Women's Film History Project: Issues of Transnationalism

At the two workshops of the Women's Film History Project, in Sunderland (UK) and New York, I was asked to consider the issues surrounding how WFHP might interact with film archives to increase awareness, availability, and profile of the surviving films to which women filmmakers contributed. Most of these are the same old problems that affect the supply of any archival material—worse perhaps because the films are often not part of the established canon and some frankly are obscure. The model created by the Alice Guy exhibition (at the Whitney Museum in New York, December 2009-March 2010) is a fine one and is already a very useful launch pad for the rest of the project. By screening so many of her films to a large, variable public (mixing tourists, aficionados, and others), it has made them and their contextual material available in a pleasing and accessible manner. The exhibit was created by building a network of partnerships that has engendered a general willingness to help and an enthusiasm for the venture. Moreover, it has done this at the international level. Of course, the exhibitions' success has built on many years of background work, both in the archival and academic spheres. It has also helped that Alice Guy is the key figure in the story of women's filmmaking, being the world's first woman film director, and a good one at that.

So why the good will? If this were another subject-led project—say trains, or medical films, or films made by migrants—would the universities and archives be so willing to help? Probably not. Well, definitely not. One reason for this may be an underlying and perhaps growing curiosity about why there are still so few women film directors, when in almost every other area of endeavour the gender balance is tipping in favor of women (film archiving and academia, for example). It is weird and mysterious and intriguing and, suddenly, has been given a social immediacy by Kathryn Bigelow's 2010

Figure 1.

"Can Women Direct Films?" Film Weekly, 1929

Oscar win for The Hurt Locker (US, 2009). Are there answers to be found in the past? Women want to know; even men want to know. It is one of the biggest questions connecting film history to the current film industry. And so we have amassed this network of people who are willing to burrow away for the sake of the project. They are driven by curiosity and a desire to build a body of material from which we can venture a few nascent speculations.

Unsurprisingly, the most evident of these speculative solutions is going to emerge in opposition to auteurism, which (to oversimplify) intimates that the success of a movie is due to one guiding hand or genius, that the whole of this complex filmic creation is the work of one individual vision, like God or Van Gogh. The further implication is that to do such a thing you have to be very, very good and that if there are no female directors it is, ergo, because they are no good. If you circumvent the auteur perspective (whose time is surely up anyway), then the whole question of contribution and the position of women in the creation of films suddenly opens up in a most interesting way. Identifying the contribution to a work by different members of a team is not easy, or always even possible, but this shouldn't prevent us from looking at filmmaking from that point of view.

From the general discussions at the various Women's Film History Network sessions, I suspect that the biggest area of research that will face us, if we are to answer this question about women's contribution, will be in the field of economic history—we need to find out how many women were in the industry, what jobs did they do, and in what numbers. Did the marriage bar exclude them from working? All of them? If so, until when? What effect did the Unions have? Is it...