Women Documentary Film-makers and the British Housing Movement, 1930–45

Abstract

This article examines the role women played, as film-makers and participants, in the development of the documentary genre from 1930 into the wartime period. In the 1930s and 1940s, the topics of slum clearance and town planning were a preoccupation of British documentary and non-fiction cinema. This article therefore first focuses on the little-known propaganda films generated by housing charities in the 1930s. After an examination of the use of films in the campaigns for better housing between the wars, it concentrates on three films which are linked by the inclusion of filmed interviews with the poorly housed. The study starts with a re-evaluation of Housing Problems (1935) and Kensal House (1937), widely regarded as the first of the genre, placing them in the context of the housing movement. It then gives an overview of the housing issue and female documentary-making during the Second World War, as background to a case study of film-maker Kay Mander, concentrating on her end-of-war manifesto Homes for the People (1945), which saw a further development of the interview technique and presented the women's perspective in a feminist manner. This article shows that women were not only instrumental in the development of the housing documentary but that the films they made promoted a female-orientated and progressive view of housing provision and town planning for working-class people. It was a passion for social change and a growing belief in the democratisation of the image of the poorly housed that determined changes in treatment in the films of the documentary film movement.