Screen

Josh Yumibe, Professor of Film Studies at Michigan State University and an editor of Screen interviews Professor Melanie Bell as winner of the 2023 Screen Award.

Following are excerpts from the interview, where Josh introduces the Screen Award Committee and Professor Bell. Melanie talks about her article, her history with Screen and about her experiences at the Screen Conference. To finish, Josh provides comments from the committee about the winning article.

Josh Yumibe

The Screen Award Committee 2023:

I was fortunate to be on the Screen Award committee this year, along with my fellow editor, Professor Tim Bergfelder, as well as with our guest award committee members: Professor Lúcia Nagib from the University of Reading, and Professor Jean Ma from the University of Hong Kong. A big thanks to both of them for serving with Tim and me.

It's not only a pleasure to read through the nominated essays and discuss them, but it was particularly exciting to work through these fantastic works with my excellent committee members.

The Screen Award:

The Screen Award dates back to 1994, and it recognises the best paper submitted to screen during the years under review.  The latest award we're discussing today covers Screen volumes 63, and 64 from 2022 to 2023.

The Winner 2023:

It's my pleasure to announce the winning essay of the 2023 screen award:  Professor Melanie Bell’s ‘Feminist Histories of Costuming Film: Gordon Conway, 1930s British Cinema and the collaborative world of Mayfair sewing’, published in Screen 64:2 in summer, 2023. On behalf of the editorial board and award committee - congratulations, Professor Bell, on your outstanding achievement.

About Professor Bell:

Melanie Bell is Professor in Film History at the University of Leeds and is also the Deputy Director of the Leeds Arts and Humanities Institute. Widely published, she is a scholar of British Film Studies and Feminist Film History. Her most recent book from the University of Illinois Press is 'Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema (University of Illinois Press, 2021)'. She's also published a BFI volume on Julie Christie Stardom and Creative Agency in 2019, and before this 'Femininity in the Frame Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema' in 2009. She's currently leading the Arts & Humanities Research Council funded three-year study of ‘Film Costumes in Action: Design, Production and Performance Cultures in British Film, 1965-2015’, which investigates costume design and making for British film.

Professor Melanie Bell

About the winning article:

This article is a feminist study of costuming film. It looks at costume designers and costume makers, mainly women, not all, but mainly women, who made costumes for British studios in the 1930s. I have been really interested in costume as kind of form of highly specialised craft labour which is absolutely central to film production, but which takes place outside the film studios. It's been largely ignored in film history, especially the costume making part of that labour.

And of course, one of the interesting questions that follows from that is - why is it missing? It doesn't fit easily with those ideas about director led authorship or solo creative visions, all of those kinds of ideas which have driven traditional film scholarship and costume, design. Costume making involves really complex team forms of teamwork which have kind of creative and intellectual and emotional dimensions. To them it involves hand skills, it involves material literacy, it involves shopping. So how do you fit those kinds of things into this kind of director led authorship model that we often work with.

For this article, I used the personal archives and the design diaries of one designer, a woman called Gordon Conway. I used those to reconstruct her world of work and reclaim those activities - the hand skills and the teamwork that you can see in her diaries, reclaim them as really kind of highly skilled forms of labour. Through that I wanted to recentre film history through a feminist lens of craft labour, and that's what I hope I achieved in this article.

Professor Bell’s reaction to the Screen Award:

To use a colloquialism - I was really chuffed, really pleased, really happy! And I was relieved. I was relieved because I think you get a sense of connection that your work has found an audience. And that's really important for us, I think, as writers. Scholarship is a long time in the making, especially archival. Research is a really long kind of gestation period, but I think any kind of work that involves the work of the mind and ideas takes a long time to come to fruition. I first started working with the Gordon Conway materials back in 2018. So that's a long time ago now, and really beginning to think about, what does this mean for film history, this kind of material that I'm working with in the archive?

So there's that long kind of period of thinking and exploring where you pick things up, and you put them down, and you go backwards and forwards before you kind of shepherd them into an output.It is really, really special and also special for the work to be recognised, and I'm thrilled that it was. It was a win for costume designers and for makers as well - especially those kinds of working class girls in costume houses whose labour is central to film production, but haven't been really kind of formally recognised in a way that the work the research does, and the award does as well. I was really pleased.

Professor Bell’s history with Screen journal:

It was a bit scary looking back as to quite how long my relationship with Screen had been which tells you how long I've been you know in the profession. I guess my first introduction to Screen was perhaps not surprisingly 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. That's the first article I read in Screen when I was an undergraduate student in the 1990s

The other kind of key piece for me, was the Screen Reader in sexuality . That introduced me to ideas by Richard Dyer,  Steve Neale, and Griselda Pollock . You know images of men and women. I still have my copy of the screen, reader, it's really been well read and annotated, and there's lots of kind of underlining’s in it. I guess the relationship goes back for 30 years now.

Screen has always been a key journal for the discipline, it's absolutely foundational to it, and it continues to be so. Even as the discipline has kind of morphed and diversified, Screen has always remained at the vanguard of those conversations, and I've also had the pleasure of introducing it to countless students in the teaching of gender and sexuality. It’s very much about handing the baton on to subsequent generations, and that's always been done through the journal as well. So, a long and happy relationship with the Screen journal.

Professor Bell’s history with the Screen Conference:

When I was doing my PhD I was far too scared to go. My very first Screen Conference, I can't remember what year it was, but it was when I'd finished my PhD and in my first teaching post.

I was part of a panel on British film stars which my colleague, , had convened, and I gave a paper on the British Film Actress, Patricia Rob. I really liked the fact that it was really serious about the subject. So it took film studies really, really, seriously, which is really important because it's a really serious subject. You always learn a lot when you go to a Screen Conference. That's always been my experience. It’s always had great keynotes and really interesting themes

I was so nervous but it was actually friendlier than I expected, which tells you something about what your expectations are and what the reality is as well. It was welcoming, and I remember it as a place that always asked you great questions.

The dinner is really nice, because the restaurants are really good! And Glasgow well, who doesn't love Glasgow? It's an amazing city, and I always feel really happy to go there again.

It's become a fixture in the annual calendar and has been a long and very happy relationship with the conference. I'm looking forward to going again next year in 2025.

Josh

Committee comments about the winning article:

The award committee's assessment of your article - Professor Tim Bergfelder, Professor Lúcia Nagib, Professor Jean Ma and myself.

We found your essay to be such a model of remarkable innovative research with depth and archival rigour. The article plumbs the collaborative and feminist nature of costume, design in film from the archival discovery of designer Gordon Conway's diaries and scrapbooks. Melanie Bell develops a cogent argument on the importance of costume design for film in the 1930s Britain, which was a realm exclusively inhabited by women from the modest seamstresses to sagacious socialite designers whose specialist skills define the female star's own acting style, Bell excavates through extensive archival research the nature of the contract work.

Conway carried out on British films to reconstruct the elaborate workflows and depth of expertise that went into costume designs in the 1930s helping the idea of the male director as the supreme creator of a film. The paper unveils a fascinating facet of cinematic authorship, grounded in the society of the time, but leaving a lasting legacy in cinema worldwide, and we know that this article also will provide a lasting interrogation and ways of opening up these archival questions about gender and craft work in such amazing ways.

Again, our deep congratulations and gratitude for publishing this piece with Screen will be making time at our next Screen Conference in Glasgow, June 2025, to celebrate your article in person, and we hope you'll be able to attend.