ABSTRACT
The term ‘British women’s picture’ contains a range of issues which we need to unpick. It would be possible to discuss films made by women, for women or about women. In the first, the issue of female agency needs to be interrogated: the contributions made by women in different areas; art direction, costume design, scriptwriting and so on. I began this task in the second half of Women in British Cinema (2000), in which it became clear that female autonomy was determined by the managerial structures of the industry. Films such as A Taste of Honey (1961) and Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1986) were dominated by the ideas of their female writers, who had managed to find a voice in the production process. It was easier for women to develop their creativity in some periods than in others. In the 1950s, for example, it was possible for Muriel Box and Wendy Toye to develop directorial careers. With Box, it was family connections, combined with her own facility with the dominant realist mode, which advanced her career. With Toye, it was the cumbersome structure of the Rank organisation, plus the 1950s industry’s preference for comedy, a genre in which she excelled. Another period in which female directors flourished was in the alternative cinema of the 1970s. Exasperated by what they saw as the venal mainstream industry, avant-garde directors such as Ariel Levy, Sally Potter, Annabel Nicholson and Laura Mulvey operated in a relatively unfettered manner, and produced explicitly feminist films. It would be feasible to construct a narrative about films by women, but it would
need to be scrupulously related to mainstream production and also to cultural and social developments. The danger of such a project is that it might lead us into an uncritical feminist approach, in which the mainstream industry is presented as a conspiracy against hapless females. I am chary of such an approach for two reasons: first because it encourages a victim-mentality among female artists and critics, and second, because it simplifies the inner workings of patriarchy. That is always intellectually fatal. Patriarchy, like all systems of social control, manifests (indeed requires) powerful images of the social groups over which it holds sway. In order to function properly, it also needs texts which show the pleasures of the losers as well as the winners in its system. What about our second category – films for women? This can be a helpful
way of analysing patterns in British cinema, as long as it is carefully historicised. ‘Woman’s film’ needs to be understood as an industrial category – that is to
say, a category devised by studios for a target female audience. Evidence of this type of targeting can be found in the advice to cinema managers in the trade journals, about how to select specific films. Films were frequently categorised according to the class likely to respond positively to the film. Thunder Rock (1943), for example, was presented as high-brow fare for the better halls: ‘such fantasy is not for the hoi-polloi’ (Today’s Cinema, 18 September 1942). Trade journals also emphasised the gender of the target audience: Clara Dean (1932) was recommended as ‘good programme booking, particularly for the masses with strong feminine and emotional appeal’ (Kinematograph Weekly 26 May 1932). Trade advice about target audiences is plentiful until the early 1960s, but disappears thereafter. The second source of evidence about target audiences is the publicity material provided by studios, which gives clues about how the films were intended to function. The producers of Gainsborough costume melodrama were quite clear about the ideal viewers for their films. Publicity material on Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944) suggest that it be sold through the headline ‘Split-Mind Disorder Gives Idea For Year’s Finest Romance!’ They urged that this would appeal to ‘curiosity, that great feminine characteristic. Trade on this!’ (Press books for Madonna held in BFI Library.) Similar material on Caravan (1946) and The Wicked Lady (1945) indicates that producers were more interested in the profit women could generate than in the textual pleasure they might experience. What is notable about British cinema is that the market category of woman’s
film was relatively short-lived. As a discrete cultural form, it spread from the 1930s to the late 1950s. What took its place in the market was the ‘family film’, which foregrounded children and wholesome values, and which was an important aspect of provision throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Partly because of this emphasis on generational rather than gender distinctions, ‘woman’s film’ was not an industrial category in Britain during the 1960s. This was for two reasons. First, audience demographics had changed, and second (and probably as a consequence of that), studios were no longer producing films predicated on a female perspective. Of course, in working with the notion of films for women, the question of the gendered nature of taste must also be addressed. It is clear from work that has been done on female film taste in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s (Kuhn 2002; James 2009; Glancy 2009; Harper and Porter 2003) that female viewers in all three decades used films for far different purposes than their male counterparts. But after that, there is a paucity of evidence about film taste in general, but particularly about female film taste. This may be because fewer films were specifically aimed at female audiences, or possibly because evidence of their taste has been lost, or not thought valuable enough to keep. The third category, and the one to which I want to devote the remainder of this
chapter, is films about women. By this I mean films which are preoccupied by women’s role, by their feelings (whether socially convenient or not), their appearance and their symbolic function. These films are neither celebratory of, nor admonitory towards, the gender group on which they focus. That is not to say that they are neutral: rather, one of their social functions is to draw a line between the sacred and the profane, for a particular (often narrow) historical period.
