When I was an undergraduate, I wanted to be a filmmaker. I wrote an essay declaring I would be a woman director, who made films about women, with all-women crews. Today, I am an Associate Professor of Film Studies, researching women’s cinema and women filmmakers. I may have let go of that dream to be a filmmaker, but that impulse to challenge the male-dominated cinema has remained with me.
This week, the research project that I lead, “Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary Film Culture in the U.K.,” released a report that shows women made up only 20 percent of all directors, writers, producers, exec-producers, cinematographers, and editors making British films during 2015, and that 25 percent of all of those films had not one woman across any of those roles.
I wrote that undergraduate essay in 1991; the year of “Thelma and Louise.” Eleven years later, I began my PhD on women filmmakers who adapted novels by women. In my research I found Martha Lauzen’s Annual Celluloid Ceiling Report, which showed the number of women working across the roles listed above in the top 250 grossing films in America each year was less than 20 percent, and had not changed much since the first report produced in 1998. At the same time, while researching Sally Potter, I discovered that she had made 1983’s “The Gold Diggers,” a film with an all-woman crew, and I wondered what an Annual Celluloid Ceiling Report of British cinema might look like.
During that time as a research student, I also learned that feminist film academics were discovering that early silent film, which we thought had been dominated by men, actually had been full of women making films. Women like Alice Guy Blache, Mary Pickford, Lois Weber, and many more around the world were present in the industry. In my research on theories and histories of women’s authorship, I had become more agitated by the ways that academic and cultural histories regularly “forgot” or “lost” or never recognized women’s authorship in the arts, and it seemed utterly clear to me that women making films in the present could just as easily be left out of future histories of the now.
Both those forms of research — finding lost women of history and counting the numbers to show the inequality of today — stuck with me. They have directly influenced the structure of “Calling the Shots,” which has two main parts: the quantitative research of counting the women working in six key production roles in British cinema from 2003–2015, of which this week’s report is just the beginning, and the qualitative research of recording interviews with fifty women working in those roles so that their stories are never lost. Together, they will help our research team construct the contemporary history of women working in British film now, so these women will always be on the record in the future.
That research team, not unlike my ideal film crew, comprises women who are working together to write this history and these women’s stories. Linda Ruth Williams, the co-investigator, and I worked for several years to write the proposal for a fundable project, and together we have the very real privilege of listening to women filmmakers tell us the stories of how they got where they are and their ideas about how to change the industry for the better. Our research fellow, Natalie Wreyford, is doing the painstaking work of finding all the women working in those production roles, listing their names, and counting up the numbers for our reports. The project also supports two women PhD students who are researching women filmmakers in the U.K., because we need women researchers and historians to keep fighting and challenging the status quo in the future.
When I think back on my undergraduate essay, I think about my current students and their goals for the future, and I think about women working in film today who might have had similar thoughts when they first started. And I always think about those women who thought about being a filmmaker once and who were never able to become one of the 20 percent. “Calling the Shots” will strengthen the growing chorus of voices both inside and outside the industry pushing for change. Moreover, we will challenge the male-dominated version of cinema history for women who make, study, and enjoy film now; and for those who will come after us.
Shelley Cobb is an Associate Professor of Film at the University of Southampton. She is the Principal Investigator of “Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary Film Culture in the U.K.” and the author of “Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers.”
