‘My Heart Beat for the Wilderness’: Isobel Wylie Hutchison, Jenny Gilbertson, Margaret Tait and other twentieth-century Scottish women filmmakers

Neely, S. (2015) ‘My Heart Beat for the Wilderness’: Isobel Wylie Hutchison, Jenny Gilbertson, Margaret Tait and other twentieth-century Scottish women filmmakers. In: MacKenzie, S. and Stenport, A. W. (eds.) Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, pp. 299-309. ISBN 9780748694174 (doi: 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694174.003.0024)

Abstract

In this chapter Sarah Neely explores the works of three Scottish women filmmakers who made films in the Arctic. These women are part of a largely unwritten history of the cinema: it was rare enough in the 1930s to be directing documentary films; to have them go to the Arctic on expeditions is mostly unheard of. Neely examines the works of ‘amateur’ filmmakers Margaret Tait, Jenny Gilbertson and Isobel Wylie Hutchison, considering the ways in which their works could be understood as those of ‘women explorers’, and the ways in which ‘women explorers’ have been left outside canonical accounts of Polar exploration and the cinema. Neely positions their works, both those produced in the UK, and in Canada, as a different mode of documentary filmmaking from the tradition formulated by Scottish filmmaker, producer and theorist John Grierson, who nonetheless played a central part of some of their training.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Additional Information: eISBN: 9781474408561 (2017).
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Neely, Professor Sarah
• Authors: Neely, S.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts > Theatre Film and TV Studies
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• ISBN: 9780748694174

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