Activist Lens: Bev Grant & Newsreel Films
(Newsreel Collective, 1971, digital, approx 76 min)

Block Cinema welcomes lens-based artist and activist Bev Grant for a screening of three short films that showcase the range of her artistic and political practices. As an early member of the iconic Newsreel Collective founded in New York City in 1967 and known as the “propaganda arm of the New Left,” Bev Grant contributed to key radical documentary films that chronicled the wave-making social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In UP AGAINST THE WALL MS. AMERICA (1968) Bev Grant and fellow Newsreel member Karen Mitnick Liptak participate in and document the New York Radical Women protest of the 1968 Miss America pageant through an array of creative interventions aimed at the contest’s misogyny, consumerism, militarism, and capitalistic spectacle. Two works made in 1971, JANIE’S JANIE and EL PUEBLO SE LEVANTA (THE PEOPLE ARE RISING) observe and embody the leftist struggles of the time, from the bold personal storytelling integral to the women’s movement to the liberatory social organizing of the Young Lords in East Harlem.

Following the screening Bev Grant joins us in person for a conversation with Professor Michael Anthony Turcios (Radio/Television/Film) about activism-focused filmmaking.

Program includes:

UP AGAINST THE WALL MS. AMERICA (NEWSREEL #22) (1968, 8 min, B&W, Newsreel)

“Here she comes…” At the 1968 Miss America pageant, demonstrators introduced a sheep as the appropriate winner. This entertaining short film shows how Women’s Liberation activists used guerrilla theater to raise awareness of what Miss America really represents. The film was widely screened by the second wave women’s movement and is a vivid document of the movement’s activists in action.

This short film was the first film made by Bev Grant and Karen Mitnick Liptak, members of the Newsreel collective. Bev Grant said, “The movie came about because I was a member of NY Radical Women, a sort of coalition group, including WITCH and Redstocking who were planning the Miss America Beuty Pageant demo. Miriam Boxer and I had gained press passes as members of Liberation News Service and were sitting below the runway. Karen Mitnick and I had a Bolex camera and a Nagra recorder and Miriam shot stills. When Miss America took her walk, we filmed it and also caught some footage of the banner being unfurled over the balcony. This was the first film Karen and I had ever worked on.” — TWN

JANIE’S JANIE (1971, 25 min, B&W, Newsreel)

“Produced by The Newsreel collective, JANIE’S JANIE is an extraordinary document of the early 1970’s women’s movement. In this personal documentary, Jane Giese, a working class woman in Newark, comes to realize that she has to take control of her own life after years of physical and mental abuse. As Janie says, “First I was my father’s Janie, then I was my Charlie’s Janie, now I’m Janie’s Janie.”

The “personal” aspect of the film was unusual for early Newsreel, and its very existence resulted from gender issue struggles within the collective itself. It is a document of a time and its issues, and of the efforts of feminists to give creative visual form to their concerns. Using both interviews and verité material, it is one of the more complex Newsreel films. Principal collaborators were: Geri Ashur, Peter Barton, Marilyn Mulford and Stephanie Palewski, with music by Bev Grant and Laura Liben.” — TWN

EL PUEBLO SE LEVANTA (1971, 42 min, B&W, Newsreel)

“In the late ’60s, conditions for Puerto Ricans in the US reached the boiling point. Faced with racial discrimination, deficient community services, and poor education and job opportunities, Puerto Rican communities began to address these injustices by using direct action. This film focuses on the community of East Harlem, capturing the compassion and militancy of the Young Lords as they implemented their own health, educational, and public assistance programs and fought back against social injustice. An excellent portrayal of inner city organizing in the late 60s.” — TWN

Activist Lens: Bev Grant & Newsreel Films is co-presented with Third World Newsreel.

The screening is presented in conjunction with the Block Museum exhibition Dissident Sisters: Bev Grant and Feminist Activism, 1968-72, on view from September 18 – December 1, 2024, and the cinema series Films by Women/Chicago ’74.

Image credit: JANIE’S JANIE, courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

About the guests:

Bev Grant is a labor and social justice activist, feminist, musician, photographer, and filmmaker. In July 2017, Grant began digitizing images she shot in the late 1960s, including iconic photos of the Women’s Liberation Movement. In 1967, she joined in New York Radical Women (NYRW) and New York Newsreel, where she co-produced “Up Against the Wall Miss America,” a short documentary about the Miss America Beauty Pageant Protest in 1968, and “El Pueblo Se Levanta,” a documentary about the Young Lords Party. She has exhibited at OSMOS in New York City, the Old Stone House in Brooklyn, the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College in Portland, OR, and the American Labor Museum in New Jersey. A monograph of Grant’s photographs called: Bev Grant Photography: 1968-1972, was published by OSMOS Books in December 2021. She is currently working on a documentary film focusing on her experiences and photos.

Michael Anthony Turcios, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in Screen Cultures in the Department of Radio/Television/Film. He is faculty affiliate with the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research and the Latina and Latino Studies Program, and is involved with the Northwestern Prison Education Program. He specializes in the histories of nontheatrical film and media, nontraditional audiovisual production, ephemeral and nonextant media, and relational studies of antiracism and anticolonial movements. His peer-reviewed research appears in Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas.

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Tags: Activist Lens: Bev Grant & Newsreel Films, Bev Grant, Block Museum, Evanston, Geri Ashur, Jane Giese, Karen Mitnick Liptak, Laura Liben, Marilyn Mulford, Michael Anthony Turcios, Miriam Boxer, Northwestern University, Peter Barton, Stephanie Palewski