British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access

What is Women’s Film History?

At the heart of these initiatives is the growing recognition that, despite their marginalization in film history, women have been and continue to be involved in cinema in a wide range of roles.

What Is Women’s Film History?
At the heart of these initiatives is the growing recognition that, despite their marginalization in film history, women have been and continue to be involved in cinema in a wide range of roles. However, in formulating network identity we have faced a number of compelling questions and organsational choices. To work through these questions, the first three Workshops brought a range of enthusiasts specializing in women’s history, literary, theatrical and publishing histories, film and media studies together with representatives from archives, libraries, museums and professional organisations as well as from other special interest networks such as Women’s History Network and MECCSA’S Women’s Media Studies and Race Networks. These Workshops focused first on the key question ‘What is Women’s Film History?’; second on the problems of ‘Transnationalising Women’s Film History;’ and most recently on the practicalities of ‘Resourcing Women’s Film History.’

Fiming 'Yes' with L-R: Steadicam Operator Eric Bialas, DirectoR Sally Potter, DoP Alexei Rodionov (© Nicola Dove).

Asking what it means to put ‘women’ in front of film history, the first Workshop questioned whether women’s film history is only a matter of filling gaps in an already established history of male inventors, moguls, and great artists. Or whether posing questions of gender changes the way we do film history and therefore that history itself. In what sense, if at all, does ‘women’s’ film history ‘belong’ solely to women? Asking questions about women opens up dimensions of filmmaking and conceptions of cinema not before perceived or, if perceived, disregarded. For example, we find women in large numbers in roles considered subsidiary: production assistants or secretaries; continuity girl; editor; costume designer; make-up artist; laboratory hand, and so on. If writing history from a woman’s perspective means exploring those roles, it leads us not only to reevaluate the nature of filmmaking but highlights roles in which men also go unrecognized.

The impact of women as audiences and social campaigners, in their own viewing practices, or as imaginary targets for filmmakers and studios … is crucial to cinema’s development as a set of social institutions and creative practices

More challenging, the frequent positioning of women filmmakers as partners–professional or personal–of men, as well as their often factotum-like involvement across studio functions, or in the collaborative independent film workshops of the 1970s and 1980s, demands we conceptualise the collectivity of filmmaking, resisting the search for an ‘onlie begetter.’ The relationship between Alma Reville and Alfred Hitchcock is only the most famous of many creative partnerships. This raises the question of the difference the woman filmmaker makes or is expected to make. In a complicated way we have both to take account of gender as a social determinant and discount it as an unequivocal dimension of creative output. Little separates journalistic surprise that Britain’s ‘only woman director’ of the 1920s should make naval melodramas displaying war-like ‘patriotic fervour’ from recent commentary on Oscar-winning Kathryn Bigelow’s demand for recognition as director of action movies rather than as woman filmmaker. However, once we begin to conceive cinema in a wider social context, then social gendering – as opposed to an essential gender identity – becomes integral to analysis. The impact of women as audiences and social campaigners, in their own viewing practices, or as imaginary targets for filmmakers and studios, or sources of gendered value for social reformers, policy makers and aesthetic theories, is crucial to cinema’s development as a set of social institutions and creative practices.

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