Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema by Melanie Bell

Reviewed by: Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema by Melanie Bell Lisa Smithstead (bio) Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema By Melanie Bell. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. 286. Movie Workers is a much-needed critical volume. It fills a major gap in scholarly and popular film history, presenting a meticulous and engaging analysis of a wealth of fascinating new data and case studies. The book explores the unseen and largely unresearched history of women's labor in the British film industry from the 1930s to the late 1980s. It reframes our image of women and British cinema by challenging male auteurist accounts of British film history and focusing instead on the working lives, practices, and identities of women in a fascinating variety of below-the-line roles. Where previous key works in feminist film historiography have charted the trajectories of British female stars (such as Melanie Williams's Female Stars of British Cinema, 2017) and the practices of British female audiences (such as Jackie Stacey's Star Gazing, 1993), Bell's volume shifts focus to work behind the scenes. It offers rich new insight into how women's labor and their interaction with film technology helped shape British film aesthetics and industrial practices over time. In this regard, one of the key values of the book is its ability to present the hard data missing from a gendered history of British cinema. By offering concrete evidence of women's presence across a spectrum of production roles, it poses a direct challenge to historical accounts that reduce women's role in film culture purely to that of screen image. This facilitates a brand-new analysis of what exactly women did within the U.K. industry below the line and how they did it—crucially, making their labor visible as a lived experience. In this regard, Bell's analysis is keenly attentive to the experiential textures of their production labor and their work with film technology, exploring the period-specific gendered dynamics of the working environments they inhabited across different decades of U.K. film production. Movie Workers makes the case for multidisciplinarity as an essential framework for undertaking this kind of reclaiming and reframing of women's U.K. film labor. It draws on methods from social sciences and humanities-based film history to historicize research questions and issues shared with feminist production studies, casting a wider net toward earlier periods in women's film work in order to offer illuminating contrasts and comparisons over time. Bell's major sources include the Association of Cine-Technicians trade union records and oral history testimony from women workers. Combined, these enable the book to challenge gendered myths of film labor and women's interaction with film technology—namely that only certain kinds of low-skilled work were ever undertaken by women—which have played a substantial role in women's obfuscation from mainstream film histories. As such, there is much here to interest historians of film technology. The book End Page 242 presents fascinating accounts of how women used different kinds of film production equipment and how they refined and passed on their technical skills. Despite dealing with a wealth of dates, data, and technical terms, Bell's book is highly accessible to the nonspecialist reader. It is written in an engaging prose style and carefully structured to enable the reader either to dip into different time periods specific to their interests or to read sequentially in order to observe change and development more gradually across each decade. The book also features a range of useful graphs to help the reader navigate the statistical data alongside images from trade papers and fan magazines. It includes a number of fascinating photographs capturing women's film labor within different time periods in roles such as costume design, continuity supervision, editing, makeup, matte painting, paint and trace work, and the repair of wartime projection equipment. While offering an essential historical study, the book is also clear in its intentions to connect past, present, and future by presenting a disruptive intervention—one that not simply records and makes visible an obscured gendered labor history but also has the potential to...