In the 70s, women were up against a deluge of challenges. To put it into perspective: jobs were advertised by gender, marriage was seen as women’s end goal, and domestic violence and marital rape weren’t even considered crimes. Overall, it was not a very progressive or feminist time.
All of this played out against a new wave of feminism and rising anger and discontent.
Women began channelling their energies into liberation movements, and the production and distribution of films played an impactful role in this.
Women across England—from London to Sheffield to Cardiff to Leeds and everywhere in between—could be seen banding together in collectives, committed to pointing the camera at the issues and stories that mainstream cinema ignored.
Selina Robertson, a film programmer and writer who has just finished an eight-year PhD looking at this period of feminist film collectives, says: “A lot of female and feminist work in UK film has come from this very, very important decade.”
Robertson says that groups like the London Women’s Film Group, the Sheffield Film Cooperative and the Leeds Animation Workshop started up because they needed a platform to help discuss issues women faced in their working and domestic lives.
She calls this a ‘consciousness raising’, where women would share what they think are isolated personal experiences, only to discover together that these experiences are all too common.
The women involved in these collectives were not professionals – many had children and jobs, but they still had the ambition to work on and produce their films. Collaboration was (and still is) an essential element in feminist filmmaking too. Members would lift each other up and encourage one another to create great work. It was very egalitarian and even-handed.
This was one of the ways that feminist collective filmmaking challenged the industry’s dominant conventions. At the time, the status quo involved a white, cisgender male acting as the driving force behind a project, especially in Hollywood—think of the big filmmakers of that era, like George Lucas or Francis Ford Coppola. But this was a very different way of working in film.
“Filmmaking was and is very hierarchical. You’ve got the director, this figurehead, along with your producers and writers. But these feminist collectives blew apart the whole myth of a ‘creative genius’. It’s always been a non-hierarchical, almost consensual way of making films. Everyone had an equal part to play in the production.”
The London Women’s Film Group, for example, committed to this integrated, dynamic way of producing their films. They swapped roles on each project, and everyone tried their hand at camerawork, lighting, and sound.
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Within one year, in 1972, they released Miss/Mrs, which explored societies’ differing and almost conflicting images of women; Serve and Obey, which addressed the irrelevance of education in the minds of young schoolgirls; and Betteshanger Kent, which looked at the experiences of a miner’s wife in organising the women of a Kentish town to support the mining strikes.
Some of the work that these collectives were creating definitely ‘ruffled some feathers’, though.
A Woman Like You was produced by the Sheffield Film Cooperative in 1976. At the time, a parliamentary bill was threatening restrictions on access to abortions, which had recently been decriminalised, and the film follows a married woman’s attempts to get an abortion through the NHS. Through the combination of both fictitious-narrative and documentary style, it addresses the claustrophobic nature of motherhood and the hurdles that would often be placed in the way of a woman engaging in her right to choose. Many would baulk at the idea of making a film on such a contentious topic, but, of course, the group managed to get their message out.
This was another way the dominant ideologies of the mainstream were challenged by these women. Particularly in Britain, it was rare to see the ‘controversial’ subject matter from films like A Woman Like You depicted so realistically, without sensationalism or dramatics.
The work of these collectives was successful and recognised, though. A turning point for some came with the launch of Channel 4 in the early 80s, with its remit to support the innovative works of film being produced by independent groups across the country.
This led to greater funding opportunities and larger audiences, and soon, a boom of collective filmmaking swept the nation. The decade also saw the Women’s Liberation Movement becoming more diverse—it began to speak for lesbian, bisexual, and minority ethnic women, which meant the collectives opened up and included even more people in the conversation.
Unfortunately, life gets in the way. After a decade of progressive and radical work, the prevalence of the feminist film collective somewhat dwindled. Money and time ran out, and the sexist attitudes of the period continued to linger. Rifts in second-wave feminism also meant that the networks of influential artists and activists began to break down. The main thing is that they existed and that they made their mark.
But Robertson is worried about how long the legacy of these collectives can last.
“It’s really important that we capture their experiences and accounts, their memories from that time. But there’s a real issue with the preservation of women’s film history. Their work has simply not been prioritised for digitisation, and I think that, with the industry being dominated by white cis males, women’s work has always been marginalised.
“A lot of the video work is almost disintegrating, and it’s really awful. It’s almost like a part of our historical memory is just disappearing before our eyes.”
That isn’t to say that the age of feminist cooperatives and fighting the misogynistic status quo is dead. People are still talking. In fact, Robertson herself co-directs a London-based collective of her own, Club Des Femmes, which is very much about digging through the archives and showcasing the works of feminist and queer collectives.
“I still think it’s really hard for women to break into the industry. There are, of course, some exceptions, but it’s still very male-dominated. So I think feminist interventions in the industry, whether it be through filmmaking, through collective ways of working, even being a feminist film critic, are really important to counteract the juggernaut of the mainstream film industry.
“At Club Des Femmes, we were just two friends who said, ‘Right, let’s make a difference, let’s do something different’. It was tricky at first, but we’ve always strived to excavate histories and bring discussions that have been lost back into the ‘cinematic realm’, and it is still really exciting for us.”
The era can act as a compelling resource, a spring of inspiration. We just need to keep talking, to keep networking, to look back at this period of women’s liberation and remember the conversations that film sparked thanks to these groups of amazing women.
Selina says that they want to use their platform to advocate for the formation of more feminist collectives, groups who can speak for today’s generation: “Nowadays, even from the margins, you can still create a discussion, you can still exact a lot of change and you can still make an impact.”
