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Film Criticism as ‘Women's Work’: the Gendered Economy of Film Criticism in Britain, 1945–65

2011; Routledge; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439685.2011.572605

1465-3451

Melanie Bell,

Irish and British Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements This research was enabled by a grant awarded from the Arts and Humanities Research Council under its Research Leave Scheme (2008/9) and I gratefully acknowledge their support of the project. I am also grateful to the staff at the British Film Institute, the BBC Written Archives, Caversham, The Jerwood Library of Performing Arts, Greenwich, the National Library of New Zealand, The Critics’ Circle and the Society of Women Writers and Journalists for their assistance with my research. Notes 1. Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, second edn (Oxford, 2003), 493. 2. Commentators typically draw a distinction between ‘criticism’ and ‘reviews’. Shorter review pieces are written for audiences that have yet to see the film whilst longer pieces of criticism typically come out after the viewing event and may reflect not only on a specific film but on its place in a director's oeuvre or film culture more widely. See Meaghan Morris, The Pirate's Fiancée: feminism, reading, postmodernism (London, 1988), 117–118. Most critics write both criticism and reviews and for the purposes of this article, I’ll use ‘criticism’ as a generic category to cover all commentary about film taking place in the public domain. 3. A classic example of scholarly advances in ‘discursive surround’ is Barbara Klinger's Melodrama and Meaning: history, culture and the films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington, Indiana, 1994). For recent developments in audience studies using oral history, see Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: cinema and cultural memory (London, 2002). 4. Adopting this model of authorship for histories of film critics is supported through the continued circulation of anthologies of their criticism and reviews, particularly critics like Anderson but also Jean-Luc Goddard and François Truffaut, as their later success as directors (and the dominance of the auteur theory in film studies) has ensured a continued market for their criticism. 5. Haidee Wasson, The woman film critic: newspapers, cinema and Iris Barry, Film History, 18 (2006), 154–162. 6. Antonia Lant (ed. with Ingrid Periz), Red Velvet Seat: women's writing on the first fifty years of cinema (New York, 2006), 379. Following Lant, Laura Marcus discusses the writing of women film critics in the 1920s and the role played by Iris Barry and C. A. Lejeune in the early years of British film criticism, see Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse, Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford, 2007), 275–318. 7. Christine Gledhill, Trans-nationalising Women's Film History: Report on Women's Film History Network—UK/Ireland, Workshop 2, available at http://wfh.wikidot.com/ 8. Irit Rogoff cited in Kay Armatage, The Girl from God's Country: Nell Shipman and the silent cinema (Toronto, Canada, 2003), 13. 9. Lauren Rabinovitz, The future of feminism and film history, Camera Obscura, 61: 21 (1) (2006), 61. 10. For a discussion of methodology see Jennifer M. Bean, Introduction: Towards a feminist historiography of early cinema, in: Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (eds) A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham, NC), 1–26. For a discussion of researching film industry personnel see Monica Dell’Asta, On Frieda Klug, Pearl White and Other Traveling Women Film Pioneers, workshop paper delivered at Workshop 2 for the Women's Film History Network—UK/Ireland, and available at http://wfh.wikidot.com/ 11. Dell’Asta, On Frieda Klug. 12. Diana Negra, Introduction: Female stardom and early film history, Camera Obscura 48: 16 (3) (2001), 1. 13. Women's activity in the silent period is better understood, with activity clustering around the Women and Silent British Cinema website (http://womenandsilentbritishcinema.wordpress.com/) and the ‘Women’ strands at the annual British Silent Film Festival. The work currently being undertaken by the Women's Film History Network—UK/Ireland is encouraging and promises to make a significant contribution to knowledge beyond the period of early cinema. 14. Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema: mad, bad and dangerous to know (London, 2000). 15. Harper, Women in British Cinema, 5. 16. This is an indicative list and by no means comprehensive. It includes the names of women who wrote film criticism/reviews for one or more publications on a semi-regular basis (Elizabeth Forrest for example), to those whose criticism I have yet to read (Ruth Kessler for example) but were listed as registered members of the Critics’ Circle. Other women writers who made a significant contribution to film history at this time include Rachel Low, whose first three volumes of her seven-volume History of British Film, 1896–1939 (London) were published between 1948 and 1950. As the project focuses on the post-war period, it excludes women critics from the inter-war years including Maud Hughes (The Picture Show), Iris Barry, Elsie Cohen and Marjorie Williams who both wrote for Kinematograph Weekly in 1914–1919 and 1926, respectively (with Cohen working her way up to Associate Editor), Evelyn Bagge (News of the World, 1932), Edna Barnes (Daily Sketch, 1935), and C. A. Lejeune's career, which started with The Manchester Guardian in 1926. The Women and Silent British Cinema website is a useful resource for researching these women. 17. In this respect, I acknowledge Lant's approach to compiling her anthology of film criticism which she described as ‘a tale of systematicity and randomness’, Red Velvet Seat, 27. For my study, copies of publications like Films and Filming were checked at irregular intervals between 1950 and 1958, whilst an entire run of Picture Post from 1950–1958 was searched. 18. Material of this type is readily available in the paper archives in Britain; in the library and Special Collections of the British Film Institute (hereafter BFI) and in the newspaper archive at the British Library, Caversham (hereafter BLC). 19. Particularly noteworthy publications were Lant, Red Velvet Seat; John Ellis, Art, culture and quality, terms for a cinema in the forties and seventies, Screen 19(3) (1978), 9–49; James Chapman and Christine Geraghty (eds), British film culture and criticism, Journal of Popular British Cinema 4 (2001). The ‘General Introduction’ to Lant's anthology was particularly useful for thinking about materials and methods, as were discussions with Sue Harper. The C A Lejeune Film Reader (Manchester, 1991) includes some small personal commentary on her career whilst Catherine de la Roche's autobiography Performance (New Zealand, 1988) is a comprehensive overview of her career as a film critic from the 1920s to the 1980s. Isabel Quigly reflects on her career in Being a film reviewer in the 1950s, in Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard (eds) British Cinema of the 1950s: a celebration (Manchester, 2003) and elaborated on this in an interview with myself in September 2009. Some tantalising suggestions could never be traced. In correspondence with the BBC Talks Department, Catherine de la Roche advised them to check her professional credentials through reference to her curriculum vita held by the ‘British Margarine Company’ (BBC WAC, Catherine Cameron File 1, 1941–1949, letter from de la Roche to Bell, 19 February 1948). The company was instituted by the British government to promote consumer uptake of margarine, but why they should hold the CV of a film critic, and whether she had done any work for them, remains unknown. 20. Founded in 1894 as a society for professional women writers, membership of the SWWJ was open to ‘women engaged as professional workers in literature, journalism and related spheres’ (see their website at http://www.swwj.co.uk/levels.htm). Some women film critics almost certainly were members; Monica Ewer, a successful novelist, scriptwriter and occasional film and drama critic for the Daily and Sunday Herald was Chairman of the Society in the late 1950s, but the Society's archival holdings are incomplete with a great deal of material either burned, flood-damaged or destroyed during the Second World War (personal correspondence between the author and SWWJ member, Sylvia Kent). 21. See Peter Cargin, A Brief History of the Circle (2009) at the Circle's website, http://criticscircle.org.uk/history/. The Circle's archive is held within the Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection at the Jerwood Library of Performing Arts, Greenwich (hereafter JLPA). The archive has been poorly curated and the material held contains many gaps; correspondence and letters pertaining to the 1950s period for example are especially sparse. 22. By 1976, membership numbers stood at over 100 and it was the largest of the Circle's three divisions. 23. The Circle was active in raising funds to support the slander and libel action brought by the film critic E. Arnot Robertson against MGM in 1948. It also intervened in the 1969 spat between The Spectator's drama critic Hilary Spurling and Lindsay Anderson, then artistic director at the Royal Court Theatre, who attempted to ban Spurling from the theatre because he objected to her reviews of his work. Details of this and other cases are held not only in the Archives’ personal correspondence but are more readily accessible through The Critics Circular’, the association's quarterly publication, copies of which are held in the British Library. Less public but no less interesting are the Circle's support of retired critics through its benevolent fund. Elspeth Grant and Freda Bruce Lockhart had forged successful careers as film critics but by the end of their professional lives their financial situations was sufficiently unstable that both women approached The Circle's benevolent fund for a loan (later translated into a ‘non-repayable grant’). Lockhart received £50 in 1968 (for ‘essential repairs’ to her house), Grant £75 in 1971 (to cover ‘rent arrears’), an equivalent value of approximately £700 in 2010 (JLPA, letter from Lockhart to Betts, October 1971; letter from Grant to Betts, July 1975). The payments stand as a reminder of the precarious position of freelance workers, without access to professional pensions. 24. ‘Bal’., Ballet critic; ‘B’., Broadcasting critic; ‘D’., Drama critic; ‘F’., Film critic; ‘M’., Music critic. 25. JLPA, The Critics’ Circle membership booklets for 1945, 1950, 1955, 1960, 1965, 1970 and 1975. 26. In the USA, representation was even higher with one 1943 survey estimating that 75% of the 100+ fan magazine writers of the day were female (Lant, Red Velvet Seat, 380). This data needs to be interpreted with care, however, as writing for fan magazines was notably different to writing for ‘quality’ newspapers or trade journals. Few women writers wrote for Variety for example (Lant, Red Velvet Seat, 775), a situation duplicated in Britain where Elsie Cohen and Marjory Williams were notable exceptions to Kinematograph Weekly's stable of resident male critics in the inter-war period. 27. Anne Ross Muir, A Women's Guide to Jobs in Film and Television (London, 1987), 2. The ACTT (Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians) was the trade union for the British film industry. The ACT (Association of Cine-Technicians) was created in June 1933 and became ACTT in 1956, after the introduction of commercial television (http://www.bectu.org.uk/about/bectu-history). 28. Harper, Women in British Cinema, 158. 29. Masters, BECTU interview no. 362, transcription held at the BFI. Her career progressed no further than production manager on children's films in the 1960s and 1970s. 30. The ACTT became BECTU, the Media and Entertainment Union in 1991. The BECTU History project is a series of oral history recordings made with practitioners from theatre, film, radio and television. See http://www.bectu.org.uk/home for further details. 31. Christophe Dupin, The postwar transformation of the British Film Institute and its impact on the development of a national film culture in Britain, Screen, 47(4) (2006), 446. 32. Lant, Red Velvet Seat, 380–381. 33. Marcus, The Tenth Muse, 237. 34. Christopher Cook (ed.), The Dilys Powell Film Reader (Oxford, 1991), ix. 35. Britain's post-war welfare state was predicated on the ‘traditional model’ of the family with a male breadwinner and female homemaker, with women receiving a lower rate of benefit to men. Despite the ideological rhetoric of domesticity women continued to work outside the home, which gave rise to much discussion about women's ‘dual role’. See Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise: women in postwar Britain 1945–1968 (London, 1980) for a full discussion. 36. Melanie Selfe, conference paper delivered at the Screen Studies Conference, University of Glasgow, July 2010. I’m grateful to Dr Selfe for a full transcript of her paper. 37. Respectively, BBC WAC, Catherine Cameron File 2 1950–1962, memo from Keen to Quigly (editor of Woman's Hour), 14 July 1952; de la Roche, Performance, 46. 38. BBC WAC 04/HT/PNF, letter from French to Lockhart, 12 March 1963. French claimed that his changes to The Critics involved ‘a general hardening of its character and the introduction of many new critics’ and that he did not consider she ‘would fit in with the nature of the programme as it is now emerging’. This ‘general hardening’ was part of the wider shift towards a more masculine film culture in the 1960s, which was less hospitable to women as critics. 39. The film section of Woman's Hour, entitled ‘At the Cinema’, lasted for approximately five minutes earning the critic a fee of roughly £5. Factoring in script research, writing and revision time, plus travel into Central London for the broadcast, a reasonable estimate is £5 for one day's work. This was generous compared to other women's wages in the film industry, although of course the freelance critic couldn’t guarantee this income for every day. The editor Noreen Ackland for example earned £8 per week in 1946 for a 10-hour day, five days per week, and Julie Harris earned a comparable amount as a costume assistant at Gainsborough (respectively, BFI BECTU interview number 327; BFI BECTU interview number 487). The continuity girl was the poorest paid. Elaine Schreyeck, working at Ealing studios, started on £2 per week in 1942, rising to £6 by 1946, a wage she supplemented by doing freelance secretarial work for the comic Tommy Trinder (BFI BECTU interview number 38). 40. Powell, The Dilys Powell Film Reader, xi; Quigly, Being a film reviewer in the 1950s, 215. 41. For a fuller discussion of the dual address of Robertson's style of film criticism, see Melanie Bell, ‘Quality’, cinema and the ‘superior woman’ persona: understanding women's film criticism in post-war Britain, Women's History Review, 19(5) (2010), 703–709. 42. To-Day's Cinema, 18 July 1947, 18. 43. The Cinema, 16 July, 1947. 44. Powell, The Dilys Powell Film Reader, 422, article dated January 1961. 45. Ibid. Oxford Opinion was Oxford University's undergraduate magazine, with the editor of its film section Ian Cameron declaring in his first editorial in 1959 ‘Film criticism in Britain is dead. Perhaps it was never alive …’, cited in Charles Barr, Ian Cameron obituary, The Guardian, 14 March 2010. 46. In the pages of his influential film journal Sequence Lindsay Anderson included sketches of C. A. Lejeune, which he derisively entitled ‘Chestnuts’, a sarcastic reference to the 1948 anthology of her reviews entitled Chestnuts in her Lap. I’m grateful to Melanie Selfe for this observation. 47. JLPA, The Critics’ Circle, membership booklet, 1975. Although the numbers of women critics were consistent throughout the 1960s a shift in demographics was taking place. The pool of women film critics included a number of the old guard like Freda Bruce Lockhart and Elspeth Grant who were effectively retired and had no cultural clout, whilst the pool of men was swelled with an intake of new critics such as Philip French who held high-profile posts at The Times and the BBC. The consistent figures mask the fact that a shift in gendered power dynamics was underway. 48. Bean, Introduction: Toward a feminist historiography of early cinema, 2. 49. Banks-Smith was initially a reporter for the Daily Herald and Daily Express between 1955 and 1965, then television reviewer for The Sun before joining The Guardian in 1969 for whom she still writes. See Our Nancy, The Guardian, 4 February 2010, 4–8. 50. De la Roche, Performance, 16–17. 51. Ibid., 25–26. 52. I have discussed aspects of this work, particularly the Good Housekeeping articles, in Melanie Bell, Feminism and women's film criticism in post-war Britain, 1945–59, Feminist Media Studies 11(4) (2011). 53. She was married twice, first to Leo Van de Velde, second to the Scottish poet Norman Cameron, who died in 1953, Catherine de la Roche obituary, The Evening Post (New Zealand) 15 May 1997, 9. Material at the BFI, BBC WAC and the National Library of New Zealand (hereafter NLNZ) is held under her married name of ‘Catherine Cameron’, although she never published under this name. 54. The material is held in the Alexander Turnbull Library at the NLNZ with the records searchable via the library's ‘TAPUHI’ database. 55. See John Ellis, Art, Culture and Quality for a discussion of film criticism and how the terms of the ‘Quality’ debate were framed around discourses of ‘restraint’ and ‘sincerity’. 56. On the topic of ‘women's cinema’ see de la Roche's articles ‘The Mask of Realism’, Penguin Film Review 7 (September 1948), 35–43, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, Penguin Film Review, 8 (January 1949), 25–34 and my discussion of these and radio broadcasts on the topic in Melanie Bell, Femininity in the Frame: women and 1950s British popular cinema (London, 2010). 57. Catherine de la Roche, ‘Cannes’, Sight and Sound, January 1950, 24–25; ‘A Festival of Film People’, Woman's Hour, 24 April 1951. Microfiche broadcast script held at BBC WAC. De la Roche reported that ‘the vogue for pencil skirts and pleated skirts continues, but the jackets are longer, tightly waisted and often widely flared at the hips’. 58. Armatage, The Girl from God's Country, 25–26. 59. Ibid., 26. 60. Freelancers would send in speculative scripts in the hope these would be commissioned and generate income for them. One of de la Roche's proposals was for a programme on ‘women and film’, and I’ve discussed this and other proposals in more detail in Femininity in the Frame: women and 1950s British popular cinema (London, 2010). 61. She is mentioned in passing in Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: cinema and society in Britain, 1939–1949 (London, 1992), 99–101, and with rather more consideration in Antonia Lant, Blackout, Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princetown, NJ, 1991), 162–167. 62. Dupin, The postwar transformation of the British Film Institute, 443–451; Terry Bolas, Screen Education (Bristol, UK, 2009), 37–66. 63. De la Roche, Performance, 76. She delivered lectures in Norwich, Cardiff, Hull, Newcastle and many other cities in England and Wales. Details of these and others are held at NLNZ 97-224-01/20. 64. NLNZ 97-224-01/20, letter from Lindgren to de la Roche, 23 October 1950. 65. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, A Freudian Impression (Chicago, 1995), 17. 66. NLNZ 97-224-09/10, Catherine de la Roche lecture script ‘Women's Cinema’, dated 1948. BBC WAC, Catherine Cameron File 1, 1941–1949, letter from de la Roche to editor, ‘Mainly for Women’, 5 March 1949 detailing her recent educational activities with women's groups. 67. NLNZ 97-224-01/20, letter from Dorothy Russell, Secretary, Bucks Federation of Women's Institutes, to Catherine de la Roche, 13 June 1956. NLNZ 97-224-01/20, letter from Rosamonde Pribram, Secretary, Tyneside Film Society, Newcastle to Catherine de la Roche, 2 November 1956. Again, relative to the work of other women in the film industry, the BFI lectures were well-paid although there was no guarantee of a repeat booking. By comparison, the costume designer Julie Harris, who by the mid-1950s was extremely experienced in her profession, was earning at this point twenty-five pounds per week (BFI BECTU interview number 487). 68. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: the decline of deference (Oxford, 2003), 244. De la Roche makes a similar point in letters to the BBC stating that her lectures to women's organisations have demonstrated to her that ‘women are interested in the subject [of women's cinema] and like hearing about foreign pictures, even if they can't view them’. BBC WAC Catherine Cameron File 1, 1941–1949, letter from de la Roche to Elisabeth Rowley, Talks Department, 23 March 1949, suggesting a talk about the Italian actress Anna Magnani.