A Female Movie Pioneer Who Showed Britain ‘The Way We Live’

‘Jill Craigie: Film and Feminism in Postwar Britain’By Yvonne Tasker and Sadie Wearing University of Illinois Press, 232 pagesIf Jill Craigie had directed only “Out of Chaos” (1944) and “The Way We Live” (1946) she would have an honored place in the history of documentary for making one of the first films about modern art, featuring fascinating segments on Henry Moore and Stanley Spencer, and about the rebuilding of Plymouth, galvanized not only by city planners but a populace roused to express its desire for a more democratic nation.And yet Craigie has been written out of most histories of documentary film, as I realized when I began work on a biography of her more than a quarter of a century ago. At that time, shortly after her death, not even her colleagues in the film industry understood the significance of her esthetic and political program, which included a deep involvement in depicting the lives of women and their contributions to society. In order to teach Craigie’s work I had to self-publish my own book, “Documentary Film,” to sit beside the available books on the genre.So I have been waiting more than two decades for the arrival of another book that gives Craigie her due, and I’m not disappointed. Yvonne Tasker and Sadie Wearing have done an extraordinary job of showing how formidable a challenge Craigie had to mobilize a male-dominated and conservative film industry to take seriously the lives of women in postwar Britain and their role in bettering society.Craigie pioneered a form of participatory documentary, involving the artists and the communities in which she situated herself, listening to those she wanted to interview and portray on screen, writing her scripts that were informed by the way people actually spoke at home and in public meetings. She consulted and filmed experts but also made fun of them, showing how removed they could be from the daily lives of people.Rather than relying on government funding, which was slow to come or nonexistent, Craigie focused on British movie mogul, J. Arthur Rank, appealing to his Methodist mission to make films for the public good. Because he was a businessman, though, with a fiercely protective accountant, Craigie soon realized that after her first two films, she would have to form her own independent production company.The result was another groundbreaking film, “To Be A Woman,” (1951), a forceful feminist argument for equal pay for equal work. Craigie believed in debate, so the film includes a prominent antifeminist spokesman, and an innovative percussive sound track that perfectly captures the spirited arguments of the time.Confronting increasing resistance to her role as a director in the commercial film industry, Craigie resorted in the 1950s to screenwriting, some of which had to tone down her socialist and feminist arguments. Ms. Tasker and Ms. Wearing, relying on archival research and the best scholarship on postwar British film, sensitively situate Craigie’s disappointment that she was not able to make more of a breakthrough in the attitudes of commercial film producers.The feminist focus works well in most instances, but it can sometimes distort. A comment I make in my biography that “To Be a Woman” might have been even more successful if it had sometimes adopted a playful tone, as in some of Craigie’s other films, is taken to be a “gendered” response, as if I’m saying Craigie needed to employ “traditional ‘feminine’ tones of wit and charm and not the anger that the film displays.” But I was not arguing against the film’s anger but rather how it might have been more effectively presented.Feminism, like all ideologies, can have its blinders — like those of a feminist scholar who objected to my saying in my biography of Marilyn Monroe that she was a “hot property,” even though those two words were applied to male stars as well, such as one of my other biographical subjects, Dana Andrews.Fortunately, such lapses are infrequent. The authors are superbly successful in writing Jill Craigie back into the history of documentary, according her an importance that goes beyond their book’s title, which suggests a narrow focus that their in depth research and insights transcend.Mr. Rollyson is the author of ‘To Be a Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie.’

A Female Movie Pioneer Who Showed Britain ‘The Way We Live’

A Female Movie Pioneer Who Showed Britain ‘The Way We Live’

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