Retired UMass prof recognized for women's films

By MEGAN BURBANK Bulletin Contributing Writer

Published on August 22, 2008

"Why would a girl want to do this?" Liane Brandon's film professor asked her. She was the only woman in his class at a Boston University, the late 1960s had arrived, and she wanted to be a filmmaker.

"It was an interesting time," Brandon said in a recent phone interview from her home in Boston. People thought it was unusual for a woman to want to make a film, she said, and questioned why anyone would want to see films about ordinary women.

"Most documentaries at that time were made by men," she said, "and they were about wars, exploration, exotic travel - they were not about ordinary people."

Despite the skepticism, Brandon, who is now retired from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she taught until 2004, emerged as one of the first independent women filmmakers during the early women's movement in Boston.

Two of her films made during that era, "Anything You Want to Be" and "Betty Tells Her Story," were recently chosen to be restored and preserved by New York Women in Film and Television, a nonprofit organization for professional women in film, television and new media based in New York City. Brandon's films will be preserved as part of the organization's Women's Film Preservation Fund, which focuses on the work of female filmmakers.

Brandon never set out to be a filmmaker, though, at least not until the late '60s, when she became involved with Newsreel, a documentary filmmaking group in Cambridge that produced antiwar films during the Vietnam War. Eventually, she started making her own films, finding subjects in the lives of ordinary people, focusing especially on women.

Getting there wasn't easy

Back then, distribution companies weren't interested in films made by and about women, especially ordinary women, she said.

"They thought the women's movement would last a year at most," said Brandon. Because getting her films distributed was difficult, she teamed up with three fellow filmmakers to start up her own distribution cooperative, New Day Films, which focused on films dealing with feminism and social issues. Making a movie wasn't easy either. Because everything at that time was filmed on expensive and inaccessible 16-millimeter film equipment, finding access to a camera was almost impossible.

She made one film with a camera borrowed from the football team at North Quincy High School in Quincy, where she worked, for example.

Gradually, though, the films were purchased and rented all over the country.

"Everybody wanted our films," she said, "We could watch the women's movement move across the country when our films were bought and rented in places like Texas."

"Anything You Want to Be," which was one of the most popular films of the early women's movement, concerns the confusion a teenage girl faces when she is told repeatedly she can be "anything you want to be," but is provided with daily evidence to the contrary in the form of strict gender roles.

"Betty Tells Her Story" chronicles a woman's search for the perfect dress. Betty tells her story twice in two different takes, each one revealing something different about her experience.

Today, the two films are still mainstays in college libraries across the country, used in film, psychology, sociology and women's studies courses.

One such class is "The Cultural Work of the Memoir," taught by Susan Van Dyne, who heads the program for the study of women and gender at Smith College in Northampton.

"'Betty' is our first day," said Van Dyne, and its impact is not lost on her students. "They're fascinated by it. ... They can respond to her as a person. She has a voice, she has an accent, she reminds them that writing is about putting a personality and a voice on a page."

Now retired, Brandon has made an array of films in addition to "Betty" and "Anything," including, "Sometimes I Wonder Who I Am," "Once Upon A Choice," "How To Prevent a Nuclear War" and "Fine Print."

In the Pioneer Valley, her films can be found in the libraries at Smith and Hampshire Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She said she hopes that retrospective screenings of her work can take place in the Valley soon.