On the Edges of the Documentary: Jill Craigie’s Political and Aesthetic Sensibilities

Abstract

As a raging beauty, an avowed socialist, a British documentary filmmaker, a repository of suffragette material, and politi-cal wife par excellence to former British Labour party leader Michael Foot, Jill Craigie (1911–99) had always been a diffi-cult personality to pin down within comfortable categories. Within the cinema, she appears mostly in the footnotes of British film history as the victim of the industry’s inherent sexism and the Rank Organisation’s eventually overwhelm-ing commercial interests. In the company of the handful of women who worked in the British film industry in the 1940s and 1950s, such as Betty Box, Muriel Box, Wendy Toye, and Mary Fields, Craigie seemed a minor player who positioned herself awkwardly, both in terms of her gender and political orientation, and who was eventually forced into retirement. Geoffey MacNab, for instance, notes the way in which Craigie became a pawn in the politicking between Filippo Del Giudice and John Davis within the Rank Organisation in his account of the British film industry in the 1950s (1993, pp. 159–61, 225–6). As an exemplary political wife, she inhabited, more willingly, a peripheral role that necessarily placed her hus-band, Michael Foot, and his high office above herself.KeywordsBritish GovernmentFeminist EthicAesthetic SensibilityRank OrganisationUnited Nations CharterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.