NAME INDEX:
■ ■ ■
BOSTON, Sara
■ ■ ■
CAPPS, Mary
■ ■ ■
DAIN, Marion
■ ■ ■
DICKINSON, Margaret IMDb
In 1983 Margaret Dickinson founded
Marker Ltd. Its main business is the development and production of documentary films, specialising in social and political subjects. As well as making films, Margaret writes on film and film politics.
■ ■ ■
DOVE, Linda (1948-2001)
IMDb
The weekend before she died aged 53 from cancer, the award-winning film editor Linda Dove was helping to host a teach-in on Afghanistan at her home in Santa Monica, California. The gesture was typical of a woman who had been a pioneer in the world of film and television and had challenged injustice throughout her adult life.
In 1970, she became the first woman to be taken on by the BBC as a trainee film editor. She was a founding member of both the London Women's Film Group and the Newsreel Collective, two outfits that believed that film could be used to change people's perceptions of subjects few film-makers were then tackling. In 1978, she was part of the Newsreel Collective team that won first prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival for Divide And Rule?, a film about racism with a soundtrack that included the Clash, Steel Pulse and Tom Robinson.
She had also worked on the Newsreel Collective's Housey- Housey in 1975 and, in the same year, An Egg Is Not A Chicken, the latter becoming a major campaigning tool for the National Abortion Campaign. In the 1970s, she co-directed The Amazing Equal Pay Show for the London Women's Film Group, as well as Miss/Mrs, Serve And Obey and, in 1976, Whose Choice? She also worked on the well-regarded BBC television series About Men, years before such subjects became common topics in the mainstream media. The director Paul Morrison recalls her as "always the last to leave the cutting room", the ultimate praise for an editor.
Linda met the American film editor Bruce Green, who was to become her partner in life and work, in 1976 in Los Angeles, where she combined bringing up her two daughters, Mia and Abby, with a successful career as a film and television sound editor, and a continued commitment to political causes.
In 1980, she worked on the film Nine To Five, with Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton, and the television movie Attica, one of three Emmy nominations for sound editing with which she was associated, the others, in the late 1970s, being The Woman's Room and Ike, The War Years. The Panama Deception, on which she also worked, exposed the role of the United States' government in Panama, and won a best documentary Oscar in 1992. She was always tickled to have been a small part of television history as the sound editor responsible for the shot that killed JR in the television series Dallas.
In Los Angeles, Linda was active in the Motion Picture Editors Guild, and played a major part in the work of El Rescate, a group dedicated to exposing the human rights abuses of the civil war in El Salvador. She helped to compile a report on atrocities there and, in 1992, flew back to the country, camera in hand, with the FMLN general command after the successful peace talks in Mexico. Among the many tributes after her death was one from Salvadorans who recalled her presence on the victory march through San Salvador.
Born and brought up in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, the middle of five children of two teachers, Linda studied art at Goldsmith's College, London, and Ealing College, where one of her contemporaries was Freddie Mercury.
Her resilience remained with her throughout her long illness. She retained her sense of humour and her curiosity about life until the end and died with her closest family around her. She is survived by her husband and her daughters. —
The Guardian Obituary by Duncan Campbell, 14 Dec 2001
■ ■ ■
EVANS, Barbara IMDb
■ ■ ■
JOHNSTON, Claire (1940-1987)
Wiki
■ ■ ■
KELLY, Mary (1941)
Wiki
■ ■ ■
MacLEAN, Fran
■ ■ ■
MacKENZIE, Margaret (Midge) Rose (1938-2004)
Wiki IMDb
Director: John Huston War Stories (1999)
IMDb
Midge Mackenzie, who has died aged 65, was a documentary film-maker, writer and historian of film; energetic and determined in all her endeavours, she made uncompromising, honest and stylish documentaries about feminism, human rights and child abuse as well as many other subjects.
With her habitual Stetson setting off flame red hair, tight jeans, extravagant rings and cowboy boots, Midge Mackenzie's appearance reflected her originality and showmanship, but belied her strong principles and need to expose injustices. Film-making was her real passion, but in her work for the feminist and anti-apartheid movements in the 1960s and 1970s she cut a swathe, excited controversy and made a difference.
Margaret Rose Mackenzie was born in London on March 6 1938, the eldest of three children. After the war, which she spent in Dublin, cared for by a great-aunt, she attended a convent school in north London. But having been left to look after her brothers when her parents divorced, she was determined to escape her home life. She left school at 16 and went to work for an advertising agency in central London, which provided her with an entry into films.
Following a brief marriage to Peter Jepson-Henry, an antiques dealer, she moved to New York where she cut her teeth in film-making as a director of television commercials. Her reputation as a documentary film-maker was established in 1967, when her revolutionary, and widely acclaimed, multimedia Astarte for the Joffrey Ballet made the cover of Time magazine.
Three years later, she brought out Women Talking, a profile of the American feminists Sheila Allen and Kate Millet. Midge Mackenzie was a committed feminist, but she was uneasy with stereotypes and would attend women's lib demonstrations swathed in fur. "There was no such thing," she explained, "as politically correct then." Indeed, at a screening of Women Talking at the ICA in London she included a striptease act.
She showed a similar readiness to court controversy the same year when she successfully staged a re-enactment of the Sharpeville massacre at the Lyceum in London, making full use of the theatre's revolving stage and a contemporary soundtrack of the massacre.
In 1975 Midge Mackenzie released one of her most memorable works, Shoulder to Shoulder, a drama documentary series recounting the history of the Suffragettes, which she later turned into a book. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s she and her companion Frank Cvitanovich, a successful documentary film director, also made commercial films through their company Mohawk Films.
During this period, however, much of her time was taken up with their son, Luke (known as Bunny), who had been born prematurely, severely brain damaged and autistic. Midge Mackenzie unearthed a controversial "patterning" treatment then being pioneered in Pennsylvania, which required her son to have three helpers working on him for five hours every day.
It was a tribute to her resourcefulness, perseverance and organisational skills, and the vast network of acquaintances, friends and helpers she mustered, that the treatment was not only sustained but was successful. Bunny gained some coordination and balance, but died of cancer, aged 11, in 1978.
It was a time of extraordinary anguish for Midge Mackenzie. Her relationship with Cvitanovich had broken down and she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. But when she was offered a job teaching film history at Harvard University she managed to pick herself up and returned to America.
There followed a period of intellectual and professional fulfilment. An arresting sight on campus, hailing everyone with a cheery smile, and with her beloved dog, Tex, in tow, Midge Mackenzie loved teaching and relished the access Harvard provided to the intellectual heart of America.
A highlight of these years was the filming in Mexico of interviews with John Huston, talking about his suppressed war films; in 1999 she turned these interviews into a documentary for Channel Four.
In 1989 Midge Mackenzie returned to Britain, settling in Islington. There she would conduct long boozy lunches with her friends, surrounded by antique figurines and cans of archive film. She also continued to make documentaries that reflected her sense of community and social commitment.
Prisoners of Childhood, which she made in 1991, dealt with issues of child abuse through actors working with therapists to unlock their own childhood experiences. Three years later she set up the first Sheffield International Documentary Festival.
Her last finished work was a sensitive documentary about the London Hospital's facial reconstruction unit and the portraits Mark Gilbert had been commissioned to paint of its patients. These featured in an exhibition, Saving Faces, at the National Portrait Gallery in 2002.
The challenges she faced with her son went some way to prepare her for the ordeal she endured with the recurrence of throat cancer early last year. Her many friends rallied round. Though reduced to scribbling notes in hospital, she never lost her interest in people and her surroundings, and she filmed many of her consultations and treatment.
Midge Mackenzie died on January 28. —
The Telegraph Obituary, 11 Feb 2004
Distilling the essential Midge Mackenzie, who has died aged 65, is not easy. She was a film-maker, film historian, director and writer who was determined to be seen and heard. She dedicated her working life to making uncompromising films about feminism, human rights and many other subjects she believed a civilised society should dwell upon.
Rangy and restless, she carried her hand-held camera around as others might a handbag, and was rarely seen without her trademark stetson hat, pulled low over red hair worn in a dishevelled bob. Dogged was the word when it came to getting the material she wanted. It took 17 years to persuade John Huston to be interviewed by her in 1985 and filmed by Richard Leacock for the documentary series War Stories, eventually shown on Channel 4 in 1999. When, afterwards she observed "he was a tough old bugger ... but enchanting" a friend commented that she could have been describing herself.
Feminism ran through her like the message in a stick of rock, a lifelong commitment from the heady days when she filmed a Boston women's collective, which included Betty Friedan and Kate Millett, for Women Talking and was at the forefront of demonstrators pelting Bob Hope with tomatoes at the Miss World contest in London. But that did not mean dressing in sexless sackcloth. She was an astute and witty showgirl who knew the value of being seen and admired. She adored dressing up, being in-your-face with her vivid clothes, skin-tight trousers, one of her wardrobe of exotic fur coats and an exuberance of silver rings the size of small birds perched on her fingers.
Getting noticed and admired in a world of film, where power was predominantly held by men, was sense, not compromise, in her book. She once said she didn't see the point in hostility towards men. Even so, showing the injustice that was too easily done to women in patriarchal societies recurred in her films, whether in the documentary she made for Amnesty about abuses against women or the hugely successful 1975 BBC2 drama documentary series Shoulder To Shoulder. She devised, developed and co-produced this story of the suffragettes' militant campaign, also writing the impressive book that accompanied the series.
Born in London, Midge was the eldest of three. She was evacuated to stay with a relative in Ireland during the war but returned to the family home in Kingsbury afterwards. She grew up in an environment where expectations were not great, left school at 16 and did typing jobs. One of these took her to Shaw Films in Soho, where she persuaded her employer to teach her line production. Next call was New York, where she worked in advertising and started making her own experimental films. Her big break was being asked, in 1967, to make the ground-breaking multi-media production Astarte for Joffrey Ballet, which made the cover of Time magazine.
There was a short marriage in the early 1960s to Peter Henry, and other relationships included "a week of non-verbal communication" with François Truffaut. But her big love was film-maker Frank Cvitanovich (obituary, August 14 1995). From 1967 they lived together for nearly a decade. The relationship was put to the toughest of tests with the birth of their brain-damaged and autistic son Bunny (Alexander). They were told that nothing could be done to improve the very bleak prospects for his quality of life, but in America they found a revolutionary programme devised by Drs Dolman and Delacato. And just as, in the last months of her life, a large network of close friends - the Midge Pack - made sure she was visited and cared for in hospital, so some 42 friends had a rota for doing the "patterning" exercises required for Bunny while Mackenzie worked.
The grief she endured when her relationship with Cvitanovich broke up and, a year later, in 1978, Bunny died, aged 11, in her arms - she spent the last days of his life lying in bed with him - was rarely alluded to. She went to New York and became a visiting fellow in 1980 at Harvard, where she taught film. Back in the UK, she later worked as media policy adviser to her close friend MEP Carole Tongue at the 1989 election and helped to draft the Public Service Broadcasting Report.
After reading the work of psychoanalyst Alice Miller she started exploring the meaning of her own childhood and from this came Prisoners Of Childhood, (1991) in which actors brought out themes of pain and damage from early years. She made the wonderful I Stand Here Ironing (1980) based on Tillie Olsen's stories, and in later years a trilogy of films looking at remote communities in Ireland, Scotland and Wales appeared. Saving Faces documented the patients whose faces had been reconstructed by surgeon Iain Hutchinson and he recalls: "She followed us around absolutely silently and made a film that said so much."
It was ironic that cancer took the voice of someone so articulate and with so much to say, but until the end she was communicating hectically on pads of paper, and the redoubtable spirit, sociability and wide roguish smile never went. —
The Guardian Obituary by Angela Neustatter, 5 Feb 2004
■ ■ ■
MATIAS, Diana
■ ■ ■
MULVEY, Laura (1941)
Wiki IMDb
Biography —
BFI
Co-Director: Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)
IMDb
Co-Director: Amy! (1979)
IMDb
Co-Director: Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti (1983)
IMDb
Co-Director: Disgraced Monuments (1994)
IMDb
■ ■ ■
RONAY, Esther IMDb
Co-Editor: The Year of the Beaver (1985)
IMDb
Esther Ronay joined the London Women's Film Group in 1971 and worked on all the group projects.
■ ■ ■
SEGRAVE, Brigid (1940)
■ ■ ■
SHAPIRO, Susan IMDb
■ ■ ■
WINHAM, Francine IMDb
Director: Careless Love (1976)
IMDb
Francine Winham was a still photographer in New York and London, and was a member of the London Women's Film Group between 1972 and 1977.
■ ■ ■
WOOD, Linda
■ ■ ■
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1970s
Film Notes: Information Compiled by the London Women's Film Group
Publisher: London Women's Film Group, 1973
Pages: 25
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Author: Laura Mulvey
Originally Published in: Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975, pp. 6-18
Reprinted in: Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
Feminist Politics and Film History
Author: Claire Johnston
Originally Published in: Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975, pp. 115-125
Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema
Author: Claire Johnston
Originaly Published in: Notes on Women's Cinema (Society for Education in Film and Television, 1975)
Reprinted in: Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
Women’s Happytime Commune: New Departures in Women’s Films Jump Cut
Author: E. Ann Kaplan
Originaly Published in: Jump Cut, No. 9, 1975, pp. 9-11
1990s
Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism
Author: Lester D. Friedman
Publisher: Routledge, 1993
Pages: 344
Publisher – 2nd Edition: Wallflower, 2006
Pages: 341
Social Process/Collaborative Action: Mary Kelly 1970-75
Authors: Mary Kelly, Judith Mastai
Publisher: Charles H. Scott Gallery, 1997
Pages: 135
Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain 1945-90
Author: Margaret Dickinson
Publisher: BFI Publishing, 1999
Pages: 330
2000s
Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed
Author: Shohini Chaudhuri
Publisher: Routledge, 2006
Pages: 160
From Women's Work to the Umbilical Lens: Mary Kelly's Early Films
Author: Siona Wilson
Originaly Published in: Art History, Volume 31, No. 1, Feb 2008 , pp. 79-102
2010s
Working Together: Note on British Film Collectives in the 1970s
Authors: Ann Guedes, Esther Leslie, Peter Osborne, Nina Power, Steve Sprung, Humphry Trevelyan, Paul Willemen
Editors: Dan Kidner, Petra Bauer
Publisher: Focal Point Gallery, 2013
Pages: 224