The Continuity Girl: Ice in the Middle of Fire

Williams, Melanie

doi:10.3366/jbctv.2013.0160

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…While this might not be an unexpected finding given the patriarchal culture of the 1950s, it is also noteworthy that on the special committee designated to deal with training issues, two of the seven members were women: documentarian Mary Field and film editor Helga Cranston. This confirms, as has been argued elsewhere by feminist media historians (Ball and Bell, 2013;Bell, 2017;Williams, 2013Williams, , 2016; Wallace, Harrison and Brunsdon, 2017), that it was clearly the case that there were some women working as film and television technicians; however, they were not actively encouraged to enter and participate in the industry to the same extent as their male counterparts.…”

Section: Training Scheme Issues: Access and Opportunitysupporting

confidence: 78%

“…More recently, the state-industry discourse has been challenged by a new scholarly focus on the historical role of workers within the British media industries, some of which cuts across both film and television (Ball and Bell, 2013;Bell, 2017;Williams, 2013Williams, , 2016 Wallace, Harrison and Brunsdon, 2017). Feminist media historians have led the way in this research, motivated by the aim of making visible the hitherto unrecognised labour of women working within the media industries.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Invisible Institution? Reconstructing the History of BAFTA and the 1958 Merger of the British Film Academy with the Guild of Television Producers and Directors

Pett¹,

Warner²

2020

Journal of British Cinema and Television

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As a cultural institution of national and global significance, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) is notably absent from existing scholarship on the media industries. More importantly, BAFTA's role as an independent arts charity set up by the industry to support and develop new talent is often overlooked. Instead, references to BAFTA made by media and film scholars most frequently take the form of footnotes or digressions that detail particular awards or nominations. Drawing on a range of archival sources, including BAFTA's own records, we address this significant omission within existing scholarship on the British cultural and creative industries. In particular, we examine the period 1947–68, focusing on the 1958 merger of the British Film Academy with the Guild of Television Producers and Directors to form a new institution, known as the Society of Film and Television Arts (SFTA, later renamed BAFTA). This was achieved despite the well-documented tensions existing between the two industries throughout the period, which we identify and analyse within this historical context. We argue that a crucial factor driving the 1958 merger was the desire to develop quality training schemes across both industries. This, in turn, was partly enabled by an egalitarian turn in post-war British society towards the development of greater social equality and mobility. In reconstructing these events, we therefore interrogate and reassess the role played by this key national institution on the development of the creative and cultural industries, offering an expansion and revision of scholarship on media histories of post-war Britain.

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Section: Training Scheme Issues: Access and Opportunitysupporting

confidence: 78%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Invisible Institution? Reconstructing the History of BAFTA and the 1958 Merger of the British Film Academy with the Guild of Television Producers and Directors

Pett¹,

Warner²

2020

Journal of British Cinema and Television

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Taking the British film industry as example, by the 1930s its well-established infrastructure of studios, production companies, laboratories, distributors, and cinema chains employed several thousand specialist cine-workers. Melanie Williams (2013) has used nontraditional sources such as personal letters and memoirs to illustrate how women could exercise considerable agency through their role as continuity "girls," influencing the director's decisions and deputizing for him on the studio floor. Melanie Bell (in press) has used oral interviews to bring women's voices into film history, building a detailed picture of female-dominated occupations such as production secretary, and of women's high-level skills in logistics, problem-solving, and diplomacy.…”

Section: Women's Film Work "Below-the-line" In the United States And Britain 1930-1970mentioning

confidence: 99%

Researching Women's Film History

Bell¹,

Cobb²,

Gledhill³

et al. 2020

The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication

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While 1970s/1980s feminist film theory questioned the representability of women within a male-dominated industry, renewed interest in early film history revealed unexpected numbers of women film makers. The international Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), an ever-growing database housed at Columbia University, New York, documents research into the pioneering work of women in cinema's first crucial decades as it became a mass and transnational medium. A surge of monographs has followed, focusing on women's diverse careers, the gendering of film studio organization and practices, and the cultural impacts of female audiences, campaigners, journalists, and critics. These discoveries are emerging in festival and film theater programming, film education, and local cultural activity. In Britain, the Women's Film & Television History Network-UK/Ireland, encourages research across the barriers between silence and sound, cinema and television. In what follows, the Network records key issues and figures emerging from the project of women's film history.Feminist theory's encounter with film history questions the gendered assumptions that determine historical methods and what counts historically. Following Gertrude Stein, Jane Gaines (2018) asks: How does the historian know? The term "history" is ambiguous, referring both to what happened and its narrativization as "story." Where we look for evidence and how it is interpreted depends on the questions asked, underlying gendered expectations, and the conventions of narrative construction. Historical knowledge is provisional: new questions emerge; new discoveries are made that contradict or alter the known. So, asked Shelley Stamp at the 2018 Doing Women's Film and

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Digitally Preserving Potter

Atkinson¹

2016

Feminist Media Histories

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The Continuity Girl: Ice in the Middle of Fire

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

The Invisible Institution? Reconstructing the History of BAFTA and the 1958 Merger of the British Film Academy with the Guild of Television Producers and Directors

The Invisible Institution? Reconstructing the History of BAFTA and the 1958 Merger of the British Film Academy with the Guild of Television Producers and Directors

Researching Women's Film History

Digitally Preserving Potter

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