Close Up: A creative-critical intervention in analysing the female voice in documentary film directorial practice

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This project will investigate the impact that social activism has on women's lives and explore how insurgency in women fosters courage and transformation. It will analyse how womens' activism extends beyond their cause and into their individual lives. This practice-led research will include the production of a documentary film which will feature two groups of female activists: women insurgents in the 1984-5 miners' strike, specifically the the protest group 'Women Against Pit Closures' and a current movement against social injustice, 'Black Lives Matter'. Both female-led organisations have been openly militant in their desire for change. Their causes have divided opinion and occupied a controversial position in the media. My project will examine the unintended and unpredicted consequences of women's activism, the impact that this experience has had on the lives of miners' wives and investigate how dissent is affecting women active in the Black Lives Matter movement now. What do these experiences have in common? To what extentd do the activists (past and present) perceive themselves to share common ground, experientially, politically and, specifically, as women? Why does involvement in protest empower women to re-evaluate their role and aspirations and to take action in order to realise their potential, in and outside an activist context? It is important too to consider the ways in which the presence of social media and developments in technology have altered the organisation of protest for women.Much has been documented about the miner's strike Bell (2009), Milne (2014), Paterson (2014) (et al.). Media coverage of marches, flying pickets and clashes with the police was firmly focussed on men. The absence of women from the picture was not immediately obvious insofar as women were shown in schools and community centres, organising soup kitchens and food for their striking men. But women were on the picket lines too. One activist assesses with hindsight, 'The police didn't know how to deal with us. If miners crossed the yellow line, even put one foot over, they could be done for trespassing and were sacked. But we couldn't be sacked because we didn't work for the colliery. We caused a lot of havoc, and we sang' (Brenda Proctor, 2014). Prior to the strike many of the miner's wives were housewives and mothers. Once the strike ended, some became politicians, gained university degrees and some remained life-long activists. The women had moved from the kitchen, to the picket lines and into new careers: 'My horizons were broadened. I didn't have to stay in my marriage. I went to college and found new born strength' (Betty Cook, 2016).The discourse relating to activism and insurgency usually has a masculine frame, firmly placing men in the foreground of the revolutionary picture. When women have been vociferous in their charge for change e.g. the Ford sewing machinists' strike (1968), the Women's Liberation Movement from around 1970- and the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, (1981) (which was an influence on Women Against Pit Closures), such movements have been positioned outside the frame as auxiliary or different. They have required recovery research to bring them into the foreground, or to situate them in contextual relation to activism that is discerned to be broader, itself a gendered assumption. Beeban Kidron's article in the Guardian in 2013 about the Greenham Common protest supports this; 'In 30-plus years since I sat at the yellow gate filming the heavy hand of the police and the inexplicable prejudice of the media against a group, whose major crime seemed to be the absence of men...'This research project intends to refocus the image with the spotlight on women in the Midlands region.