When the pictures began to talk, women were asked to leave. It’s long been recognized that the coming of sound (beginning in 1927) resulted in diminished opportunities for women in the film industry. In early days women directors, writers and producers were surprisingly common, but their numbers declined in the 1920s and by 1930 they became rare.
But as Melanie Bell is pleased to remind us, women didn’t stop working behind the camera but continued in significant number “below the line.” Her book, Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema, focuses on the U.K. industry from the 1930s through the ‘80s and documents the thousands of women who labored as “‘continuity girls,’ production secretaries, negative cutters, editors, costume designers, wardrobe assistants, makeup artists, publicists, sound wave operators, researchers, librarians, paint and tracers, in-betweens, foley artists, animation artists, matte painters and, very occasionally, as directors, producers, and writers.”
And that doesn’t exhaust the list.
“Below the line” was defined as crew without managerial authority or significant creative input, employed at wages set by their union, Britain’s Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT). Many of them received low wages because their jobs were afforded low status in the glamorous industry of cinema. Bell cites examples of the reigning sexism: “This systematic downgrading of women’s skills” is reflected in the ACT journal, “which rarely featured examples of women’s work and, when it did, described it in pejorative terms.”
Along with extensive research into the underacknowledged contributions of women to British movie production, Bell makes a larger argument about how movies are made. Film is collaborative. “As teams worked together to a collective end, they were participants in a process that had a number of interlocking, codependent elements.” The auteur’s vision is “realized by a team” and the technical aspects can also be creative.
Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema is published by the University of Illinois Press.
