The British Film Institute (BFI) has played a vital role in shaping British cinema, launching the careers of countless filmmakers. It began financing productions in the 1950s, allocating state funding for film until the establishment of the UK Film Council (UKFC) in 2000. These developments coincided with significant social change in Britain, especially for women in the immediate post-war decades and via the emergence of the second-wave feminist movement in the 1960s.
Building on recent work in feminist British film history, and in collaboration with Dr Josephine Botting, Curator of Fiction Film at the BFI, this project will focus for the first time on the women filmmakers who were funded by the BFI’s production schemes, to examine how women’s films were shaped by the BFI's funding and its institutional barriers.
This unique lens will enable the researcher to develop a historiographical framework with which to explore the various obstacles faced by women filmmakers during this period, and how they intersected with other factors such as class, race, and disability (Crenshaw 1991).
The project will focus on the following key research questions:
- How did women filmmakers navigate the male-administered funding streams and oversight of the BFI Production Board?
- In what ways did these women’s interests, aesthetic concerns, and choice of medium differ from their BFI-funded male counterparts, and how did this change across the funding period?
- To what extent did the BFI’s funding choices influence the direction of women’s filmmaking in Britain, and how can this be situated within the historical, socio-cultural, and economic context of the time?
To answer these questions, the doctoral researcher will be encouraged to develop a creative methodology, combining skills of archival research, interviews, and media practice, to produce a thesis that explores ways in which multimedia responses (eg. data visualisation, video essays, podcasts, augmented reality) can inform the interpretation of the work in the BFI’s collection. The core research will be based on an analysis of the BFI National Archive’s holdings of the 82 BFI-funded titles directed by women between 1952-2000, when state funding was transferred to the UKFC. This period includes work by renowned filmmakers Sally Potter, Gurinder Chadha and Ngozi Onwurah, through to lesser-known productions such as The First Step (Felicity Gray, 1961) and Short Vision (Joan Foldes, 1956). The project will be augmented by research into a selection of BFI-funded productions since 2011 (when it resumed responsibility for film financing), providing opportunities for comparisons between women’s experiences in the 20th century and in recent years.
By researching this material, the project aims to:
- Develop a historiographical framework for evaluating the relationship between women filmmakers' state-funded artistic production
- Explore multimedia responses to the material, to offer original ways of analysing how gendered working environments and practices have produced, framed, and influenced filmmaking in Britain
- Identify key titles for digitisation (or re-digitisation into modern formats) alongside other contextual materials, for production as a public-facing national cinema touring programme, Blu-ray boxset or BFIPlayer collection.
This CDA is funded by the TECHNE DTP partnership - led by Royal Holloway
For details on how to submit an application, please visit our webpage .
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