Adopting a Female Perspective: An Account of the Films of Ethyle Batley, 1912–17

Abstract

Ethyle Batley was Britain's first woman film director, responsible for some 64 one- and two-reel films between 1912 and her death in 1917. Her unique, albeit brief, career was carved out in an industry domain conventionally reserved for men but her film-making practice appears to have been inflected by her experiences as a woman, especially as she began producing at the moment the Women's Social and Political Union was entering its most militant phase. Consequently, she developed a subject matter that drew on an identifiably ‘female perspective’. Adopting a short-story narrative approach and working in a range of genres, she used them to address such themes as childhood, women and children in wartime, working-class poverty, fragmented families and intimate personal relationships – emphases contrasting with those of her closest male co-worker, her husband Ernest. At the same time, her command over the formal resources of film became increasingly confident and sophisticated, as a consecutive reading of her few extant films demonstrates.