Learning on ScreenWhat is Women’s Film History?
Women’s Film History Network-UK/Ireland is an emerging organization open to anyone committed to investigating women’s film history from its early days to the recent past.
About the author: Professor Christine Gledhill is Visiting Professor in Cinema Studies at the University of Sunderland.Her publications include Gender into Genre: Cross-currents in Post-War Cinema (forthcoming, Illinois University Press); Reframing British Cinema 1918-1928: Between Restraint and Passion (2003, British Film Institute); Reinventing Film Studies, edited with Linda Williams (2000, Edward Arnold); Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama (1987, British Film Institute).
E-mail: christine.gledhill@gmail.com
Women’s Film History Network-UK/Ireland aims to encourage, support and disseminate research into the history of women’s participation in cinema across the full range of activities, including:
producing / directing / scriptwriting / designing / editing / scoring / sound-recording / costuming / distributing / cinema-managing / exhibiting / critical writing / reviewing / performing / activity as audiences and fans
How We Began
The Network emerged as a small, informal group from the Women and Silent Britain day held at the NFT in November 2006. This event, followed by a second in November 2009, responded to American-led initiatives begun in the late 1990s that challenged the absence of women in standard film histories. The establishment of the biennial Women and Silent Screen conferences staged in America, Mexico, Europe and soon in Australia (2013), and the growing body of research recorded by the international Women Film Pioneers Project (see below) reveals women creatively active in every conceivable job associated with cinema. So what had happened in Britain?
The large audience gathered at the NFT registered both surprise and delight at the new discoveries presented of adventurous women who in different ways had participated in the formative days of British filmmaking.
The large audience gathered at the NFT registered both surprise and delight at the new discoveries presented of adventurous women who in different ways had participated in the formative days of British filmmaking. This surge of enthusiasm spurred us to seek funding to establish a British-based Women’s Film History Network. With support from the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland we won an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to run a series of Workshops through which to lay the groundwork.
