Back into Focus: Women Filmmakers, the Amateur Trade Press and 1960s British Amateur Cinema

Abstract

AbstractWhile recent scholarship has helped uncover specific stories of women in different commercial cinema industries, there remains a lacuna around the role of amateur women filmmakers within national amateur contexts. Where male amateur filmmaking has often been linked to a range of solitary or group‐based leisure pursuits, we cannot make the same assumption about women amateur filmmaker’s involvement in social groups, not least due to the gendered nature of domestic and non‐work activities in the post‐war era. This article considers the representation of women's creative labour across the 1960s within a dominant and patriarchal trade journal, Britain's Amateur Cine World. Combining feminist and digital humanities approaches allows us to analyse data from this magazine to reveal recurring debates and tensions around women's amateur creativity, with particular concerns around domesticity, leisure and the gendered nature of technology.