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Data: Ostrowska, Anna (2019) “Authorial agency of British women documentarians: practitioner interviews” [dataset]. University of Southampton Faculty of Arts and Humanities Film Studies Not quite an auteur, more than a creative labourer: authorial agency of British women documentarians by Anna Maria Ostrowska ORCID ID 0000-0002-6856-3307 Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2019 University of Southampton Abstract Faculty of Arts and Humanities Film Studies Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Not quite an auteur, more than a creative labourer: authorial agency of British women documentarians Anna Maria Ostrowska This thesis argues that to achieve a nuanced picture of British women documentarians’ authorial agency, traditional film-text based approaches to authorship need to be supplemented by the analysis of extra-textual contexts like the filmmakers’ background and training; the rules and relationships present in the main production context they work in; the filmmakers’ own perceptions of themselves as authors and of their creative process. Building on the research into women’s authorship done within feminist film, TV and media studies as well as in documentary studies, presented in Part One of this work, the core of this thesis (Parts Two and Three) comprises thematic analysis of data gathered in twenty-six semi-structured interviews with women documentarians currently active in the UK; my sample and the method of analysis are described in detail in Appendices 1-3. I present my respondents’ opinions in the context of existing literature on British documentary, TV production, cultural and creative industries, gendered aspects of labour and documentary desire. I conclude that supplementing traditional text-based approaches to women’s documentary authorship with these new areas of research not only demonstrates the importance of gender as analytic category but also deepens the understanding of women documentarians’ authorship and enables the revaluation of their authorial position in critical discourse around British documentary. 5 Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ 5 List of Accompanying Materials ................................................................................................ 11 Declaration of Authorship .......................................................................................................... 13 Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................................... 15 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 17 Part I: Theoretical and methodological contexts ................................................................... 21 Chapter 1: Researching women in front of and behind the camera in feminist film, television and media studies ..................................................................................................... 21 Women in the media text: representation and psychoanalysis ................................................... 25 Women in the audience: reception studies, gendering of film and TV genres .......................... 31 Women in the encoding process: feminist media and production studies................................. 37 Women filmmakers’ authorship ......................................................................................................... 41 Women documentarians in feminist film studies ................................................................................. 47 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 51 Chapter 2: Gendered authorship in documentary ................................................................. 53 Documentary modes and degrees of authorship ............................................................................ 55 Authorial signature in the documentary text ................................................................................... 57 Thick text documentaries: voiceover and on-screen appearances ................................................. 57 Thin text: Observational mode .................................................................................................................... 59 TV and documentary authorship ................................................................................................................ 63 Women as documentary authors ....................................................................................................... 69 Cinematic documentaries and box-office success ................................................................................ 69 Strong authorial voice of women ............................................................................................................... 71 Women in traditional observational documentary .............................................................................. 73 Women directors in TV .................................................................................................................................. 75 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 79 Chapter 3: Aims and methods: towards an intersectional feminist methodology .......... 81 Claiming a feminist methodology ....................................................................................................... 85 Positioning myself as a researcher ............................................................................................................. 86 Beyond gender: intersectionality........................................................................................................ 87 Intersectional analysis as a method of inquiry ....................................................................................... 88 The practitioner interview ................................................................................................................... 91 Interviewing, the feminist way .................................................................................................................... 92 External impact of my study ................................................................................................................ 95 Part II: External factors influencing authorship ..................................................................... 97 Chapter 4: Where does a voice come from? Getting into making documentaries in the UK ................................................................................................................................................... 97 Different routes to documentary filmmaking .................................................................................. 99 Film school ......................................................................................................................................................... 99 Art school ........................................................................................................................................................... 99 TV apprenticeship .......................................................................................................................................... 100 Independent paths ........................................................................................................................................ 100 The internal effects of educational route taken: ‘inner-‘ and ‘outer directed’ creative development ......................................................................................................................................... 103 The external effects of educational route taken: can a voice come from anywhere? ........... 109 Barriers to entry ................................................................................................................................... 113 7 Gender ............................................................................................................................................................... 113 Social class ........................................................................................................................................................ 116 Age .....................................................................................................................................................................