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Women’s Screen Work in Archives Made Visible

Thousands of women have contributed to shaping British filmmaking, and its vibrant history, but their creative contributions are largely absent from public knowledge of that history, because evidence documenting their work is often buried or invisible in major film-related archives and museums.

The Women’s Screen Work in Archives Made Visible Project aims to transform our understanding of women’s creative legacy in British filmmaking. Our team brings together professional archivists and curators working in dialogue and collaboration with film scholars. We will make traces of women’s screen work more discoverable in film-related collections and more visible in film museums through developing archival and curatorial practices. We understand the term ‘filmmaker’ inclusively, widening it to include and value women’s screen work in a range of production roles beyond the category of director, and opening up women’s film history.

Our project works with the major film-related collections in the UK: the British Film Institute’s Special Collections and the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. At the BFI we are working with case study collections of Gurinder Chadha and Tina Gharavi, and at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum we are working with collections of scripts by a range of female screenwriters, as well as sampling collections relating to the work of script supervisors, and women’s work in other below-the-line roles. Through interviewing we will learn from women filmmakers about how they work, and relate to their archive, using this knowledge to augment catalogue descriptions. We will also seek to better understand the context in which archivists and curators work, and the challenges they face in the screen heritage sector by undertaking oral history work.

Our project has regional, national and international partners: Studio 74 at the Exeter Phoenix Media Centre; the Wessex Film and Sound Archive, Winchester; the Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles; and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Sharing our research with these partners will enable us to more fully understand the common challenges of making women’s screen work visible to a range of audiences, and allow us to take our insights in the UK context to impact work in screen heritage more widely.