From Documentary Film to Television Documentaries: John Grierson and This Wonderful World

Abstract

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Jill Craigie and the BBC: Postwar television, feminist histories and modern femininities

“…The BBC’s television service offered Craigie a new creative opportunity to adapt her plans for a film about the suffragettes to the small screen in 1949. Just as Craigie’s career has been overshadowed by post-1960s feminists – between waves, so too she was developing this project during a shadowy, relatively unmapped period for television documentary at the BBC: between the documentary film movement’s development in the 1930s and during the war, and its shift into television in the 1950s and 1960s (Fox, 2013) – when television documentary was evolving and ‘beginning to find its own distinctive voice’ (Russell and Taylor, 2010: 6; Corner, 1991b). When Craigie was writing her scripts, documentary at the BBC was guided by McGivern but wasn’t formally established as a department until filmmaker Paul Rotha was appointed to head it in 1953 (Bell, 1986; Thumim, 2004).…”