Jill Craigie: Film Pioneer
Jill Craigie: Film Pioneer is a three-year research project exploring the career of Jill Craigie, one of the first women to make documentaries in the UK. Her work, often overlooked in film history, encompassed innovative films, a feature, journalism and writing for the screen and as well as a passionate history of the women’s suffrage movement.
Located within women’s film history, the project uses Craigie to interrogate the historical frameworks and the canon of the British Documentary Movement which have undervalued women’s contribution to the genre. The project will explore Craigie’s films, looking at how they were distributed, exhibited and reviewed. Using critical, biographical documentary as a research tool we use film to explore what Craigie’s life history reveals about the social and industrial factors which constrain, and sometimes enable, women’s involvement in film production. Drawing on her extensive personal archive at the Women’s Library at the LSE and other sources, the project will investigate how Craigie managed in her short career as a director to negotiate both obstacles and opportunities. The project asks what can be learned from a pioneering woman’s career about the inequalities which persist in the creative industries today.
The project takes two principal forms: firstly, an experimental documentary biopic about Craigie, produced by Lizzie Thynne with Hollie Price and Adele Tulli, and secondly a book-length study co-authored by Yvonne Tasker and Sadie Wearing.