From Oral to Visual: A First-Timer's Introduction to Media Production

Abstract

In the past ten years a number of impressive media products have helped to popularize women's oral history. Slide shows, video productions, and films based wholly or in part on oral interviews have helped bring women's history to a larger public audience and have been used in women's studies classrooms. Pathbreaking historical documentary films like Union Maids and The Emerging Woman were followed by Great Grand Mother, With Babies and Banners, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, and Talkin' Union.2 Some video productions have been sponsored by public television, such as Plainswomen, Men and Children.3 Hardest to market and least well known, slide-tape programs like Good Work, Sister! have reached local audiences and occasionally regional or national markets. They have the virtue of costing less to produce than film or video.4 Merging as they do technical and historical skills, most of these projects have involved collaboration between academics and media professionals. In many instances, historians or persons active in the women's movement simply decided there was a story that should reach a larger audience, and they learned media production techniques in order to achieve that goal. Julia Reichert and James Klein, who produced Growing Up Female and Union Maids, set out not to become filmmakers but rather to provide accurate images of women to combat popular media stereotypes. Just as women's historians began using and refining oral history techniques to gather data that was not available in written records, so we have also begun to explore visual media in order to reach a larger audience. Motivated by a desire to educate the public about women's historical contributions, and thus to empower more women, the temptation is strong to move from tape recorder and print to a media product. The technical problems of translation from one medium to another, however, and of moving from an academic to a popular mode, can be as overwhelming as they are seductive. We speak from experience. This does not mean we speak from expertise. In 1978-79 we co-produced a slide-tape presentation about working-class families from the Cripple Creek, Colorado gold mining district, entitled We Were Never Supposed To Be Rich. It was an unfortunately prophetic title. Like most women's oral history media products, this one involved the sharing of skills and expertise. We both have academic backgrounds, Jameson in American studies and history, Lenfest in English. Lenfest is experienced with still photography and film and had produced experimental films and a documentary, but he had not previously used historical material in media. Jameson was the historian for the project, which was based on interviews she had begun in 1975 with elderly residents of Cripple Creek. In 1977 we began trying to raise funds to make a film based on the experiences recorded in those interviews. We were unable to raise enough money, but we did receive funding to produce a slide-tape oral and visual history. At the time we saw the project as preproduction for the film we wanted to make. Slide-tape was not our preferred medium for a number