Making women amateur filmmakers visible: reclaiming women’s work through the film archive

Sarah Hill,Keith M Johnston

doi:10.1080/09612025.2019.1703541

Sarah Hill, Keith M Johnston

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2019.1703541

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Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers the place of women’s amateur film within regional and national film archive holdings through a specific case study of the ‘Women Amateur Filmmakers in Britain’ project at the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA). Reflecting on the process of cataloguing and presenting this collection, the article will explore the challenges of making women’s creative filmed work visible, suggesting that women’s amateur films exist at a crucial overlap of archival oversight and cultural stigma. We argue that prevailing associations of archive film with space, place and location could prevent feminist-led projects from gaining traction in the contested world of exhibition where locality often overshadows other thematic or stylistic approaches. We argue that only by reconsidering the types of films that are prioritised for preservation and presentation can women’s films be made fully visible.

Highlights

Amateur films represent unexplored evidence for film history, a way to create a more complex, richer explanation of how visual culture operates across many levels of practice, from elites to amateurs, as an instance of filmmaking from below.[1]
The addition of ‘even’ here is likely that of writer Clyde Jeavons rather than Lindgren himself, but it points to the prevailing assumption that amateur film remains an afterthought, the least important form of film to target for that national archive endeavour, when compared to the need to reclaim and restore feature films
One of the issues we explore through the second phase of the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) case study is the problems of trying to serve two audiences: one via traditional curated digital screenings, the other via online access to digitised versions of the same films

Summary

Introduction

Amateur films represent unexplored evidence for film history, a way to create a more complex, richer explanation of how visual culture operates across many levels of practice, from elites to amateurs, as an instance of filmmaking from below.[1].

Results

Conclusion