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.

 

Three Lives by Kate Millett: A Women's Liberation Production

CLARISSA JACOB

Featuring……… Mallory Millett-Jones

                            Lillian Shreve

                            Robin Mide

 

Co-directors…………. Louva Irvine

                                    Susan Kleckner

                                    Robin Mide

 

Production…………… Louva Irvine

                                     Susan Kleckner

                                     Bici Forbes

 

Sound and …… Mallory Millett-Jones

Production

 

 

Lighting………  Jean Carballo          

                          Susan Kleckner

Camera………. Leonore Bode

 

Camera ……… Gloria Stein

Assistant

 

Sound………… Lisa Shreve

 

Production …… Louva Irvine

Manager

 

Editors………… Ann Sheppard

                           Ellen Adams

 

In the early 1970s, the feminist activist and author of Sexual Politics (1970), Kate Millett, collaborated with a group of women filmmakers to make a movie about women’s liberation. Writing in her 1975 autobiography, Flying, Millett explained that making the film was her way of counter-acting the ‘ego-tripping’ she feared in the wake of the success of her bestselling feminist thesis; using her new-found wealth she hoped to ‘multiply my accidental good fortune, share it, make something for all women.’ The result, Three Lives, featured her younger sister Mallory Millett-Jones; Lillian Shreve, mother of the film’s sound recordist; and Robin Mide, one of the film’s co-directors.

Three Lives can be considered part of the wave of non-fiction films that emerged at the initial intersection between the women’s liberation movement and underground filmmaking of the era: The Woman’s Film (San Francisco Newsreel, 1971), Growing Up Female (Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, 1971) and It Happens to Us (Amalie Rothschild, 1972). In 1972 an interview, co-director Louva Irvine recalled that Millett had been inspired by the independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967). Like Portrait of Jason, Three Lives appropriates the sixties’ cinéma vérité aesthetic and the format of the portrait film, but with an end to visually convey the experience of a feminist consciousness-raising session. Since the late 1960s, consciousness-raising groups had become the driving force behind the growing women’s movement and helped set the agenda for feminist activism and theorising. Three Lives can therefore be seen as an cinematic extension of their cell division-like proliferation: its three subjects testify, rap and reflect on their lives as women and their experiences as girls, lovers, wives, mothers, workers and artists. ‘I’ll bet that’s the first time a lot of guys had to sit and listen uninterruptedly to women’, a female film student reportedly remarked following a screening in 1972, ‘I wonder what it means to them to listen to women without having the chance to butt in and have their say!’ (from Julia Lesage’s  ‘The Political Aesthetics of Feminist Documentary Film’, 1978).

The film’s collective production methods similarly reflected the emotional instensity of the CR group. Despite not having a clear idea of what working as a collective might mean, Millett has said that at the time, ‘it was my dream to be peers, artists together’ (Flying, 163). For her, ‘the movie will always be the shooting, never that thing on the screen which I made, editing it alone. It will be what we endured together making it, our orgies of recrimmination and recreation’ (167). In a 1972 Filmmaker’s Newsletter interview, co-director Susan Klechner described the successes of this method, in which the group would ‘unite to the point where there would be a huge amount of energy and that would be the creative force. […Where] everybody is connected to the person who is talking about her life. That’s when the film becomes powerful’ (32). However, the process also entailed its fair share of strife; at one point in Flying, Millett described ‘the company’ as ‘a nest of oppressed women screaming at me like machine guns’ (163).

The film opened at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York on 4^th November 1971 and was met with mixed reviews from the feminist and mainstream press. New York Times critic Vincent Canby called it ‘a moving, proud, calm, aggressively self-contained documentary feature’ that could not have been made without its all-female crew. On the other hand, Ruth McCormick, writing in the left-leaning film journal Cineaste in 1972, remarked that more militant feminists would be dissapointed by the absence of Millett’s more radical political perspective and the lack of explicitly feminist analysis in the film. Although she continued to work with film intermittently throughout her carrer, Millett revealed in a 1974 interview with French film magazine Cinéma that despite the film’s successes, she belived she was more likely to reach a wider audience through her writing. Nonetheless, feminist film critics such as Julia Lesage have heraled the film an important part of the ‘establish[ment] and valoriz[ation] a new order of cinematic iconography, connotation, and a range of subject matter in the portrayal of women’s lives’ and a key tool for women’s ‘subcultural resistance’.

 

Louisa Wei's Golden Gate Girls and the (re)discovery of Esther Eng

MELANIE WILLIAMS


One of the highlights of the 'Doing Women's Film and Television History' conference in Norwich last month was the chance to see S. Louisa Wei's beguiling documentary on a women director I'd never even heard of before, the Chinese American film pioneer Esther Eng. Eng made a number of films in America, China, Hong Kong and Hawaii from the 1930s to the early 1960s before switching careers altogether and becoming a celebrated New York restaurateur. Wei carefully contextualises Eng's life and career in terms of Sino-American relations and the upheavals created by global conflict but also on a more personal level as an openly gay woman and one of a very limited number of female directors working at that time. Wei cleverly and subtly interweaves Eng's story with those of actress Anna May Wong, another Chinese American woman trying to carve out a successful career in film, and also Dorothy Arzner, the only other women director working in feature film in the US at the same time, and another out lesbian; Wei finds some fascinating parallels between their cool mannish styles of dress. The film is gorgeously illustrated throughout with stunning black and white photographs of Eng and her associates, many of them found in a box left for the refuse collector which was then reclaimed from the dustbin of history by a canny passerby. These still pictures of Eng are complemented and commented on by Eng's surviving relatives and friends, tracked down by Wei, and they help to round out the portrait of Eng not only as a filmmaker but as a kind, compassionate, clever woman. The fascinating interviews and the plenitude of stills partially compensates for the fact that many of Eng's films are lost, like the intriguing-sounding It's a Woman's World (1939) in which all the characters on screen are female (rather like Cukor's more familiar variation on the same theme The Women, also from 1939) or the evocatively-titled melodrama A Night of Romance, a Lifetime of Regret (1938). One film of hers still extant is Golden Gate Girl (1941), a Cantonese-language film made and set in San Francisco which boasts the first screen appearance of Bruce Lee as the heroine's chubby-cheeked baby.

 

So we may not have all her films to look at but what we do have, in the shape of Wei's documentary, is a renewed awareness of Esther Eng's significance as a remarkable woman filmmaker who had a truly transnational career and who deserves to be much better known and more widely recognised as a film pioneer.

Women Directors – Who’s Calling the Shots? A Report by Directors UK

This report from Directors UK, out last week, made some interesting observations about the startling underrepresentation of women directors in contemporary British television. As the report point out, 'despite women representing almost 30% of the TV and film directing workforce, attitudes within the media industry are preventing women from reaching their full potential'.

These were their key findings about why it's happening:

• Decisions on hiring are influenced by the opinions (or perceived opinions) of commissioners, in a risk-averse culture that keeps hiring the same directors.
• Production executives responsible for hiring are unaware of low figures for women directors.
• There is no uniform or consistent monitoring of the freelance workforce throughout the industry.
• Beyond a trusted few, there is a lack of awareness of a large number of highly qualified and experienced women drama directors.
• Gender stereotyping is prevalent when hiring in specific genres in drama, factual and comedy.

And their main recommendation to counteract this bias was to set 'a minimum 30% target for women directors across all broadcasters’ programming output, to be achieved in 2017'. It will be interesting to see what comes of that recommendation and of the report's finding in general. But, as Directors UK point out, it is clear that 'the current situation is not balanced if 30% of our membership is not accessing 30% of the work.'
 

New infographic on women directors at Cannes over the last decade: 'No Cannes Do'

This comes courtesy of Melissa Silverstein of 'Women and Hollywood' (http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/)

A post for International Women's Day 2014

Two little gifts for #IWD2014

A short piece about women directors Melanie Williams (@BritFilmMelanie) wrote for The Conversation UK

and details of the forthcoming 'Doing Women's Film and Television History' Conference which will be happening in Norwich in April - we really hope you can make it along!

'Women Without Men': Flowers in the Desert?

Siobhan Hoffmann-Heap 

@SiobhanHoffmann

When I was a teenager, malleable of mind, I watched The House of Sand and Fog. Echoes of that were stirred by this fim, and two themes from it lodged in my mind to be be fired up by Women without Men: the first was a problematic depiction of ‘The American Dream’ - how Americans struggled to make ends meet – coerced into an uncomfortable synergy with foreign interpretations of the same concept. It made me wonder whether all of humanity was perpetually undertaking a universal quest for happiness - or at least the creation of a personal utopia. Many of the characters in the film seemed to be desperately searching for a home, for contentment, for silence and a place to rest. This theme is revisited in Women Without Men; Munis wonders: “What is it about people, that their hunger, their desires seem to eat everything?”

The second piece of brain shrapnel was the story and the associated imagery, of Massoud’s (Ben Kingsley’s character) existence before he left Iran:

It was a wonderful idea to cut down the [cypress] trees at our house on the Caspian, to have the sea spread before us, to reach infinity with our eyes… Our lives went the way of the sea when the Ayatollahs ripped the soul out of our beautiful country.

I never fully understood the cultural allusions that the film made to Iran, since I had no understanding of the area, or the history, and even now my knowledge on it is still sketchy. The history curriculum in this country is limited, mentioning anything remotely related to the Middle East and the lasting impact British and American intervention had on that area, way before my generation were forcefully made aware of it in the 90s.

Women Without Men follows the metamorphoses of four women from various walks of life within that lost generation, in Tehran in 1953, using the CIA and M16 orchestrated coup that removed left-leaning Dr Mohammad Mossadegh from power, as a backdrop. Mossadegh’s Achilles Heel had been his government’s creation of a policy that nationalized the Iranian oil industry - an industry that had been under British control, via the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) now British Petroleum (BP), since 1913. You will have heard of BP, but Mossadegh? No?? It’s ok… Apparently even Tony Blair (as PM) didn’t know who Mossadegh was or why Iran hated the British so much… (he was obliged to rather sheepishly consult the font of all knowledge, Jon Snow). Apparently, bungled interventions and militarism spurred on by interest in oil provision isn’t, and never was, a new idea. Mossadegh claimed that “long years of negotiations with foreign countries... [had] yielded no results”, coming to the conclusion that “With the oil revenues we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people.” Can’t argue with that.

The director of Women Without Men, Shirin Neshat’s stock in trade is photography, and it shows. She initially aimed to create a series of separate stories based on the 1989 novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, and present them as art installations across the globe, before her bright idea of editing them into the feature film occurred. This feature film (her first) deals with, amongst other things, arranged marriage, rape, prostitution, unrequited love, religion, and death (not to mention Communist and Fascist politics), but in a typically Persian poeticist way, and stretched over a robust historic framework. The film is studded with quotable lines, sparse but emphatic dialogue, features beautifully choreographed action sequences and camerawork that references classical art and literature: Zarin (the prostitute), is discovered floating, Ophelia-like in a pool in the orchard, surrounded by aquatic greenery, simultaneously wide-eyed and comatose; Munis finds a new life as a revolutionary after faking her own death to avoid an arranged marriage, reborn from the earth into which she is buried, Lazarine and determined, and her internal monologues punctuate much of the film, often alongside slow-motion scenes of watery submersion or falling. She falls to her death, petticoats fluttering in the breeze at the end of the film, with the words “Death isn’t so bad. You only think it is. All that we wanted was to find a new form, a new way.” Being a political radical is just as problematic as being a woman.

An elemental metamorphosis is constantly alluded to in the film whether through rebirth, epiphany, cleansing, or changes in dress. The theme of water is one that is visually referred to, in a callback to Islamic and Middle Eastern historical tradition. Islam, a religion born of the desert, understandably places huge importance on water and nature. The Gardens of Babylon, were, according to Dr Stephanie Dalley (Oxford) located near Ninevah, in northern Iraq. Huge feats of engineering prowess were executed by the Sassanians to bring water to pleasure palaces located in arid mountainous regions. In Islamic art, rock crystal holds huge material significance as representative of solidified water, a precious commodity. Unsurprising, then, that Farrokhlagha’s orchard is a place of sanctuary, or that the changes that take place in the female characters are signified, without exception, by them shedding their black shawls to reveal flowery dresses beneath. Faezeh is proposed to by Munis’ brother with the words, “A woman’s body is like a flower. Once it blossoms it soon withers away”; the fall of the regime that fosters growth in the tradition of art and culture, or the dashing of romantic hope, or gender emancipation linking with the sickness of the orchard, and the death of nature are not coincidental.

After the upheaval, and the catharsis experienced by individual characters (and by proxy, the viewer,) all that is left is society - the everyday. The music ends, the party is over, and we are given the impression that despite the finite nature of human life, these stories hold universal piquancy, and humanity is composed of individuals in a cyclical search for belonging, and the unerringly predictable failure of humanity to achieve it: "In this turbulence and noise, there was almost silence underneath. The sense that everything repeats itself over time. Hope. Betrayal, Fear.