This summer the project team held a workshop event in Swansea, brilliantly organised by Project Co-Lead Dr Lisa Smithstead (Swansea University). Lisa reflects on the day in the blog post below:
We gathered at Taliesin Create, the arts centre at the heart of Swansea University’s Singleton Campus where we were joined by a range of exciting guest speakers and participants from England and Wales, including Cardiff’s University’s Alix Beeston, UEA’s Melanie Williams, and researchers from Swansea University including Elain Price and Non Williams.
The day centred around the theme of the unmade and women’s screenwriting, inspired by Alix’s trailblazing work in this area in her co-edited collection (with Stefan Solomon) Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film.We asked all participants to reflect on how concepts of the unmade and the unfinished has impacted their research into women’s screen work in archives.
The workshop was intended very much as an open, free flowing space of collaboration and sharing of ideas, methodologies, best practice – but also problems, obstacles, questions that both academics and archivists are struggling to answer about how to do the work of feminist archival film and TV historiography.
In doing so, we opened an exciting and distinct vein of the WSWIA project extending our focus across the four nations in the UK to showcase the work of scholars based in Wales and research focussed on Wales and in Welsh.
Our approach for this was consciously presentation-light and discussion-heavy, breaking away from the more standard conference paper format to enable ideas to flow more freely and problems and methodological sticking points to be untangled (and re-tangled) collectively in a room that comprised of senior and junior academics, archivists, and postgraduate students.
The morning kicked off with coffee and pastries and a chat with Alix about her approach to the unmade, laying the foundation for the discussions to follow by probing her concept of the unmade film as a site of feminist ‘possibility’. Alix gave some fascinating insights into her writing and research processes and highlighted the value in non-standard modes of writing and dissemination for producing work in this specific field.
Our second set of speakers were Non Williams and Elain Price, who focussed on women in Welsh broadcasting and issues of preservation and visibility. Non foregrounded a range of Welsh women BBC producers whose papers were bequeathed to the National Library of Wales, mapping her journey as a bricoleur ‘embroidering these women’s lives from a range of colourful threads’. Elain discussed her work in helping preserve physical artefacts related to the history of S4C, excavating materials otherwise destined to be destroyed that potentially contain untold histories of women staff working across the history of S4C.
Elain and Non were followed by Lisa Smithstead, who presented her research into unmade scripts by women in the Richard Burton collection in the Richard Burton archives at Swansea University as an interactive exhibition, mapping the research process and its various dead-ends and alternative possibilities in trying to find a way to visualise and make sense of these kinds of archival fragments. Lisa’s discussion focussed on two women writers from the 1970s – Gladys Hill, who collaborated frequently with John Huston, and the TV writer and former Head of the Writer’s Guild of America Manya Starr.
After lunch, Melanie Williams spoke about her work around Muriel Box in the BFI collections, showcasing a range of thrilling images from Box’s collections including her diaries and highly edited drafts of letters discussing films that were stalled at the distribution and exhibition stages.
Helen Hanson focussed on challenges, opportunities and methods in researching women’s script work in the Ranks Scripts collection. Helen mapped some of the key methods and approaches for the WSWIA project more widely, before exploring the vast and exciting range of material – what she termed ‘the pile on the table’ – donated to Exeter’s Bill Douglas Cinema Museum from Pinewood Studios, and primarily comprising film projects associated with the Rank Film Company. The collection is composed of a mixture of treatments, script drafts, and unmade projects, with lots of work by women. Helen discussed the importance of ‘acknowledging incompleteness’ in the material traces of women’s unrealised projects and interpreting items in the collection as part of a career ‘as a whole’.
Finally, Katie Crosson joined us on zoom to discuss her fascinating research into the unmade screen projects of writer Hazel Adair, whose work ranged from adapting children’s fiction to writing sexploitation cinema in the 1970s.
The workshop day as a whole gave the WSWIA a valuable chance to reflect on project methods and approaches, and the collaborative conversation with expert speakers allowed us to take stock of our work as we approach the mid point of our project.
