History Forgets Itself: Women’s Film Production Outside the Studio System
The struggles women have faced in
attempting to work within the Hollywood studio system have been the focus of
recent scholarship (Erin Hill, for example) and activism (#metoo). These
efforts shed light on the pervasive and longstanding exclusion of women, which
has kept them from key creative positions in Hollywood. The financially
high-stakes world of commercial media production has long been male dominated, so
it should perhaps come as no surprise that women have had more opportunities to
participate in filmmaking outside of the studio system. However, until fairly
recently the lives and work of women who made movies outside of Hollywood has
been subject to neglect.
A new wave of scholars,
archivists and preservationists has begun to productively excavate women’s home
movie and amateur filmmaking efforts drawing attention to women who pursued their
own filmmaking interests. However, this panel looks specifically at women’s
professional filmmaking outside of the studio system to further enhance our
understanding of women’s labor in media production. These filmmaking efforts often
unsettle the binaries of professional/amateur and theatrical/non-theatrical
that have characterized scholarship to date.
Given
the limited opportunities for women within the studio system, particularly
after the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of women’s participation in the teens and 20s,
we must look beyond Hollywood to uncover the careers of women who worked professionally
in the film industry. There were many women who made a living working as camera
operators, editors, writers, producers, directors, etc., almost all of whose
careers were met with a discourse of exceptionalism that positioned each woman
as unique and a novelty. This discourse obscures the innumerable other women who
worked professionally on industrial and sponsored films, travelogues and travel
lectures, expedition films, adventure and nature films, church films,
government and educational films, documentaries as well as narrative fictions.
We welcome
papers on any aspect of women’s participation in film production outside the
studio system that redefines not only what we understand as the film industry,
but that work to disrupt received notions of what constitutes a professional
filmmaking career.
Please forward inquiries and paper
proposals (200-300 words) and a short bio by August 3rd to:
Liz Czach, University of Alberta, liz.czach@ualberta.ca
Marsha Gordon, North Carolina State
University, marsha_gordon@ncsu.edu
Panelists
will be notified by Tuesday August 14, 2018.