March 2003

Iowa is best known for early political caucuses, Old Settlers Picnics, the fictional River City of Meredith Wilson’s musical Music Man, Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams, and although not quite as famous, the corncam website. Yes, corncam. At www.IowaFarmer.com/corncam/corn.html you can literally sit back and watch the corn grow, with updates every fifteen minutes. But Iowa’s fields of opportunities are both vast and varied for mediamakers of all types.

Earlier this year the Carnegie Museum announced it would close one of Pittsburgh’s oldest and most renowned screening series and shut down the museum’s film and video department, the result of a $4 million budget cut for 2003. In addition to dropping the film and video program, Carnegie Museum is eliminating seventeen full-time and four part-time employees.

What is the Woman In Film Finishing Fund?

We are the philanthropic outreach arm of the Women in Film organization. We do a lot of outreach programs that are open to the general public, but specifically to the Women in Film general membership. The fund supports filmmakers who make thoughtful and provocative films by or about women. It’s the only fund of its kind in the United States.

After years of saving money, finding the best crew, and refining your filmmaking skills, you finally produce the short film that will prove your talent as a filmmaker. Unable to wait for festivals or other distribution, you want to share your work with the world immediately by putting the movie on the web. But what ends up online is not your beautiful 16mm film, but something the looks like it was shot with a PixlVision camera with a shattered lens; the actors’ performances now sound like police walkie-talkies; and it still takes twenty minutes to download the whole thing.

This was going to be the last article ever on woman cinematographers. It shouldn’t be news in 2003 that women are making movies—gorgeous, stunning, provocative movies—and with Ellen Kuras shooting big-budget Hollywood films like Analyze That, can anyone still argue that the gaze is male?