Bringing Women into Focus in Film & Media Archives

By Sarah Arnold (Maynooth University) and Keith M. Johnston (University of East Anglia)

In 1933, the Derby & District Cine Society made their first short amateur film, a 9.5mm chase comedy called A Run for Her Money. A report on the club in the April 1934 issue of Home Movies and Home Talkies noted how a recent story competition had led to the choice of this first project before detailing the main crew: Mr H.S. Cooke (scenario writer, camera, co-director), Mr Dobson (director), Mr Harrison (assistant cameraman), and Mr P.A. Bower (titles). The most intriguing note was that the original idea for A Run for Her Money came from Mrs H.S. Cooke. Apart from the club’s secretary (Miss P.L. Smallwood) this was the only indication of a woman playing a creative role in the film, or the club.

Film still from Run for her Money, courtesy of East Anglian Film Archive

Given a scant amount of related information (the film won an award from the Insititute of Amateur Cinematographers), we were left with questions: did Mrs H.S Cooke play any further creative role in the film’s production? Given her husband appeared to be closely involved in the film, did she take on any other responsibilities? Is there any way to confirm her full name, rather than referring to her as an adjunct of her husband? And was she the only woman in this club, or simply the only one to be referred to directly?

Such questions are faced by almost all historical researchers when approaching amateur filmmaking, an area which had tended to be undervalued within film history. The project builds on feminist work in film, media and archive studies, not least Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight’s crucial collection Doing Women’s Film History; we hope our work helps to develop and expand their observation (which has relevance to the Derby example above) that “many women have left few historical traces, their roles in production or film culture obscured by more publicly visible or self-promotional male partners or concealed behind collective or collaborative practices’ (Gledhill and Knight 2015: 4). Our expansion here is into the world of media archives, with a particular focus on how that lack of historical traces has led to an under-reporting of women in historical documents is mirrored in archive practice: how archives choose what collections to add; what is prioritised within curatorial techniques; and whether the voices of male filmmakers, club members or archive donors have reinforced a patriarchal understanding of amateur filmmaking within the archives.

Our project, Women in Focus: Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata and Cataloguing, aimed to create feminist-informed methods and tools that could support audiovisual archives in making the contributions of women to amateur film works more visible and searchable. Our team of academics and archivists all had an interest in women’s creative work and labour but recognised that there were multiple intersecting undervaluings of women’s creative and film work. In order to identify the biases and omissions that make the work of women filmmakers like Mrs H.S. Cooke so difficult to access and research, we developed an open-access toolkit to enhance metadata schemas and tackle this ongoing marginalisation. The project had at its core a feminist ethics of care through which is recognised that archival work is often women’s work and that any tools and methods that developed should be cognisant of the laboriousness of archival work. The project was concerned, therefore, with the value of labour both of archivists and of the filmmakers whose work was ‘hard to reach’ in archives.

The toolkit that emerged from this project, Women in Focus: A Toolkit for Archiving Women’s Amateur Film, details five tools that respond to the research we undertook on archive practice and holdings. Below we consider each tool in turn, with a reflection on how that tool could help us reveal more about Mrs H.S. Cooke:

Tool 1: Acquisitions Questionnaire

It became very clear to the project team that amateur films often come to archives without typical film metadata like titles or production credits, which makes it difficult to locate women’s participation at later stages. A questionnaire is a key tool to gain as much knowledge at the earliest stage of the accession process. Getting rich data at this stage can reduce labour and feed directly into future metadata; while retaining a detailed questionnaire can also be useful for future users or researchers.

In the case of Derby & District Cine Society, there was little extant donor information as the film had been deposited at the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) as part of the larger Institute of Amateur Cinematographers Film Library collection.

Tool 2 – Expanded Film Viewing and Inspection

This tool acknowledges that archives tend to have a dearth of primary information on the women who made and were involved in the making of amateur films. As this results in a lack of recognition of women’s amateur film titles, filmmaking style, or their contributions across a range of collaborative productions, we felt it was important to capture as much data as possible from the films and any supporting ephemera (film cans, notes, donor information). This can also lead to a better understanding of the stylistic content of women’s films, or the craft skills on display.

Viewing A Run for Her Money immediately expanded the data available on Mrs H.S Cooke and other members of the cine society. We confirmed her full name (Audrey Cooke) and credit (“Story by…”), while revealing roles that other women had played in this club production as either crew, e.g. Hilda Robinson (“Continuity”) or cast: Alvina Peach (“Mrs Smith”), Phyllis Wheen (“The Maid”).

The viewing also offered additional contextual information that could feed into tool 5: the Derby & District Cine Society had changed its name to CSD / The Cine Society of Derby by the time of the film’s release; with new or additional information on male cast and crew names, demonstrating changes since the Home Movies and Home Talkies article. Crew: Joseph E. Dobson (“Production Manager”), Philip A. Bowler & Bernard Harrison (“Photographed by”), Hugh S. Cooke (“Directed by”). Cast: Alex Hoard (“Mr Smith”), Tony Clarke (“The Thief”), Chas G. Lanaway (“The Policeman”)

Film still from Run for her Money, courtesy of East Anglian Film Archive

Tool 5 – Using Other Research Resources

Skipping ahead to the fifth tool, this notes the limited information about women filmmakers that is held within and beyond the archive (often limited to a name and associated film titles). This tool, given our care-based awareness that archives are time-poor, identified a series of ways that archives could quickly check for additional information.

Considering Audrey Cooke, we were now able to find additional references to her work within amateur film: most noticeably her story contribution to another 1934 film shot in and around Derby, Horatio Spinks Detective, a film traditionally associated with its male director H.A.V. Bulleid (a well-known figure within the 1930s amateur film world).

Tool 3: Agent / Authority Records

Agent records are a standard aspect of archive records around professional and commercial filmmakers but are not always applied to amateur filmmakers. Developing such ‘person’ records – either within the archive’s own Collections Management System (CMS) or via an external partner organisation such as the Amateur Movie Database (AMDB) – allows for important biographical data, contributors, and a list of associated film titles.

With additional information available on Audrey Cooke (from Tools 2 and 5) we could now begin to create a basic agent record covering the films she had written and her interaction with key members of the cine society. We could also create an agent record for CSD itself, including the twelve people directly associated with simply this one film.

Tool 4: Metadata and Controlled Vocabulary

Traditional metadata standards are, quite simply, not sufficient to capture those women filmmakers who work in non-traditional or varied roles within filmmaking. Relying on existing metadata fields may lead to misattribution and not be expansive enough to reflect amateur practices. Simple steps here can make significant changes: use broader terms for multi-author collections (to reflect multiple contributors, such as in a family), introduce keywords (such as ‘women filmmakers’), adopt the title ’creator’ (rather than director or producer), and utilise broader subject headings (beyond, say, ‘home movie’).

Here, the ability to credit ‘Audrey Cooke’ rather than ‘Mrs H.S. Cooke’ is a significant step: albeit one that recurs through amateur film trade press where the use of patriarchal married names dominated the data (our project found hundreds of cases where a woman’s creative contribution was hidden behind the equivalent of metadata listing simply “Mrs A. & B. Smith”). Given we could demonstrate that Audrey’s writing credits extended beyond this one film the adoption of terms such as “woman filmmaker” or “creator” would be entirely appropriate to apply.