Women In Film Research Articles

Research “Expanding Opportunities for Women in Cinema”

The Cinema and Television industry is always dominated by men. Since the technology involved in making movie was complicated and requires hard physical skill men were dominated in the industry. So even the characterizations of women is projected through men perception only. This scenario is still being seen in movies ever since Lumiere Brother invented Camera. Developments in Information and Communication Technology is slowly changing this by opening up the opportune for women from production to exhibition through websites such as “VIMEO”, “DAILYMOTION”, “TWITCH”, “LIVELEAK”, “VEOH”, “BREAK”, “METACAFE”, and the most used “YOUTUBE”. This paper would speak about the changes in film making technology in which it has expanded opportunity for women to work in. How ICT has has changed the technology of film making paving way for women to contribute more in this men dominated media. The digital media has encouraged participation of women in all stages of film making.

Women’s Interventions in the Contemporary German Film Industry

Although women today graduate from Germany’s film schools in numbers nearly equal to those of men, they remain heavily underrepresented in the nation’s film industry. This essay employs statistical evidence to take stock of the situation for women filmmakers and examines three women-driven initiatives that offer responses to current industrial practices: Women in Film and Television Germany (WIFTG), Pro Quote Film (PQF), and the grassroots organization Into the Wild Mentoring (ITW). Their approaches to dealing with sexism and structural inequalities continue to be multipronged and diverse and therefore can be historically situated within the tradition of feminist film activism in Germany. The essay illustrates the unique paths each organization has pursued within a neoliberal film market to achieve the common goals of gender equality and the revitalization of women’s film authorship, namely: feminist structures (WIFTG), demands for a quota system (PQF), and a grassroots feminist mentoring collective of film school graduates (ITW).

Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography, and Art by Rebecca J. DeRoo

Reviewed by: Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography, and Art by Rebecca J. DeRoo Ray Balstad DeRoo, Rebecca J. Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography, and Art. University of California Press, 2017. Pp [i]-x; 238. ISBN 0-520-27940-9. $85.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-520-27941-7. $34.95 (paper). In her 2017 book, Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography, and Art, art and media historian Rebecca DeRoo examines the work of Agnès Varda through a multimedia lens. She interrogates the critical reception of Varda's work, illustrating how conventional interpretations have reified the very ideologies that Varda sought to impugn. In chapters two and five respectively, DeRoo examines how La Pointe Courte (1955) and Daguerréotypes (1976) commingle documentary and fiction. La Pointe Courte contrasts the fictional narrative of a Parisian couple on vacation with vignettes of the fishing community based on the island, whereas Daguerréotypes documents the lives of trade workers on the Rue Daguerre in Paris. Both films feature references to vernacular photography, betraying a tension in the separation between the working class and the bourgeoisie. While La Pointe Courte was read by critics as neorealist, DeRoo argues that it instead complicates neorealist aesthetics through its portrayal of the working class, the bourgeoisie, vernacular photography, and Renaissance painting. Similarly, in Daguerréotypes, Varda alludes to petits-métiers (the photographic tradition seeking to document trade workers of nineteenth century Paris in the midst and the aftermath of Haussmannian renovations) in her representations of Parisian trade workers, rendering spectral the romanticized topos of bourgeois Paris. [End Page 172] Whereas other critics have read Daguerréotypes as sentimental and apolitical, DeRoo asserts that its liminal portrayal of Paris is tactfully political in its own right. Chapters three and four address Le bonheur (1965) and L'une chante, l'autre pas (1977), which both thematize women's work. In Le bonheur, a man's wife dies, and he marries the woman with whom he was cheating. She then becomes surrogate mother to his children. L'une chante (a musical), however, explores female friendship within the context of the 1960s women's liberation movement. DeRoo examines intermediality in Le bonheur through the presence of women's magazines and advertisements. The film was often read as anti-feminist, but DeRoo instead maintains that Varda uses the magazines parodically, highlighting rather than promoting the devaluation of women's work. L'une chante, on the other hand, is overtly feminist in its treatment of women's liberation. DeRoo argues that the film's contrast between image, music, and narrative operates in a Brechtian manner which interrogates the ideological underpinnings of "musical" as a genre. While addressed in L'une chante, the gendering of genre is a point that merited more discussion in her analysis of Le bonheur. The choice of melodrama and musical (canonically associated with women) illuminate the way in which these films challenge generic hegemony, underlining the complexity and importance of the work women's cinema can do. Chapters six and seven of the book are concerned with autobiography and memory. In chapter six, DeRoo discusses Varda's 2006 art installation L'île et elle, which explored Varda's relationship with her late husband, Jacques Demy. The final chapter addresses the film Les plages d'Agnès (2008), an autodocumentary on the processes of aging and remembering. Critics, DeRoo contends, have tended to place these works comfortably in the realm of the sentimental without considering the emotional and political complexity of that sentiment. L'île et elle comprises two levels: one replete with tourist bric-a-brac from the island where Varda and Demy vacationed, another filled with reconfigured personal artifacts such as Demy's film reels. DeRoo's reading of the piece presents a beautiful meditation on Varda's portrayal of grief. The piece, DeRoo advocates, also serves as a pointed critique of the corporatization of the art world through Varda's use of tourist knick-knacks and her choice to show at the Fondation Cartier. In her chapter on Les plages, DeRoo remarks that critical reception is dominated by rosewater readings of the film. While not denying the film's emotional dimension, she advocates that the...

Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Films by Jennifer L. Creech

Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Films by Jennifer L. Creech

Gender, violence and representation in three Algerian women's films

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on a feminist aesthetics of violence that distinguishes Algerian women filmmakers’ treatment of violence from that of earlier male filmmakers. Such feminist aesthetics reveal how questions of gender and nation have moved to the forefront of analyses of the roots and repercussions of institutionalised violence. Through their female protagonists, Yamina Bachir's Rachida (2002), Djamila Sahraoui's Barakat (2006) and Yema (2013) represent traumatic events and their effects on women during the civil war that engulfed Algeria during the 1990s. The article demonstrates how these films subvert gender norms through embodied performance. It also shows how these films undermine normative femininity and masculinity, taking on gender politics in a performative mode that seeks to represent female victims of violence as agents of change, defying both the gender binary and a politics of representing victimhood.

Is it necessary to "be" a feminist to "make" feminist cinema? Icíar Bollaín and her cinematographic representation of gender.

Inequality between men and women in cinema has remained stable from its beginnings. Both behind the cameras and on-screen representation, women have been systematically invisible, underrepresented and objectified. Feminist efforts arose in the 1970s to visualize and subvert the existing power order, working through two axes: the critique on patriarchy and patriarchal cinema industry, and the development of feminist counter-cinema. Despite their efforts, women's situation has not been greatly improved. However, from the 90s a stream of female authors considered feminists by the critic disowning feminism has spread out. Their films are led by strong capable women, no longer representing women's struggles but assuming their victories and creating from them. New categories of analysis such as post-feminist cinema have been developed for those films. Nevertheless, I question whether these are essentially feminist representations since they are building alternative models of femininity. If they are, does this mean that a feminist consciousness is not necessary to make feminist films? In order to address this question I analyze gender representation in Bollaín’s filmography, and see whether their films fit in any feminist category despite her denial to the term, and the implication this could have.

Estéticas curvas para una revolución artístico-feminista

El principal problema que sigue existiendo en los feminismos es la falta de unión que ha derivado de una crisis epistémica y de conocimiento. Esto ha sido trasladado al campo artístico, pero con menores rivalidades, lo que acontece en estos momentos es una reflexión del conocimiento y de las prácticas artísticas culturales, que comienza por cuestionar el todo, para quedarse en un análisis fragmentado, ya que la inclusión gestáltica solo propiciaría un nuevo orden social exclusivo y fijo. Se comienza por el análisis de la estética, cualidad intrínseca al pensamiento humano, después lo humano, concepción historicista basada en una figura hermética y patriarcal, lo histórico, un campo de batalla en el que la mujer ha sido el elemento reproductivo, el espacio público, lugar de encuentro y de generación de conocimiento y así sucesivamente. En esta propuesta se establece una serie de relaciones conceptuales y prácticas que tratan no de eliminar viejos paradigmas culturales, sino más bien tratan de criticar los viejos y promover nuevas relaciones que busquen re-conocer en lo consabido, que se practiquen a sí mismas, lo que Rian Lozano llamó “prácticas culturales anormales”. Para tratar el tema en profundidad y analizar un caso real, se propone como práctica cultural anormal el Festival Internacional de cine feminista, Fem Tour Truck.

Novel Circulations: Old Acquaintance, Rich and Famous, La Flor de Mi Secreto

Across three women's films, the status of the literary novel in the midst of changing media environments is melodramatically plotted through the figure of “old acquaintance.” Vincent Sherman's 1943 Old Acquaintance pits the meager output of celebrated writer Katherine “Kit” Marlowe (Bette Davis) against the stream of popular, lowbrow novels written by her friend Millie Drake (Miriam Hopkins). This contest of literary style and production is closely adapted in George Cukor's 1981 film Rich and Famous. In Pedro Almodóvar's 1995 La flor de mi secreto, friction between literary styles and markets is subdued through melodrama's focus on affective rather than taste-making practices, appearing as a viable metaphor of the fate of book-objects in a zero-sum marketplace. This article focuses on Rich and Famous, which explores the question of affinity between women, lowbrow and highbrow, and the fate of the novel circa 1980. The particular and volatile experience of “alikeness” that founds friendship and the possibility that literary value is volatile—that high- and lowbrow are alike—are imagined in its nuanced representation of what Ronald Britton termed “publication anxiety” and in its use of cinematic space to stage the possibility of amicable if incongruous contemporaneity.

Stephanie Rothman Does Not Exist: Narrating a Lost History of Women in Film

This article examines Stephanie Rothman and her career as a second-wave exploitation film director between 1966 and 1974. Marginally represented in film histories and archives, Rothman made seven films during her short career and flourished in the primarily masculinized world of second-wave exploitation filmmaking. Despite her success, she remains largely obscure to academic and popular film communities. Grounding the discussion in a series of interviews conducted with the director, the author examines Rothman's role as the rare woman director working in second-wave exploitation filmmaking—and, indeed, in Hollywood—through her professional and personal ideology, her relationship with Roger Corman, and her marginalized place in film history. In so doing, this article provides an interventional model for the reconceptualization of film histories and archives through a feminist framework.

Patricia White (2015) Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms

Patricia White (2015) <i>Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms</i>

Traveling Gazes: Glocal Imaginaries in the Transcontinental, Transnational, Exilic, Migration, and Diasporic Cinematic Experiences of African Women

The exilic and diasporic filmmaking experiences of African women of the screen have been evident from the start of African cinematic practices. Women have traveled and relocated outside of their homeland to study, edit, shoot, work, live, and network. Informed by Hamid Naficy's formulation of "accented cinema," this article traces these peripatetic migrations framed within selected topics that are representative of the histories, trends, and tendencies throughout the evolution of African women in cinema: Oscillating between hostland and homeland, defining home(s) is a frequent practice. In the interstices of hostland and homeland, navigating in third space is a recurrent theme, as well as the mediation of exilic identities. The common phenomenon of intracontinental migration also leads to diasporic discovery. As a growing cohort of African women are born, raised, or settle in the United States, they are also negotiating within the dominant African American paradigm. Germany, a lesser-known site for Afrowomen's cinematic journeying, is emerging as an important space for study, work, and exploration. Several questions are posed for reflection and research.

Africultures Dossier: &lt;em&gt;L'Arbre sans fruit / The Fruitless Tree&lt;/em&gt; by Aïcha Elhadj Macky: Woman among Mothers

L'Arbre sans fruit / The Fruitless Tree by Aïcha Elhadj MackyWoman among Mothers Olivier Barlet Translated by Beti Ellerson The jury of the Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) in June 2016 granted its documentary prize to L'Arbre sans fruit / The Fruitless Tree, by Aïcha Elhadj Macky, coproduced by Sani Magori, who won the same award in 2009 with Pour le meilleur et pour l'oignon / For the Best and for the Onion. Both of these films, which come from the training and production circuit Africadoc, are part of the Lumières du Monde Collection. Macky was only five years old when her mother died after childbirth. It is this trauma that Macky, who is married without children, reconstructs in this film about infertility. She starts with childbirth: the calm and the advice of the midwife, the fatigue of the mother, the arrival of the child. She then moves to a spoken letter that refers back to the event: "Dear Mother, behind the camera, I tremble throughout my body," before concluding, "In my sleepless nights, your spirit guides my steps." This film speaks to us, as it knows how to build on the emotion of this personal implication, as an interrogation of society, a question posed to all of us. The task was not easy, as the subject remains taboo in Nigerien society. How to convince one to share such an experience? How to film a face that does not want to be seen? Macky accomplishes this very well. With her small technical team, she has an eye for detail, the lighting, the mood. The camera and the editing are of great tenderness. The testimonials are subtle conversations where she displays the quality of attentiveness, glances, and silences. It was necessary to have this level of sensitivity in order to show these very delicate issues in an environment where a woman does not have the right to go uncovered, and where sex itself remains a taboo subject. Macky's first film, Savoir faire le lit / To Know How to Make the Bed, described how the knowledge of the art of seduction and sexual intercourse was transmitted between mother and daughter. She was warned of the [End Page 267] repercussions she would face in her country Niger, including scandal, repudiation, and banishment, but it didn't happen. The film was well received, screened in schools and universities, and was the catalyst for much debate—evidence that African societies are not static. The Fruitless Tree questions the belief that one must one have a child in order to accomplish her personal life as a woman. For Macky, who is labeled as a "tree without fruit," it was with this film that she could assert herself above all as a woman among mothers—a place that requires courage and determination. Her stance, however, will give courage to the many women confronted with men's indifference towards their suffering, the suspicion and rejection of husbands and their families, the taking of co-wives to ensure fertility, and the rip-offs of some marabouts. Women's rights are perceptively discussed, most notably through the comments of an imam at the Islamic school who encourages pursuing a divorce if marriage does not lead to the woman's enjoyment and pleasure in the same way it does for the man, and to file a grievance to the religious leaders in the case of refusal. This is the taboo topic that Macky confronts head-on; tackling the silent contempt and suffering. She is not satisfied to only denounce the plight of women who are rejected because of infertility; she also demands the ability to control one's own destiny as a woman. This film, hence, is an attempt to not only correct these practices, but also and above all acting through the positioning of agent, to tell through word and image, and in this way to speak to the world and contribute to change. Translation by Beti Ellerson In partnership with African Women in Cinema [End Page 268] Copyright © 2017 Trustees of Indiana University

Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Film

Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Film

Archival News

Archival News Compiled by Yalie Kamara Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences The Academy Film Archive, home to over 90,000 titles, is actively preserving the 16mm home movies of Fayard and Harold Nicholas, who, performing together as the Nicholas Brothers, revolutionized dance entertainment in the earlier part of the twenty-first century with acrobatic moves such as "the leap frog" and performances in films such as 1943's Stormy Weather. In 2011, their home movies, which chronicled the dancers at home and on their extensive travels, were named to the Library of Congress National Film Registry, which honors twenty-five films each year for their contributions to the enrichment of America's film heritage. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The Nicholas Brothers with Carmen Miranda, courtesy of the Fayard Nicholas Family Home Movie Collection. [End Page 304] Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University, Bloomington In July 2016, the Black Film Center/Archive (BFC/A) received a collection of media and memorabilia representing the musical career and screen appearances of Ella Fitzgerald. Donors Fran Morris Rosman and Richard Rosman of the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation visited the Indiana University campus in Bloomington to announce the donation. In a convivial ceremony officiated by Media School Dean James Shanahan, those gathered shared stories of their great appreciation and fondness for the iconic jazz performer. The Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation will be leading celebrations in 2017 to honor the centennial of Fitzgerald's birth. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. The Black Film Center/Archive's JaQuita Joy Roberts with Annie Willis and Fran Morris Rosman (from left to right), July 2016. Photo courtesy of James Brosher, IU Communications. The BFC/A completed its work to preserve filmmaker Jessie Maple's second feature, Twice as Nice (1989), through a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Her earlier feature, Will (1981), brought Maple recognition as the first African American woman to direct and produce a narrative feature film. With her husband and producing partner, Leroy Patton (Twice as Nice's director of photography), Maple collaborated with BFC/A associate director Brian Graney on the film preservation work at Colorlab in Rockville, Maryland. Screenings of the new preservation print were held [End Page 305] at the Indiana University Cinema, with Maple and Patton in attendance, and at BAMcinématek, where it was featured in the film series "One Way or Another: Black Women's Cinema, 1970–1991." Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Paula and Pamela McGee in Jessie Maple's Twice as Nice (1989), preserved by the Black Film Center/Archive through a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. BFC/A also hosted recent visits from filmmakers Deborah Riley Draper and Julie Dash. Through her documentary film work, Draper seeks to uncover untold and often forgotten stories of the African American experience. Her films Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution (2012) and Olympic Pride, American Prejudice (2016) were both shown at Indiana University Cinema, with support from the College of Arts and Sciences' Themester program. Dash's visit, a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of her masterpiece Daughters of the Dust (1991), featured screenings of the newly released digital restoration of Daughters, along with presentations on 16mm and 35mm of her earlier short films, in prints from the collections of the BFC/A and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. [End Page 306] Film & Media Archive, University Libraries, Washington University in St. Louis The Film & Media Archive (FMA) received a donation of original interviews, photographs, footage, and research files related to two documentary films from Berkeley, California–based Paradigm Productions, The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It (2000) and Race Is the Place (2005). All materials in the Paradigm Productions Collection will be available for research to faculty, students, and the public on-site in the Washington University Libraries. Select materials also will be made available online. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. A still of Amiri Baraka during filming of Race Is the Place, a documentary by Paradigm Productions, materials for which are now housed in the Washington University Libraries' Film & Media Archive. Also in...

Konstantinos P. Nikoloutos (éd.), Ancient Greek Women in film

C’est une excellente idee d’avoir voulu, grâce a des contributions diverses, donner une idee du traitement des heroines grecques, mythologiques ou historiques au cinema. Le resultat, s’il n’est pas parfois a la hauteur de l’ambition affichee, est toujours interessant. D’abord Helene, vue par le cinema ame­ricain (Helene de Troie, Troy) et grec (Les Troyennes). Si les analyses des deux pre­miers films (en deux chapitres distincts) sont excellentes, quelle curieuse idee de vouloir comparer le ...

Mujer y cine en América Latina: proyectando una visión alternativa de la nación

Al explorar la relación entre cine de mujeres y cines latinoamericanos, este artículo interroga las categorías de cine nacional, cine latinoamericano y cine de mujeres con el fin de superar lógicas geopolíticas, de idiomas, colonialidad, y las lógicas industriales del mercado que han creado esas categorías. Partiendo de interrogantes como qué modelo de análisis feminista del cine es adecuado para articular las perspectivas de mujeres en las nuevas formaciones del cine mundial, propongo la utilidad del discurso de la interseccionalidad para un análisis de cine de mujeres que presente una visión alternativa de la nación.

A Politics of Intimacy

This conversation with filmmaker Alina Marazzi and editor Ilaria Fraioli took place on April 20, 2012, as part of a conference on found footage cinema at the Arts Department of the University of Bologna. Marazzi and Fraioli were invited to reflect on their work with archival material in films like For One More Hour with You (2002) and We Want Roses Too (2007), by a group of scholars with interests in compilation films, cultural memory, and women's cinema: Monica Dall'Asta, Barbara Grespi, Sandra Lischi, and Veronica Pravadelli.

Teaching African Women in Cinema, Part Two

Teaching African Women in Cinema:Part Two Beti Ellerson (bio) The second part of this essay offers a primer on African women in cinema studies, which is based on actual courses, seminars, and lectures and draws directly from articles posted on the African Women in Cinema Blog1 since its inception in 2009. A longer version of this article was published in nine parts on the blog. Toward an African Women Cinema Studies A developing corpus of literature serves as primary texts in the study of African women in cinema, several essential readings include: the special issue of Feminist Africa on African Feminist Engagements with Film2 and Journal of African Cinemas’s special issue on Celebrating forty years of films made by women directors in francophone Africa,3 both issued in 2012, and Gaze Regimes: Film and Feminisms in Africa,4 a by-product of the African Women in Film Conference held in Johannesburg in 2011. My three works in the volumes contribute to the discussion on historical, theoretical, and critical practices of interpretation. In each, I outline the tenets, critical debates, and developing trends in what has evolved as a veritable subdiscipline of African Women in Cinema Studies. Essential to this discussion is its vital role in the history of African cinema, women’s studies, and film criticism. Included also in this emerging review of literature on African Women in Cinema Studies are books, scholarly journal articles, graduate theses and their subsequent publication, and the citations and links of which are accessible on the website of the Centre for the Study and Research of African Women in Cinema.5 The ensemble of publications collected here, though some are out of print or not accessible to a global public, is indicative of the expanding written works that contribute to the emerging subdiscipline of African Women in Cinema Studies. In the introductory sessions of the course, students present a short overview of their assigned countries in order to become familiar with or give a review of the political, social, cultural, and economic histories and [End Page 217] geographies; languages, religions, and topography of the vast continent of Africa. The mapping of Africa during these sessions allows the class as a whole to participate and become familiar with, updated on and acquire a deeper knowledge of Africa. It also serves as references to which students may return throughout the course when discussing the film practitioners and the specific themes and settings of their films. The objective of assigning weekly critical reflection papers is to make ongoing connections with the readings, discussions, lectures, and visuals as they evolve from session to session. The critical reflection paper is a space within which learners work through the concepts, theories, questions, and difficult issues that are address I find this exercise to be particularly satisfying as it is a way to interact directly with students, responding to, commenting on their reflections, and dialoguing with them via email. Under the theme, “Women Artists’/Filmmakers’ Voices” the class has a glimpse at historical, political, and cultural events of African societies through the eyes of their female cultural producers, featuring Safi Faye (Senegal), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Fatou Kandé Senghor (Senegal), and Rina Jooste (South Africa). The readings include: “Africa through a Woman’s Eyes: Safi Faye’s Cinema,”6 and from the African Women in Cinema Blog, interviews with Tsitsi Dangarembga and Rina Jooste, and the autobiographical narrative by Fatou Kandé Senghor also translated in English from French. The choice of the women was guided by my interest in highlighting the interdisciplinarity of African women’s lives, how they work at the intersection of multiple experiences: Safi Faye as filmmaker and anthropologist, blurring the boundaries of the documentary and fiction; Tsitsi Dangarembga as filmmaker, writer, cultural activist, and organizer; Fatou Kandé Senghor as multimedia artist, connecting the borderlines of filmmaking, performance, plastic arts, music—including hip-hop; Rina Jooste, as musician, filmmaker and historian, brings together these disciplines to explore the difficult, storied history of South Africa, and in particular Afrikaner experiences and identities. Students, thus, are exposed to the concept of “African women in cinema” as an expansive, outward-reaching entity, and from the beginning of the...

Editors' Introduction

The contents of this special issue on women's film history have their starting point in the “Doing Women's Film and Television History II” international conference, which took place at the University of East Anglia, England, in April 2014. Several of the texts began life as keynote lectures and presentations, while others were inspired by the discussions that took place across its packed three-day schedule. The second conference of the Women's Film and Television History Network, UK-Ireland, the inaugural edition of which had taken place at the University of Sunderland in 2011,1 provided another opportunity for researchers, archivists, and activists to share their ideas around histories of women working in film and television, …

The Coming of the Projectionettes

This article investigates women's roles as cinema projectionists, and transformations in women's spectatorship, in Britain during World War II. Between 1939 and 1945 the British Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association (CEA), among other organizations, encouraged women to train as projectionists when the government conscripted men into the armed forces. The “projectionettes” experienced unequal pay, often chaotic training programs, and patronizingly sexualized portrayals in contemporary press reports. Yet without women projectionists, British cinemas would not have been able to operate during the war. This essay traces their histories and daily working lives through archival materials and the trade press. Moreover, by situating their work in a broader narrative about gendered spectatorship, the article proposes that owing to changing labor conditions, women gained new perspectives through their experiences in the movie theater. Investigating women projectionists is a valuable strategy in a broader reexamination of British film exhibition, points of view, and the proliferation of “women's cinema” during wartime.