The University of East Anglia (UEA) explores the current scale and scope of the holdings of women’s amateur filmmaking within the regional and national film archives in their report, ‘Invisible Innovators: Making Women Filmmakers Visible across the UK’s Film Archives’
Commissioned by Film Archives UK (FAUK) the report investigates ways of optimising the visibility of Women Amateur Filmmakers, and follows on from an initial project in 2015, ‘Women’s Amateur Film’ when UEA worked in association with FAUK member, the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) highlighting the role of women’s international filmmaking.
The success of that initial project led to Film Archives UK commissioning the British Women Amateur Filmmakers Project team to undertake the nationwide archive mapping exercise of women’s amateur filmmaking that informs this report.
Surveying content from FAUK member archives – East Anglian Film Archive, Screen Archive South East, North West Film Archive, Lincolnshire Film Archive, The National Screen & Sound Archive of Wales, The National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive representing holdings right across the UK , the report champions the important work already done by film and media archives and historians and provides data for Film Archives UK, and the individual archives, to help raise the profile of some of the women filmmakers and to make them and their rich, fascinating work visible again.
Making Women Amateur Filmmakers Visible: Reclaiming women’s work through the film archive – the first publication by the team behind the ‘Women Amateur Filmmakers in Britain’ project – is available to read with open access online. It is co-authored by Professor Keith Johnston and Dr Sarah Hill, and published in Women’s History Review journal.