Labours of Love: the Feminist Work of Doing Women’s Film History, par Melanie Bell
Séance à 18h à l’Ecole nationale des chartes, 65 rue de Richelieu, 75002 Paris – Salle Delisle
Avec le soutien de l’Institut Universitaire de France
Pour la visio: écrire à recherche@chartes.psl.eu
Doing women’s film history demands persistence, hard work and a certain amount of bloody mindedness. Established explanatory frameworks are difficult to shift, evidencing women’s film labour is hard-won, and feminism falls in and out of favour with students, funders and institutions. Notwithstanding these challenges, I argue that doing women’s film history is a necessary, political act which has the power to radically transform our understanding of film cultures. In this talk I will summarise my major contribution to the field of film history, most notably centring labour history in the British film industry by reconceptualising work through a feminist lens. I discuss the materials, methods and processes I developed to write a radically new history of British cinema, one with women and their professions at its centre. I also reflect on the different forms of knowledge production needed to recompose the female film worker, and what a feminist reconceptualization of labour means for inclusive screen historiography. Ultimately, I argue for an understanding of women’s film history as both a feminist methodology and a way of being in the world, one that is essential to the wellbeing of the discipline and the academy.
Melanie Bell is a Professor of Film History in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds (UK). She has published widely on many aspects of women’s film history including studies of foley artists, film critics, costume designers and film stars. She works with oral histories, trade union labour records, photographs, and ephemera in her scholarship, and enjoy devising new methods for recovering and championing women’s work in historic film production. Her recent book Movie Workers: the Women Who Made British Cinema was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2020 and won awards for Best Monograph from the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) and the Theatre Library Association (US). She is currently leading a team researching the history of British costume design for the screen, entitled Film Costumes in Action: Design, Production and Performance Cultures in British Film, 1965-2015.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Myriam Juan (5 mars 2025). Séance du 13 mars 2025. Histoire culturelle du cinéma. Consulté le 15 juillet 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13f93