By Anna Rose Garvey
In 2021 Kasandra O’Connell, Head of the IFI Film Archive, acknowledged a limitation in the IFI Film Archive research resources and put out a request to academic partners for assistance in developing new tools that would highlight the work of female filmmakers within the collection ( https://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue20/HTML/ArticleOConnell.html ).
This resulted in a collaborative research project, ‘Women in Focus: Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata and Cataloguing’, the aim of which has been to develop a new approach to cataloguing the creative contribution of women filmmakers in local, regional, and national archives
(https://www.uea.ac.uk/documents/96135/8353211/9_Women+in+Focus+Brochure_sml.pdf/28f826bf-9b8c-53a0-d04c-f03c1790f9af?t=1707321748246 ).
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Irish Research Council as part of the UK–Ireland Digital Humanities scheme, the project is a UK–Ireland collaboration between the University of East Anglia, Maynooth University and the University of Sussex, with the IFI Irish Film Archive and East Anglian Film Archive as archive partners (https://ifi.ie/2023/11/women-in-focus-toolkit/).
The project has resulted in a cataloguing toolkit that helps archives with moving image collections to create clear, relevant and easily accessible records about female filmmakers. The works of five original and creatively diverse female filmmakers—Margaret Currivan, Agnes Heron, Flora Kerrigan, Beres Laidlaw and Sr Maureen MacMahon—were used as case-studies for the toolkit and digitised by the IFI Irish Film Archive. A curated selection of five films from these filmmakers is now available, and free to view worldwide, on the IFI Archive Player. A larger selection of films will be made available on the IFI Archive Player in 2025.
The Amateur Movie Database (AMDB) is an online database that aggregates information on amateur filmmakers. Carolann Madden, post-doctoral research associate in Maynooth University, has worked to add key information on the filmmakers used in the case-studies (https://www.amateurcinema.org/).
UP THE CANAL
1966 / 9 mins
This short semi-documentary, directed by Margaret Currivan, is an insight into how modes of transport on the Grand Canal in Dublin have changed over the years. Currivan was an avid amateur filmmaker and keen photographer. A member of the Dublin Cine Club, she entered her films into Dublin Amateur Cine Society competitions, winning awards in the late 1950s and 1960s for her 8mm documentaries.
ROLL 21: ACHILL, 1969
1969 / 13 mins
A highly visually engaging silent film by Agnes Heron that explores Achill Island and the surrounding areas. Agnes Heron was a Glaswegian filmmaker who moved to Dublin with her family and spent most of her life as a partner in an electrical contract firm. She was a skilled maker of amateur films and travelogues, and a skilled embroiderer.
The Toolkit for Archiving Women’s Amateur Film is available here: https://www.uea.ac.uk/web/groups-and-centres/projects/women-in-focus/a-toolkit-for-archiving-women-s-amateur-film. For a deeper dive into the collections on the IFI Archive Player visit https://ifiarchiveplayer.ie.
Anna Rose Garvey is Digital Platforms Assistant at the Irish Film Institute.