Circles (film distributor)
Circles was a feminist film and video distribution network in the UK, which was set up out of a desire to distribute and screen women's films on their own terms. It was founded in 1979 by feminist filmmakers Lis Rhodes, Jo Davis, Felicity Sparrow and Annabel Nicolson, publishing a 1980 catalogue including about 30 films, and it closed in 1991, largely due to funding issues that also prompted the merger of Circles and Cinema of Women, which led to the formation of Cinenova. A previous funding crisis in 1987, when funding by Tower Hamlets council had been withdrawn, had been resolved with replacement funding from the British Film Institute.
Origins
According to Jenny Holland and Jane Harris, "Circles started in 1979, partly as a response to an Arts Council of Great Britain exhibition on experimental film. Feeling that their work on women's involvement in this field was being marginalised, the women on the exhibition committee withdrew their painstakingly researched work and issued an explanatory statement. In many ways, this research was the cornerstone of Circles, which went on to distribute the films by Alice Guy, Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, and Lois Weber which were to have been discussed in the exhibition." The statement, "Women and the Formal Film," was published in the "Film as Film" exhibition catalogue and acted as a manifesto for the distribution collective that emerged.
