Out of the shade and into the limelight: Women Amateur Filmmakers in Britain

SARAH HILL (UEA)

Joanna Fryer, Make-Up (1978)

As International Women’s Day approaches, the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA), part of the University of East Anglia, has revealed over one hundred newly-digitised films by women amateur filmmakers. This fascinating collection offers unprecedented insights into the concerns and approaches of amateur female filmmakers working between the 1920s and late-1980s. These Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC) award-winning films showcase an impressive variety of themes and topics, including observations of life in Britain (and abroad) and insights into the various social and cultural changes that took place over the period. These themes are explored through dramas, comedies, documentaries, animated films and travelogues.

The films also highlight the different ways in which women amateur filmmakers worked during the last century. Previously assumed to play a secondary or incidental role in amateur film productions, the research undertaken at EAFA during the cataloguing and digitisation of this collection demonstrates a more complex and varied range of production practices. These films were made by lone filmmakers, cine club teams, husband and wife partnerships, young women, students and children. For example, research carried out by Dr Francis Dyson into partnerships such as Stuart and Laurie Day revealed that women were key to such creative collaborations, while the all-female team of Sally Sallies Forth (Frances Lascot, 1928) arose out of cine-club interests. Indeed, the film is credited as the first amateur film produced wholly and exclusively by women.

Many of the women amateur filmmakers went on to make films professionally and the films featured in this collection offer a rare glimpse at the beginnings of the filmmaking styles they would go on to develop professionally. For example, Joanna Fryer’s film Make-Up (1978), produced when she was a student, demonstrates her skill for sketch animation which she would later use as an animator on The Snowman (1982). Meanwhile, animator Sheila Graber’s early films from the 1970s were screened at IAC festivals and seen by an agent, which led to her working on the Just So Stories (1979) and Paddington (1975-1986), and she continues to produce short films today.

The films also offer unique perspectives on significant historical and cultural moments, such as Eustace and Eunice Alliott’s travelogues, which were produced during their trips around Europe in the 1930s. The Alliott’s snapshots of their daily life on their travels are underscored by a sense of foreboding as they depict Europe on the brink of war. On the other hand, sometimes a film only becomes significant long after it was made, as is the case with Her Second Birthday (circa. 1934). The film captures a two-year-old girl playing in the garden and was not initially intended to be shown outside the family. This little girl grew up to be June Thorburn, the British actor who starred in films such as The Cruel Sea (1953) and Tom Thumb (1958), Thorburn was killed in an air crash in 1967, aged 36. 

These distinctive films shed light on the contribution women have made to amateur filmmaking in the twentieth century, and they are soon to take their place in the limelight as films are due to be
screened in selected cinemas across the UK from the 3^rd of March 2016 to celebrate International Women’s Day. This will be followed in the coming weeks by special screenings and events to be announced. You can also find out more about the films via Twitter @EAFAAmateurFilm and Facebook.

The Women Amateur Filmmakers in Britain catalogue and a selection of the digitised films can be accessed here. For more information on the collection, or to arrange a screening, please contact Sarah Hill at the University of East Anglia.

Identifying the experiences of Frances, Ivy, Nora and ... many other women in the first generation of British cine-clubs

FRANCIS DYSON

Sally Sallies Forth (1929), heralded at the time as the first amateur film produced wholly and exclusively by women, the IAC film collection, held at the East Anglian Film Archive. To see the whole film go to http://www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/3823

In recent years the involvement of women in amateur film-making has attracted the attention of a number of scholars and film archivists.  As far as the involvement of British women in amateur film production is concerned, valuable work has been performed in identifying individual women amateur film-makers in the 1920s and 1930s.  This scholarly work usually makes use of home movies, highlights the work of individuals and focuses attention on the person in possession of the camera, identifying in the process films produced by women as important historical records in their own right.  However, the focus on female film-makers also overlooks the experiences of many women who engaged with film production in the collaborative environment of Britain's inter-war cine-clubs, particularly in the production of amateur fiction films in the cine-club studio environment.

Cine-clubs emerged in Britain as sites for an amateur engagement with film production, distribution and exhibition from the mid-1920s.  Still relatively unexplored as a collective form of leisure, reports submitted by cine-clubs to amateur film-making magazines in the 1930s indicate that these clubs offered women opportunities to engage with film culture as film-making democratised, even though the contributions women made to club life were only very rarely acknowledged by editorial decisions taken in the production of these magazines.

Although the participation of women in cine-clubs was largely ignored by these magazines, the very same magazines often included still photographs of cine-club productions.  These photographs not only indicate that women took part in film production but that they often did so in productive roles which did not involve filming.  Notably, stills published in these magazines indicate that much of their activity was engaged in jobs and roles that frequently went unrecorded.  Unlikely to be credited on screen, recorded or valorised in amateur film magazines, this activity falls into what has been referred to in the commercial environment as the invisible labour of women. 

In April 2014, I presented a paper, 'Sally Sallies Forth: The involvement of women in the first generation of British cine-clubs', at the second international conference of the Women's Film and Television History Network - UK/ Ireland.  Using information I had accumulated over the last five years about the involvement of women in the first generation of British cine-clubs, I appraised the activities of women in the collaborative environment of the London Amateur Cinematographers' Association ("London ACA"), one of the first British inter-war cine-clubs. 

My paper identified in this inter-war middle class association an environment that offered women an interaction with film culture and film production.  It also identified a clear contradiction between the culture of the London ACA, which encouraged individuals irrespective of gender to develop skills and an understanding of all aspects of film production, and the opportunities open to women in the production environment.  Although it is clear that women in the London ACA were not restricted in any formal way from participating in the club's activities including film production, it is nevertheless apparent from my research that the production culture in the cine-club might have prevented them from participating on an equal basis in film production.  While it is difficult to detect "formal gendered pathways" as well as "more informal mechanisms, habits and working practices" in a leisure environment in the same way that Vicky Ball and Melanie Bell have been able to in the organisation of labour in film and television industries, it is notable that the experiences of women in the production environment of the London ACA were different to men.  Women in the London ACA only very rarely moved across different production roles.  This contrasts starkly with the experiences enjoyed by men in the club.  Drawing on information I had pieced together about the experiences of Frances Lascot, Ivy Low and Nora Pfeil, my paper speculated on the networks that existed in the London ACA, the opportunities available to individuals and the informal gendered pathways that existed in the club.  I observed, as in the case of Sally Sallies Forth, that it was possible for women in the London ACA to control productions and to undertake a variety of production roles but, unless a woman was able to break into male social networks, to do so required determination, finances and an ability to construct her own networks in the club.