Reimagining Boundaries: Amateur Animations

Very few amateur women filmmakers chose to focus on animation and none have been identified in the colonial settings considered in this book. This chapter discusses varied approaches to animation and suggests that early stop motion experiments were entertaining acts of story-telling and capturing scenes of childhood. Some filmmakers added animated titling sequences to their films and used special visual effects, either working on their own, with a partner or as part of a larger group as seen in films by the Grasshopper Group and Leeds Animation Workshop. Working at home characterises many of this chapter's examples although some teachers have explored animation with children of different ages. IAC records and reminiscences trace over eighty years of women's involvement including still active practitioners and many invisible and under-acknowledged contributors to Britain's professional mid century animation industry

Resisting Colonial Gendering while Domesticating the Empire

This chapter examines how colonial women amateur filmmakers often documented in detail their early and mid-twentieth century overseas travel and settlement experiences, jobs, sports and private and official events. Relying on cross-archival primary sources, it discusses the filmmakers’ simultaneous roles as vectors of colonising credos and commodified subalterns of imperial paternalism. It explores the historical discourse present across several colonial amateur films made by British women in South Asia, Africa, Papua New Guinea, and the Middle East between 1920s and 1940s. It also considers gender and racial hierarchies as shaped by imperial rule while confirmed or challenged by the filmmakers' prevailing perceptions of cinematic vocabulary and practice. Although traditionally seen as a predominantly male hobby, amateur filmmaking across the British Empire has been a pastime preferred by women too, almost on par with their male counterparts. It thus becomes possible to speak of a gender-based visual narrative identifiable across British colonial amateur filmmaking, one validated by the thematic choices made by women amateur filmmakers and their shared visual literacy. Finally, the chapter explores the differences and similarities in visual literacy between several amateur films made by British colonial women during the final years of the British rule in India.

British Women’s Media Narratives of Gender and Collective Memory

This chapter engages with theoretical and historical perspectives on gender, post-colonialism and new media with the aim to trace the visual literacy defined by several examples of British women amateur film and media practice. This literacy appears to inform new understandings of amateur/new media making and to elucidate how gender-driven visual narratives of gender, race and national identities function today within global online networks. It explores issues of belonging, home-and-abroad mind frames, and of colonial and post-colonial identity-building within postcolonial and feminist theories. The theoretical discourse is anchored in detailed analyses of the amateur film made by Eileen Healey of the all-women tragic mountaineering expedition up the Chy Oyu summit in 1959, and of several exceptional scenes filmed in colour by Rosie Newman during the London Blitz, including British military drills during the Second World War and portraits of British colonial subjects and sites. Finally, it identifies the ways in which some documentary filmmakers have recently re-framed and re-contextualized similar footage, such as Beatrice Blackwood’s and Ursula Graham Bower’s colonial amateur (ethnographic) films, either as visual ‘fillers’ for new perspectives on the history of the British Empire, or as cinematic documents relevant to new practices in visual anthropology studies

Teacher Filmmakers

This chapter examines the development of amateur filmmaking interests among women teachers as independent producers working on their own and as professional women who found a niche for themselves in amateur filmmaking circles. The rise of cine interests among single teachers reflects specific social, economic and educational circumstances in Britain between the wars and discussion of how they filmed their pupils, colleagues, classroom and playground links to wider consideration of women's opportunities for paid employment, societal expectations and attitudes towards teaching as a legitimate extension of childcare. Films provide opportunities to explore historical representations of childhood and its archival significance. Teachers filmed school journeys and residential visits in and beyond Britain. Such material offers informal imagery of adolescence and adult companions in and away from classroom setting during years when Britain's educational system being redefined in response to the post-war raising of the school leaving age, intense debate on girls' education and the rise of youth culture. Teachers' films represent an under-explored wealth of personal and professional subjectivities and are reminders that while professional constraints limited individual ambitions for decades, filmmaking brought autonomy, challenge and recognition. Like their teaching, filmmaking also reflected their sense of service to others and teachers' enjoyment of what they did.

Through Women’s Lens: Imperial and Postcolonial Class and Gender Hierarchies

This chapter charts how changing geo-political relations during late colonialism influenced conventional imperial ideologies of race, gender and identity and brought about a fundamental shift in women’s visual literacy. Through their unofficial, un-commissioned and private visual records of early post-colonial history, women were often able to promote new understandings of political, racial and gender transformations specific to crucial times for the British Empire and the Commonwealth. It argues that British women amateur filmmakers transcended traditional historical discourses in recording their own first-person narratives. The chapter centres on the analysis of particular sequences filmed in markedly different geo-political contexts by Queen Elizabeth II, Audrey Lewis, and two of Maharaja Vijaysinhji of Rajpipla’s British female friends. Their films prompt new perspective on how and why British women amateur filmmakers chose to record men as possible agents of national and imperial post-colonial identity. The cine-women discussed in this chapter witnessed and filmed radical shifts in representations of gender-driven, post-imperial roles within specific cultural norms and opportunities. As a result, questions of gendered and visual appropriation are considered in relation to feminist and postcolonial theories while acknowledging that the interpretation of British women's amateur visual practice often requires new methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches.

Cameras Not Handbags: The Essential Accessory

This chapter explores women's impulse to film as a response to modernity. Some women made films entirely independently, without links to clubs, literature or other filmmakers. Self-reliant and experimental, they used their cameras as modern visual accessories to capture specific moments and memories and to display agency often denied in other areas of life by class expectations, domesticity or other constraints. Their filmic versions of family life, travel and local events may be conventional or quirkily individual and spontaneous. They chronicle anniversaries and local events, children's rites of passage and where they find themselves whether in post-independent India, Kenya's Mau Mau Emergency, countryside picnics with Enoch Powell or as an acclaimed pianist from Trinidad. Not all films were edited or even survive: imagery and interviewees disclose varied emotions; films were (and are) moments in time, often eclipsed by later circumstances whether personal or political.

Webs of Production and Practice

Chapter 2 explores women’s strategic role as clubs grew up to support amateur activity. Unlike the early colonial cine club scene that was largely male dominated, Britain's cine club scene involved women from the outset and echoes other gendered patterns of associational and voluntary activity. Previously unavailable films, club records and interviews identify significant contributions by award-winning women practitioners, as mentors, adjudicators, writers, teachers and committee members that facilitate local to international events and bridge the transition from analogue into digital activity. Interviews reveal how healthier, personally wealthier and active retirees still sustain roles carved out by their pioneering predecessors. Background, education, marital status, paid employment and domestic roles contextualise how women maintained local groups during wartime, filmed club life and made films alone or with other members. Some became fundraisers, all became keen advocates and for some, film became part of their identity, whether working in non-fiction, fiction, experimental filmmaking or animation.

Amateur Women Filmmakers as Producers of Cultural Meaning

Amateur women film makers expressed their changing role in society, sense of selfhood and being in the world through film. It enabled them to negotiate the complexities of class, inheritance, status, authority, geography, convention and modernity. These films are part of the twentieth century's unofficial visual histories yet until recently they have been largely neglected in Britain’s public and private collections. This discussion sets women's filmmaking against wider histories of gender, social, economic, cultural and geo-political change. This framing allows the authors to discuss film production in Britain's contrasting national and colonial settings, to question subjectivities, probe at meanings and rework assumptions and expectations associated with British ways of life in and beyond the final decades of colonialism. Discussion introduces case-studies, methodologies and related literature so that readers may follow the broadly chronological structure of subsequent chapters and individual topics. Relevant archival sources related to colonial and British-based film making are identified, as are the specialist magazines for amateur film enthusiasts and the organisational support available via cine clubs and the Institute of Amateur Cinematography. Interdisciplinary and intentionally offering different interpretative approaches, this introductory overview offers a framework for reading on and a springboard of ideas for further research.