Saving Lost Feminist Video Letters

In a dark lab, conservator Jonathan Furmanski stands in front of a bank of old screens. “This video is very bright, which is why it’s so high,” he says, gesturing to a flickering waveform.

The waveform, he explains, is the ghostly signature of a videotape—one that, with luck and patience, will soon be coaxed into the digital age.

Furmanski—an art historian by training who learned the technical aspects of preserving old media on the job, as the field was being invented—has spent the last twenty years rescuing fragile audiovisual materials like VHS cassettes and old-school tape reels. He finds the right analog technology to restore archival films, and then makes digital copies for contemporary audiences to enjoy. “When you digitize a tape, you turn it into a series of zeros and ones,” he says. “You’re taking something that’s made out of one thing, and turning it into something very different.”

The old machines themselves are as much a part of the story as the tapes: bulky, temperamental, and increasingly rare. “You never know what you’re gonna get, like when you queue up. It's an elaborate process,” says Furmanski. “In order to play, it takes about one full day’s worth of work to get one half an hour of video. It’s not just throwing a tape in or clicking a YouTube video link.”

Most recently, Furmanski has been digitizing the battered, often unlabeled, relics of the International Videoletters, a feminist video exchange network that ran from 1975 to 1977. These half-hour black-and-white recordings were traded and screened across 27 feminist organizations across the country. The video letters, Furmanski explains, were born of the protest movements of the seventies, artifacts of a time when women, newly equipped with consumer-grade video cameras, began to make their own television. Video collectives allowed women to pool resources to access what was then an expensive technology. “It was a way to keep the momentum going, like a newsletter,” he says. “For people who found mainstream media offensive for whatever reason, they could send it out into the world without having to be a broadcast station.”

The video letters, which were made to travel, tend to turn up in unexpected places. Furmanski unearthed this tape while digitizing the archive of Janice Yudell, an artist who ran a collective called Vampire Video in Los Angeles during the seventies. Two previous tapes in Getty’s collection were discovered in the archive of the Woman’s Building. “This is at the end of the Nixon era. The talking heads on the television are telling you who to vote for, and they're advertising diet pills to women,” says Furmanski. “Video was a brand new art form that had not yet been colonized by men, and the male gaze could easily be short-circuited if you had a woman behind the camera.” The tapes might feature a corral in Tucson, a tour of women on strike at a shrimp factory in Tampa, or an interview with a female reverend about sexism in the church. In the tape that Furmanski was restoring, two old ladies were sitting at the Santa Monica Pier, talking about what the women’s movement meant to them.

Furmanski is as comfortable discussing the conceptual underpinnings of feminist collectives as he is troubleshooting a recalcitrant tape deck. The types of tapes he preserves at Getty are not well-known films—no forgotten Hitchcocks or pristine reels of Citizen Kane—but videos of avant-garde dance, electronic music, and performance that might otherwise be erased. “There are people who are better electrical engineers than I am by a country mile,” he says, “I can fix broken tape recorders, but I can also tell the difference between a Baldessari and a Vito Acconci.” He is not, he insists, a cinephile. “I’m not a film nerd,” he says. “But these tapes need rescuing. They need much more time and attention because they’re sort of the unpopular kids and very beautiful.”

Many artworks of the 1970s, he says, are at risk of being lost. “In that era, things were conceptual. It was art that was made to throw away. These things are fragile because if nobody’s stacking them up, putting them someplace, and giving them numbers, then it falls to us to do it 55 years later,” says Furmanski. “As histories get written, rewritten and masculinized, these women’s stories are very much in danger of disappearing,” he says.

Although much of the culture of second-wave feminism has been well-documented, less has been said about these video letters —in part because they are so rare. Only a handful of the video letters still exist, largely because tapes were often reused to save on costs. Now, there are only six known surviving tapes. “There is stuff on these tapes that more than likely doesn’t exist anywhere else outside of this cassette box, so that just makes releasing them from their little prisons very fascinating. This is unique material that doesn’t exist anywhere else in a digital landscape,” says Furmanski. “It’s a blank spot in the chapter of 1970s feminism, but they’re not gone.”