Not quite an auteur, more than a creative labourer: authorial agency of British women documentarians

Abstract

This thesis argues that to achieve a nuanced picture of British women documentarians’ authorial agency, traditional film-text based approaches to authorship need to be supplemented by the analysis of extra-textual contexts like the filmmakers’ background and training; the rules and relationships present in the main production context they work in; the filmmakers’ own perceptions of themselves as authors and of their creative process. Building on the research into women’s authorship done within feminist film, TV and media studies as well as in documentary studies, presented in Part One of this work, the core of this thesis (Parts Two and Three) comprises thematic analysis of data gathered in twenty-six semi-structured interviews with women documentarians currently active in the UK; my sample and the method of analysis are described in detail in Appendices 1-3. I present my respondents’ opinions in the context of existing literature on British documentary, TV production, cultural and creative industries, gendered aspects of labour and documentary desire. I conclude that supplementing traditional text-based approaches to women’s documentary authorship with these new areas of research not only demonstrates the importance of gender as analytic category but also deepens the understanding of women documentarians’ authorship and enables the revaluation of their authorial position in critical discourse around British documentary.

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ORCID for Shelley Cobb: orcid.org/0000-0003-1153-8482

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