Pub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043871.003.0003
M. Bell
This chapter discusses how the key features of the British film industry impacted women's labor. It sets women's work in the context of a production boom in the British film industry in the 1930s, a time when the sector was modernizing after the introduction of sound, and film studios were keen to create a new image of themselves. The chapter shows how they achieved this by linking the modernization narrative to masculinity in fan and trade publications and sidelining women and their labor in the process. It then moves on to examine women's labor in costume, continuity, and editing/negative cutting — jobs that have come to define popular understanding of women's contribution to sound-era cinema. The chapter recounts some of the skills required to succeed in these roles and the processes through which they were assigned secondary status in film production hierarchies.
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This chapter evaluates the feature film industry in the 1950s. It begins by focusing on production context and women's union representation as shop stewards — within the broader social context of debates about women and work. The chapter provides an overview of women in the British film industry through union membership application data. It then turns to four complementary case studies that characterize women's work in film production during the 1950s: the production secretary, publicity assistant, paint and trace artist, and editors in the documentary sector. In a decade dominated by debate about women's place in the workforce, relative to the home, the chapter uses women's accounts to trace multiple instances of occupational autonomy and the performance of skilled labor, revealing not only how women sought out and secured avenues for professionally satisfying work but also how their careers bring into view forms of creativity that have been neglected in existing film histories.
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Pub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043871.003.0008
M. Bell
This epilogue presents an account of working with oral history in a dialogue with young women at the beginning of their careers in the media industries. It shows not only how the present continues to be shaped by legacies of the “past” but also how women are using the past to shape their futures as producers of media. The strength of the connection between past and present was emphasized in women's responses to a questionnaire upon which they underlined key words and used exclamation marks to amplify their message. These and other anecdotes, highly personal and easy to discount as minor infringements on individuals, coalesced to reveal a shared, collective picture of sexist workplace cultures and how they are experienced by young women in the industry today. Nevertheless, women have found, and made, spaces for professionally satisfying work, where varying degrees of occupational autonomy could be exercised.
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Pub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043871.003.0001
M. Bell
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the work done by women in film production in the twentieth century. One of the common misunderstandings of women in film production is that after the pioneering days of early cinema — when women directed and headed up their own production companies — they contributed little of substance to film production until the feminist developments of the 1970s. This book challenges that view as too limiting and instead offers a fresh assessment of women and their work in the British film industry in the decades following the introduction of sound. It focuses on the six decades between 1930 and 1989, when employment in the film industry was tightly regulated by the Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT), the country's leading film union. Mapping women's work by decade, and in fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, the book examines women's economic and creative contribution to film production in the many “below-the-line” roles in which they were typically employed. It also highlights new lines of inquiry in the relationship between women and cultural production, reflects on issues of gender and creativity, and opens up fundamental questions about how we write film history.
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Pub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043871.003.0007
M. Bell
This chapter focuses on the 1970s and 1980s and continues the theme of women in male-dominated positions, extending it by contrasting the experiences of women in the feature film sector with those who actively built film communities outside mainstream production. Looking first at women in camera and sound jobs, it discusses how they faced the choice of either “fitting in or fighting” and the strategies they adopted to survive in a macho working environment. The chapter then moves on to examine women's experiences in the workshop sector, a unique feature of the decade's film culture, which supported cross-job working, media education, and training. Through a focus on the themes of child care, women-only spaces, class, and ethnicity, the chapter explores the possibilities, and limitations, of work outside the mainstream film industry. It also opens up the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality and argues for a wider recognition of Black women's pedagogy in film history.
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Pub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043871.003.0004
M. Bell
This chapter examines how the Second World War had a significant impact on the British film industry. It continues the theme of secondary status by examining how this played out in the 1940s, a decade dominated by the Second World War and an official address to women to join the workforce as reserve labor. In the service film units, the chapter shows how women “free[d] a man for the fleet” by taking over roles in editing, projection, photography, and animation, while their work as assistants in art departments kept the “back room” of Britain's film studios functioning. It also draws on the experience of women in documentary directing to introduce the concept of the episodic-interrupted career as a defining characteristic of women's employment. The chapter uses the concept to illuminate the multifaceted nature of women's occupational profiles and, in doing so, disrupt the dominant, male-defined narrative of the continuous work history as the key indicator of career success.
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Pub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043871.003.0002
M. Bell
This chapter begins by outlining the general contours of the British film industry. It sketches out the historical emergence of the industry's leading trade union, the Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT), before analyzing its evolution and how it favored men and their work at the expense of women in the workforce. The chapter then describes the chief characteristics of the ACT's membership records. Finally, the chapter presents an analysis of the women granted membership of the ACT for the six decades between 1930 and 1989. This discussion is structured into six main categories: Floor; Research, Development, and Publicity; Art and Effects; Camera, Sound and Stills; Cartoon and Diagram; and Postproduction. The analysis highlights the patterns of discrimination and opportunity for women in the context of technological and market shifts and trade union changes across the era.
{"title":"Organizing Work","authors":"M. Bell","doi":"10.5622/illinois/9780252043871.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043871.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter begins by outlining the general contours of the British film industry. It sketches out the historical emergence of the industry's leading trade union, the Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT), before analyzing its evolution and how it favored men and their work at the expense of women in the workforce. The chapter then describes the chief characteristics of the ACT's membership records. Finally, the chapter presents an analysis of the women granted membership of the ACT for the six decades between 1930 and 1989. This discussion is structured into six main categories: Floor; Research, Development, and Publicity; Art and Effects; Camera, Sound and Stills; Cartoon and Diagram; and Postproduction. The analysis highlights the patterns of discrimination and opportunity for women in the context of technological and market shifts and trade union changes across the era.","PeriodicalId":210927,"journal":{"name":"Movie Workers","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130399602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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