Movie Workers

Women, Melanie Bell argues, have been largely absent from the history of the British film industry. They appear in accounts of the pioneering days of early cinema and then disappear until the 1970s. Yet women engaged in many forms of valuable labor, most often in supporting roles, such as assistants to directors, editorial work, and continuity work. The long-standing devaluation of women's work in the industry, she contends, has contributed to their invisibility in the historiography. In this book, the author aims to redress this omission by examining women's work and experiences in film production from 1930 until 1989. For this ambitious study she draws on trade and fan magazines; oral history interviews; and the records of the Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT), registered as a trade union in 1933 and renamed the Association of Cinematograph, Television, and Allied Technicians in 1956. Bell begins the book with an analysis of union membership applications to identify trends for the entire period and then spotlights different forms of women's work at different time periods rather than “tracking a handful of roles longitudinally” (14). She analyzes, for example, women employed in documentaries and film service units during World War II, animation and publicity in the 1950s, makeup and special effects, costume and wardrobe in the 1960s, and workshop and independent film work in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, the author focuses on women's work experiences in this male-dominated industry. This is a broad overview of this rich study of the complex history of women's work and contributions to the British film industry.Bell clearly documents the systematic discrimination that women faced in this industry. From the start, the ACT introduced a graded system, one that recognized over 120 different job grades by the 1940s. Within the system, she argues, training was closed to women who were clustered into certain jobs designated “female” jobs or the lowest-level jobs, often with the “assistant” tag, and lower pay. Contemporaries believed that these jobs aligned with women's “natural” ability and talents, such as their manual dexterity and aptitude for repetitive work. In the 1930s, for instance, commentators remarked that being “handy with her needle” was the key attribute of a “wardrobe mistress” (74). Union and male workers jealously guarded their privileged position in the workforce. During World War II, the union extended temporary membership, under the heading of “war emergency membership,” to women who replaced male workers called up for war service. In the early 1970s, Diane Tammes recalled that women who applied for admission to the union as camera technicians were routinely rejected and received a letter stating, “We do not accept women in these jobs” (187). One argument against this form of employment was that women lacked the physical strength for it. Bell notes that such actions persisted even after the passage of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. The definition of appropriate work for women based on ideology has a very familiar ring to it; scholars have accentuated this development in their histories of women's work in manufacturing in modern British history.The great strength of this book is Bell's nuanced analysis of the complex history of women's work within the film industry. It is a history marked by discrimination but also punctuated by periods when women enjoyed more work opportunities. This was the case during World War II, when there was an influx of women to replace men called up for service. Margaret Thomson, for instance, directed a number of documentaries on subjects including agriculture and the education of children and received much critical acclaim for her high-quality work. Beginning in the 1960s, television and commercial work made it possible for women to move into senior positions and to garner professional recognition and, ultimately, to advance into the mainstream film industry. In the following two decades, independent films and film workshops provided alternative spaces for women to engage in meaningful work. The creation of all-female crews was also a notable development of this period. Bell documents the work of Sally Potter, who directed an all-female production team for The Gold Diggers (1983). Terry Wragg, who joined the all-female Leeds Animation Workshop in 1977, said, “It wasn't a million miles away from being like a consciousness-raising group in some ways” (201). These groups are reminiscent of other feminist groups of the period, and they point to the importance of women's initiatives and agency in this history.The most compelling and insightful part of the book is the author's analysis of women's accounts. She captures the dissonance between the ways men and women viewed women's work. In the late 1940s and 1950s, for example, women who worked in paint and trace work in animation were often called “hens,” “hags,” or “nuns,” while their work was described as “tedious and detailed work . . . best suited for women” (132). Jill Clark, who worked as a painter in the late 1940s, said that her work was “quite complicated really” as she had to work quickly while ensuring that she did not go over the edges with her painting (132). This is one of numerous accounts that substantiate Bell's central argument that, contrary to conventional histories, women engaged in work that required skill, resourcefulness, and creativity. They also engaged in the emotional labor that was critical to the film-making process.By centering women, Bell presents a new and compelling perspective on film history, one that will be of interest to both specialists and nonspecialists. Her work in creating the digital repository “Women's Work in British Film and Television” (available through https://learningonscreen.ac.uk) is also a major achievement. It contains the digitized union records and oral history interviews. I share the author's hope that scholars will use these sources to continue to recover the history of women's valuable labor in this important industry

Art history · Film industry · Historiography · Invisibility · Media studies · Movie theater · Oral history · Political science · Publicity · Redress · Sociology · Work (physics · Cinema and Media Studies · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Engineering · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law