of Modern Art, the Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) is the only program in the world dedicated exclusively to preserving the cultural legacy of women in the film industry. Since then it has supported the preservation of more than a hundred American shorts and features — films in which the role of women was fundamental to the production — presented them in public, and pushed scholarship on women’s place in film history.
A carte blanche at MoMA
To mark the fund’s twentieth anniversary, MoMA handed its programming committee a carte blanche: choose the films that show how essential women have been to the development of cinema as an art form. The selections ranged across the medium, from Desperately Seeking Susan to documentaries far off the canonical map.
One stood out. In 2012 the German director Doris Dörrie spent eight weeks in Mexico City with her crew, documenting the women who play mariachi — a world that views life from a resolutely macho perspective, where female musicians are seldom welcomed. Her film Que Caramba es la Vida follows Maria del Carmen, a young ranchera singer in Plaza Garibaldi. When these women sing about death, love and poverty, the everyday hardship of the city becomes, for a few bars, bearable.
Why preservation is the point
It is tempting to treat film preservation as housekeeping. It is closer to politics. A film that is not preserved simply ceases to exist; the gaps in the archive become the gaps in the story we tell about who made culture. The WFPF understood early what is now obvious: that to save a woman’s film is to refuse a future in which she was never there. Thirty years on, in a flood of infinitely copyable images, the harder and more radical act is still deciding what deserves to last.