Exploring gender and class in the amateur film collection of Wessex Film and Sound Archive (WFSA) 1895-1950

Abstract

This thesis focuses on gender and class in the amateur film collection of Wessex Film and Sound Archive (WFSA) between 1895 and 1950. It provides a timely insight into regional amateur filmmaking practice, that contributes to rethinking how women’s film history is written, moving beyond pioneers and prominent professionals towards recognising women in everyday film culture and towards providing evidence of amateur filmmaking practice as a vehicle for social mobility. Through a synthesis of qualitative and quantitative methods, I bring oral history interviews in consideration with questionnaires, combine textual analysis with demographic data and interpret print sources and ephemera alongside extant reels of film. This methodological innovation provides concrete statistical data on the demographic composition of the collection. Revealing for the first time, a more accurate sense of the gender and socio-economic status of filmmakers. Using WFSA and its collection as a representative sample, I demonstrate that the work of women amateur filmmakers is consistently overlooked in archives because of entrenched patriarchal shaped practices. I evidence how the diversity of female interactions in amateur film within this sample calls for a reappraisal of the linguistic framing around amateur practice, demanding a departure from the authorial model and instead acknowledging the more democratic features of practice and fluidity of interactions. Furthermore, I identify that the disparity in cost of cine equipment by gauge before 1950 had considerable bearing on who engaged in filmmaking and with what technology. With new evidence suggesting access was not necessarily limited to the wealthy upper classes. My work constitutes a significant contribution to the field of amateur cinema studies, and more specifically to understanding women amateur filmmakers in the UK. It offers a series of original findings including: 1) addressing the absence of substantial prior investigations into the filmmakers or films housed within the WFSA collection; 2) the dataset from which my analysis is drawn supports the argument for deployment of innovative new approaches to regional filmmaking populations; 3) my approach has uncovered more than nine additional women filmmakers, whose work was not visible or acknowledged before this research was undertaken; 4) my empirical dataset maps the work of over two hundred filmmakers active in this regional collection, the first population analysis for such a regional archive; 5) I pioneer the development and application of a collection survey method that takes a holistic approach to understanding filmmaking populations whilst drawing on the strengths of case study centred discussion

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Identifiers

ORCID for Zoe Jane Viney Burgess: orcid.org/0000-0002-5855-4458

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

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