Doing Women’s Film and TV History conference 5, Histories of Women in Film and Television: Then and Now – Maynooth University, 10-11 July [Zoom]
The many lives of ‘Jill Craigie’: socialist, feminist, film-maker, writer and ‘media personality’
The project team will be presenting their collaborative research on Craigie’s career exploring what it reveals about the obstacles and opportunities experienced by women in the film and TV industries and how her work and life questions dominant conceptions of British documentary history. Craigie was one of the most visible women directors in the 1940s, partly because her two key war-time films, Out Of Chaos and The Way We Live, were funded and publicised by Two Cities (a Rank subsidiary). However, the distribution and production of her work, as both writer and director, demonstrate sometimes, conflicting aspirations to represent socialist and feminist ideas, engage communities in her film-making and secure commercial interest.
- Narrative voices: representing the career and life of Jill Craigie in a documentary biopic – Lizzie Thynne (University of Sussex)
- “TV seems to steal all the news from film these days”: Jill Craigie and the BBC – Hollie Price (University of Sussex)
- The (im)possibility of a ‘people’s film’?: Craigie’s visions in The Way We Live – Sadie Wearing (LSE)
**There will also be a roundtable discussion of the project documentary Independent Miss Craigie (dir. Lizzie Thynne, 2020) on 11 July**
Image courtesy of the Cinema Museum