Jill Craigie / Rosamond Lehmann (Live from Two)
Writer and filmmaker Jill Craigie and novelist Rosamond Lehmann are the guests on this afternoon chat show.
The guests and presenter are witty, forthright and charming in this edition of the weekly Wednesday afternoon chat show, Live from Two, which ran from 1980-81. Eloquent conversation flows freely between the guests, neatly guided by presenter Shelley Rohde.
Rosamond Lehmann, acclaimed author of novels including Dusty Answer and The Weather in the Streets - often cited as pioneering feminist classics - matter-of-factly pronounces that 'I don't consider myself specifically to be a feminist. I'm very happy to be a woman.'
By contrast, ground-breaking documentary film director Jill Craigie (misleadingly introduced as 'Britain's only woman film director in the immediate post-war years') is not shy about professing her own feminism and adds for good measure that 'my husband's a very good feminist.' Craigie was married to Michael Foot, then leader of the Labour Party and a contender to become Prime Minister. She concedes that 'he's a very strong theoretical feminist, yes.' Incidentally, later in her life, she tells Foot on-camera that his feminism was entirely theoretical, which he unconvincingly denies, in footage included in the documentary biopic Independent Miss Craigie (2020).
Much of the discussion is about men, marriage, and women's careers. When the presenter, Shelley Rohde, comments to Craigie that 'you're a very strong career person' she responds by shaking her head and countering 'I've always put personal relationships first.' Lehmann chips in 'So've I' and clarifies that she doesn't 'think of novel writing as a career.' There is some lively debate about the comparative degrees of sexual liberation in the 1940s and the 1980s - Craigie pronounces that 'the pill is basically liberation for men' in an astute observation on the clichéd notion of the freedom sinces the 1960s.
Presenter Shelley Rohde led an adventurous life herself, like her guests, though this is unmentioned in the programme. In her early 20s she worked as a foreign correspondent in Moscow for the Daily Express newspaper, and much later in life she went on to write an celebrated biography of artist L.S. Lowry.
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The Camera Is Ours: Women Documentary Filmmakers
Most leading documentary filmmakers in Britain today are women - a stark contrast with feature film directors who, despite some progress in recent years, are still overwhelmingly male. But prominence in documentary wasn't handed to women on a plate: a debt of thanks is due to the determination and resourcefulness of previous generations of women to seize the camera and film their own stories.
Women have been pivotal to British documentary filmmaking since the 1930s. It might be a man, John Grierson, who is remembered as 'the father of documentary', but the movement he founded made (some) space for women too, including two of his sisters, Ruby and Marion, who told her brother, 'The trouble with you is that you look at things as though they were in a goldfish bowl. I'm going to break your goldfish bowl.' Marion went on to do just that, alongside others of her generation, such as Jill Craigie.
This collection focuses on what we could call a 'second generation' of women documentary filmmakers who emerged from the 1970s and 80s. Notable among them is Kim Longinotto, one of Britain's most prolific and accomplished documentarists whose work over more than 40 years, has explored women's experiences in unfamiliar contexts and cultures. Also featured are the work of collectives and workshops such as the Sheffield Film Co-op who, with the help of more affordable and easy-to-use video equipment, sought to extend the tools and skills of filmmaking to women who would never otherwise have had such opportunities. The resulting films highlight how their practical feminism brought new voices, perspectives and approaches to documentary, and told new stories with fire, wit and humanity.
9 videos in this collection
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Eat the Kimono
3
A Peace of Her Mind
4
Gaea Girls
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Life and Death on Exmoor
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Rossington - A Pit with a Future
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Jill Craigie / Rosamond Lehmann
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I Look Like This
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