Frustrated by the invisibility of women in film history, Melanie set out to change this and create a fully inclusive history of film.

Her work now raises the profile of women’s work in the film industry. It is her hope that this work will encourage change and inclusivity in the industry.

Melanie is a Professor in Film History in the School of Media and Communication.

Read more about Melanie and her research.

Transcript

[Melanie is sitting in front of a white background speaking directly to camera.]

Melanie: One of the motivations for doing this project was I was sick of reading books on film history about men. and I thought it was time to have some books about women because they were central to filmmaking.

This project started about five or six years ago when I came across this photograph in the Cinema Museum in London. And like most people, my eye was drawn to the people that you could instantly recognise in the frame. So, there's Alfred Hitchcock in there. And over on this side is the star, Doris Day.

So, I became interested in this figure seated by Hitchcock's right-hand side. And I was kind of interested in who this person was. She looked very kind of neat and studious, and she had a notepad and pen on her lap, and she was clearly busy working. So, I'm wondering, well, who is she and what does she do?

So, it wasn't too difficult to work out what the film was. So, it's The Man Who Knew Too Much and it was made in 1956 and shot in London. And so, from that, I could work out who this person was. And it's Connie Willis, and she was a continuity girl. It turned out that not only had she worked on this film, but she'd worked on about 150 other films as well. So, she had this fantastic, really long career that ran for about 40 years in British film production.

And so, on the one hand, there was somebody who was clearly very central to filmmaking. But actually, when you started to look at how you might research and write her history, I ran into problems straight away.

So, I'm a film historian, so what I need are archival traces, And these are things that I use to be able to write history. So, the usual archives that we go to, the British Film Institute, there's nothing about Connie Willis there. And I kind of hit this wall, really.

So, I made a few inquiries, asked at the British Film Institute and found somebody called Dave Sharp, who was the head librarian at the time. And he got back to be in about a month's time, and he was really, really excited. So, he said, “Oh, there are a few records, there are a few boxes. In fact, there are thousands of records. There are 67,000 trade union records relating to film and television production in this country.”

My next reaction was to be completely overwhelmed. So, we go from having one postcard to having 67,000 records. That's a lot of records. But it didn't take as long to work out that the collection was complete from the thirties through to the late 1980s. And in fact, about 25% of those records were women.

So first of all, we had, you know, some kind of indication of what the scale of women's involvement in film production was. I then set about putting together a research team. So we got some funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and we started on what was a four-year project to catalog, sort, organise, curate, digitise and archive these records.

And so, we found out lots and lots of interesting things through these records. So, these records told us people's names. They told us where they lived. They told us what production company they worked for, and they told us how much they were paid as well. We could really test this assumption that men and women were paid equal pay for equal work. So we had an example of somebody joining an animation studio, a woman, who joined one week and was paid a certain amount and a man who joined the following week and was paid £5 a week more than the woman. And here was black and white evidence of disparity for what was exactly the same job.

So, we learned a lot from the 67,000 records, but it also generated a lot more questions that we couldn't answer. So, in order to answer that, we had to go to the people involved in it. So, we put some advertisements in the trade press, basically asking, “were you a woman who worked in film and television production in the 50s and 60s? Would you like to come forward and be interviewed?" And so, they did.

So, we got lots of women who came forward who'd worked for the BBC, they’d worked for ITV, they’d worked for Pinewood Studios, they’d worked for Elstree Studios, that worked with they’d worked for people like Alfred Hitchcock and many other big director names. And they told us what they did. They told us who they worked with. They told us what the job meant to them. They told us about the kind of various campaigns they'd run for things like equal pay, grade parity. What they did when they had children. So, what did they do in terms of childcare? How did they manage that? And that's the kind of issue that's still very relevant today, I think.

So, we learned about women like Linda Devetta, and she's a makeup artist. One of the peculiarities of the film industry is that makeup was dominated by men. So, women didn't do makeup. Women did makeup in the television industry, but they didn't do it in film. So, actually, Linda Devetta was a pioneer. She was one of the first women to break through as a makeup artist on feature film production. And we also learned about, well, what does that job involve? Well, it means you have to have technical skills. You need to know how to work with prosthetics, with latex, with modelling tools. You also need really good interpersonal skills because you're working at close proximity with the actor.

So, what did we learn from this project and why does it matter? It really gave us evidence, real solid, concrete evidence, for the first time and in detail about how women made British cinema. They weren't marginal to it or peripheral. They were absolutely central to it. And it actually gave us a model, I think, more broadly for thinking about work that is inclusive, diversive, and can be extended beyond film production.