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Learning to listen: Histories of women's soundwork in the British film industry

December 2017
Screen 58(4)

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Whilst women’s contribution to early cinema (as directors, writers, exhibitors etc) is widely-acknowledged, much less is known of their historical labour in the decades following the introduction of sound, and almost nothing of their work as sound technicians. The employment of women in the jobs created by the new technology of sound remains unstudied. This essay investigates women’s soundwork in the British film industry in the years between 1939 and 1989. It uses archival materials and oral history testimony to draw a micro-history of women’s soundwork in film processing laboratories, the feature film industry and non-fiction shorts. It argues that, whilst women were routinely excluded from prestigious roles such as Sound Engineer and Recordist in the features sector, they flourished in the niche areas of factual programming and Foley sound. Including case studies of the fifty-year careers of Sound Recordist Christine Collins and Foley Artist Beryl Mortimer this paper examines the gendering of women’s participation in film sound and their economic and creative contribution as sound professionals to the British film industry. It also suggests ways in which a study of women’s soundwork might offer new ways of thinking about film history.

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Learning to listen: histories of

women’s soundwork in the British

film industry

MELANIE BELL

The study of sound has become established as a field of film scholarship

over the last two decades. Early works on sound theory (Elizabeth Weis,

John Belton, Rick Altman), the speaking voice (Michel Chion) and film

music (Claudia Gorbman)

have been followed by research which ranges

across contemporary Hollywood sound and genre and sound design.

Scholars have theorized the image–sound relationship, explored

audiences and modes of listening, examined the impact of new

technologies and interviewed sound practitioners. Sound in different

historical periods has been interrogated, including the transition from

silent to sound, the era of classic Hollywood, and the new Hollywood

cinema of the 1980s. That the Screen Studies Conference in 2008 was

devoted to ‘Sound and Music in Film, TV and Video’ testifies to the

breadth and diversity of the field.

How have questions of gender shaped these debates? There is a

significant body of scholarship that focuses on how music contributes to

the gendered politics of a film;

and the issue of speech preoccupied

feminist film studies of the late 1980s, not least because questions of

language were a central concern of second-wave feminism.

In 1988

Kaja Silverman’s The Acoustic Mirror offered one of the first sustained

theorizations in film studies of the soundtrack and sexual difference.

Silverman argued that the Hollywood soundtrack was gendered ‘through

a complex system of displacements, which locate the male voice as the

point of apparent textual origin, whilst establishing the diegetic

1Elisabeth Weis and John Belton

(eds), Film Sound: Theory and

Practice (New York, NY: Columbia

University Press, 1985); Rick

Altman, Sound Theory, Sound

Practice (New York, NY:

Routledge, Chapman and Hall,

1992); Michel Chion, Audio-Vision:

Sound on Screen, ed. and trans.

Claudia Gorbman (New York, NY:

Columbia University Press, 1994);

Claudia Gorbman, Unheard

Melodies: Narrative Film Music

(Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN:

Indiana University Press, 1987).

2See Gianluca Sergi, Dolby Era:

Film Sound in Contemporary

Hollywood (Manchester:

Manchester University Press,

2004), and William Whittington,

Sound Design and Science Fiction

(Austin, TX: University of Texas

Press, 2007).

3See Music, Sound and the Moving

Image, vol. 6, no. 2 (2012), special

issue ‘Gender and Sexuality’, ed.

437 Screen 58:4 Winter 2017

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.containment of the female voice’.

Scholars such as Elizabeth Cowie and

Amy Lawrence built on Silverman’s work, illustrating how women’s

dialogue, narration and commentary in classic Hollywood cinema were

contested by the image-text, which ultimately gave narrative authority to

their male counterparts.

The works by Silverman and others remain

cornerstone publications in feminist scholarship, interrogating film sound

from a gendered perspective.

Feminist research is now beginning to ask questions about women as

cultural agents in the history of soundwork, and their roles as

participants, contributors and makers of film sound. A 2015 special issue

on ‘Women and soundwork’ for the journal Feminist Media Histories

traced women’s contribution as music directors, feminist filmmakers and

radio performers across different national contexts, historical periods and

media.

In June 2016 the Women’s Film and Television History

Network, UK/Ireland, held a day-long workshop at the British Film

Institute (BFI) in London, bringing together academics and practitioners

to map the field of women’s contribution to sound in British film and

television. The Network itself is part of a wider community of scholars,

activists, practitioners and archivists who investigate ‘women’s work in

and around cinema across its histories as they play out in different parts

of the world’.

Recent interest in ‘women’s work’, itself part of the now

well-established historical turn in film studies, goes beyond recovery

history; its goal is to interrogate what the forgetting of women film

practitioners says about the dominant explanatory paradigms of film

history, and in doing so to reconceptualize how film history is conceived

and written. As Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight have argued,

the questions that asking about women pose to traditional ways of

doing film history demand new ways of thinking cinema itself. Insofar

as these challenge the dominance of the director, recognise co-creation

and collaboration, refuse dominant conceptions of cinematic essence,

and reorganise notions of aesthetic value, it is not only women who

stand to gain.

Much of this scholarship to date has prioritized those at the top end of the

production hierarchy, such as directors, producers, writers and

composers, particularly in silent cinema. This essay marks a step-change

in approach, focusing on a broader range of production roles than has

typically been of interest to feminist film historians, and connecting that

to the burgeoning interest in women’s work as sound professionals in the

history of cinema. Using Britain as a case study, I address three

questions: the extent to which the field of historical British film

soundwork is structured by gender; whether women and men occupy

distinct roles and how these have changed over time; and how research

about women’s soundwork might illuminate wider questions about film

historiography. I position this research in relation to Kate Lacey and

Michele Hilmes’s recent work on sound, which asks us to focus not only

on women as soundmakers but also on ‘the power dynamics that framed

Catherine Howarth, as a

representative example of recent

trends in this scholarly tradition.

On the dominance of critical

attention to music in film

scholarship, see Michele Hilmes,

‘Foregrounding sound: new (and

old) directions in sound studies’,

Cinema Journal, vol. 48, no. 1

(2008), pp. 115–17.

4See, for exmple, Helene Cixous,

‘The laugh of the Medusa’, trans.

K. Cohen and P. Cohen, Signs,

vol. 1, no. 4 (1976), pp. 875–93;

Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The

Metaethics of Radical Feminism

(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1978);

Dale Spender, Man Made

Language (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1980).

5Kaja Silverman The Acoustic

Mirror, The Female Voice in

Psychoanalysis and Cinema

(Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN:

Indiana University Press, 1988),

p. 45.

6See Elizabeth Cowie ‘Film noir and

women’, in Joan Copjec (ed.),

Shades of Noir: A Reader (London:

Verso, 1993), pp. 121–65, and Amy

Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus:

Women’s Voices in Classical

Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley and

Los Angeles, CA: University of

California Press, 1991).

7Kate Lacey and Michele Hilmes

(eds), ‘Women and soundwork’,

Feminist Media Histories, vol. 1,

no. 4 (2015), pp. 1–2.

8Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight

(eds), Doing Women’s Film History:

Reframing Cinema Past and Future

(Champaign, IL: University of

Illinois Press, 2015), p. 1.

9Ibid., p. 11.

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.and continue to frame both women’s impact on media and their presence

in the historical record’.

It is this attention to gendered power and how

power structures institutions, their working practices and cultures that

characterizes much recent work in feminist historiography, including my

own.

This essay is the first sustained academic analysis of women’s

contributions to soundwork in the British film industry. In the first half I

draw a microhistory of women’s work as sound editors, camera operators

and recordists, amongst other roles, in the years between 1930 and 1985.

Using a range of sources, including oral histories, personal

correspondence, union membership records and trade journals, I map

women’s presence and absence in the professions, tracing the roles and

grades in which they found work as sound technicians and those from

which they were excluded. I examine their work not only in the feature-

film sector but in documentaries, shorts and film-processing laboratories

– sectors typically absent from standard film histories but which have

potential to revise the wider frame within which British film production

is understood.

The second half of the essay is a case study of the role of the Foley

artist, or ‘footstepper’ as they were known in the British film industry: a

professional who specializes in a particular branch of sound effects. This

role is chosen for detailed analysis because women historically were

over-represented as Foley artists relative to other male-dominated sound

grades. I examine the career of the British Foley artist Beryl Mortimer

(1928?–2001), who was active in the profession between approximately

1955 and 1998 and is widely acknowledged by British industry

professionals as ‘the mother of Foley’.

I outline the functions of the role

and its meanings in the context of British film soundwork, before

focusing on Mortimer’s career and a case study of her work on Lawrence

of Arabia (David Lean, 1962). Attending to an area of production in

which women enjoyed relatively high levels of representation allows us

to open up a question of central importance for feminist historiography:

what is the value and status of this role, both within the industry and

within film history?

The chief obstacle to writing about British film sound is the paucity of

historical documentation. Whilst all film historians face this challenge it

is particularly acute when researching sound because it has so often taken

second place to the image. Helen Hanson makes the point that the

‘hierarchies of Hollywood’s production cultures’ in the studio system

afforded primary importance to visuals and the film’s ‘look’.

A similar

hierarchical structure obtained in the production cultures of British film,

where sound from its early days was aligned with technology and placed

in opposition to creativity, which was claimed as the preserve of

cinematography.

These hierarchies have been duplicated in archival

collections, with the result that film histories have relegated sound to

footnote status due to a lack of archival sources. In the context of British

film history, for example, producers, directors and writers dominate the

14 David Samuelson, ‘Magic boxes’,

in Action! Fifty Years in the Life

of a Union (London: Pear

Publications, 1983), pp. 51–59.

10 Lacey and Hilmes (eds), ‘Women

and soundwork’, p. 2.

11 See Melanie Bell, Julie Christie

(London: BFI Publishing, 2016).

12 ‘Trade secrets: listening in to the

work of a Foley artist’, Broadcast,

11 June 1999, p. 10.

13 Helen Hanson, ‘Behind the

scenes, below the line: female

sound technicians, creative

labour and constraints in

Hollywood’s studio system’,

paper delivered at the Doing

Women’s Film and Television

Histories Conference, De

Montfort University, May 2016.

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.Special Collections of the BFI. Only a small number of sound technicians

have been interviewed as part of the BECTU History Project – twenty-

five from a cohort of over 600 interviewees – but their testimonies are

especially welcome given the lack of sources available elsewhere.

The

pioneering soundwork of individual filmmaking units has been singled

out for critical attention – the GPO Film Unit is a case in point – but to

date there are no publications for sound that are on a par with Roy

Perkins and Martin Stollery’s British Film Editors,

which writes a

history of British filmmaking from the perspective of the editor and

editing, and includes archival sources and invaluable interview

material.

The ‘British Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound

1927–1933’ project promises to provide much needed scholarship on the

subject, but the focus on the transitional years leaves the period following

the establishment of sound under-researched. There is a pressing need for

a history of British film sound, which remains a largely uncharted

territory, though that is regrettably beyond the scope of this essay.

The limited availability of documentation pertaining to sound is

exacerbated by gender, with women doubly sidelined in a field already

marginalized in production hierarchies. Of the twenty-five BECTU

interviews, for example, only one is with a woman, the sound recordist

Christine Collins, whilst roles such as Foley artist, for which women were

employed, did not receive screen credits until the mid 1980s. Thus one of

the key mechanisms through which women’s historical labour was recorded

and can be traced is elided. To draw a map of the history of women’s

soundwork therefore raises methodological challenges for the feminist

historian trying to craft a narrative for female sound technicians. This

situation is all too familiar to those engaged in researching areas of

women’s film history in which women’s participation is often

undocumented through official mechanisms, requiring the researcher to

move laterally and look obliquely in the hunt for evidence. In this essay I

draw across a range of historical sources, including the traditional (industry

journals) and the less conventional (oral histories and trade union data). The

map offered here is partial and provisional, with gaps and absences that

have yet to be filled, but it does represent a long overdue starting point in

the history of British sound and the role of women within that field.

The key source I use to trace historical women’s work in British film

sound are trade union records. Sound technicians in Britain were

members of the Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT, later renamed

ACTT), the union which organized and regulated employment in the

British film industry.

Until the 1980s the film industry was a closed

shop, which meant that all technicians had to join this union in order to

secure regular employment. This included not only negative cutters and

clapper loaders but directors, producers and other above-the-line roles.

The union holds a complete run of its membership records, which

number approximately 67,000 for the years between 1930 and 1991.

19 Formed in 1933 and initially the

Association of Cine-Technicians

(ACT), the union changed to the

Association of Cinematograph,

Television and Allied Technicians

(ACTT) in 1956 following the

introduction of commercial

television.

15 For a full list of interviewees, see

<http://historyproject.org.uk/>.

16 Roy Perkins and Martin Stollery,

British Film Editors: The Heart of

the Movie (London: BFI

Publishing, 2004).

17 See Scott Anthony and James G.

Mansell (eds), The Projection of

Britain: A History of the GPO Film

Unit (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan/BFI, 2011).

18 Any assessment of British film

sound would need to include the

sound work of John Cox, Peter

Handford, Harry Miller and

Winston Ryder, amongst others.

Hollywood’s sound history has

fared only slightly better, with

Helen Hanson’s forthcoming

Hollywood Soundscapes: Film

Sound Style, Craft and Production

1931–1950 promising a much-

needed illumination of sound in

the classic period. Hanson makes

the point that the majority of

scholarship has focused on

contemporary sound design at

the expense of the Hollywood

studio era, an oversight which

she attributes to the dominant

discourse of ‘New Hollywood’ as

a renaissance era in terms of

technology and creativity. See

Hanson, ‘Sound affects: post-

production sound, soundscapes

and sound design in Hollywood’s

studio era’, Music, Sound and

Moving Image, vol. 1, no. 1

(2007), pp. 30–31.

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.These records cover film technicians and, from 1955 onwards, those

working in commercial television. They record members’ names, gender,

rates of pay, job titles, employers and departments, thus providing a

unique insight into a core sector of the media production workforce

across a wide range of roles, grades and historical periods. As part of my

AHRC-funded project mentioned above, I have been working with a

small team in partnership with the union and the organization Learning

on Screen to digitize these records and create a research database; it is

material from that database, currently under development, that I draw on

in this essay.

Sound technicians were members of the union’s sound recording

department, which listed eight grades in its 1947 handbook: supervisor;

sound recordist (mixer); sound camera operator; boom operator; assistant

boom operator; laboratory contact; sound loader; sound effects.

The

database contains the records of 4050 sound technicians who were

granted union membership in British film or commercial television

between 1930 and 1991. Of these, 3800 are men and 248 are women, a

clearly significant imbalance of gender. Half of the 248 women came

into the profession in the 1980s across a wide range of sound roles,

including recordists, assistants and effects librarians, and for a variety of

employers and/or media outlets such as television, the grant-aided sector,

features, commercials and sound equipment hire. Of the remaining 124

women, only one was granted union membership in the 1930s (as a

sound cutter in 1936) but fifty-five were taken on during World War II,

with a further ten in the immediate postwar years (between 1946 and

1949). From the 1950s onwards the numbers of women granted union

membership in sound grades settled at one or two per annum, until the

upturn in the 1980s.

These records show that sound as a field of production was deeply

gendered and masculinized, not an area of the industry in which women

regularly found employment. In fact their recruitment during World War

II highlights that it was only under the conditions of dire social

emergency that the industry would tolerate women in sound roles, a

pattern that was consistent with other technical grades such as camera

and lighting, which were similarly closed to women. Looking more

closely at the sound roles women undertook during wartime highlights

clear employment pathways. Of the fifty-five women recruited during

this period, the majority were employed in the film-processing

laboratories, principally in semiskilled roles such as sound wave

operator, a grade that involved quality control for the soundtrack. Smaller

numbers were employed in the laboratories in more skilled or

supervisory roles such as sound printer, sound track inspector and sound

control examiner. Although these were responsible jobs that required

meticulous attention to detail, they were at the technical rather than the

creative end of the sound production spectrum.

Only a handful of women were taken on during the war as recordists,

editors, loaders and camera trainees, and there is little evidence to suggest

20 Learning on Screen is a UK

charity and membership

organization (formerly the British

Universities Film and Video

Council), concerned with the use

of the moving image in

education. The research database

will be widely available through

its platform from 2018 onwards.

21 ACT Sub-Committee Report

(1947) formalizing grades and

inter-union disputes (ACT, ETU,

NATKE).

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.that their careers were longlived. Jeanne Polden and Blanche Gregory

weretakenonin1941and1943respectivelyassoundrecordistsfor

British Acoustic Films Ltd

– a subsidiary of the Rank Organisation

that specialized in developing 16mm and 35mm sound recording

equipment – but I have not yet been able to find any evidence of their

work for the company. Hannah Levy joined the sound department of

Gainsborough Studios in 1942 as a film loader, having previously

spent two years working in the offices of British Acoustic Films Ltd,

with Una Johnson taking up a film loader post for Rock Studios,

Borehamwood in the same year. Again, I have so far been unable to

find any further evidence of their film work. Edith Kanturek, a Czech

national, gained union membership in 1941 when she joined the staff

of Twentieth Century Fox as a sound camera trainee. It is likely that

Kanturek was the widow of Otto Kanturek, an Austrian cameraman

and cinematographer who was professionally active from about 1915

onwards in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and then London, where he died in a

plane crash in 1941. Edith Kanturek has two film credits as a Sound

Camera Operator to her name – We Dive at Dawn (Anthony Asquith,

1943) and It’s That Man Again (Walter Forde, 1943) – after which the

historian’s trail goes cold.

The short career of another sound camera trainee, Joan Salter, gives a

glimpse of how women were recruited into the more prestigious reaches

of the profession. Salter was taken on in the sound department of the

well-established film company Gaumont-British Pictures in 1942. A

single woman in her mid twenties, she had trained as a science teacher

and had been working at a girls’ school when war broke out and she

registered for war work. The head of Gaumont, Maurice Ostrer, was

looking to recruit women with science training and Salter joined the

sound department under the dubbing mixer William Salter (no relation).

But her career in film sound did not extend beyond the war years and she

returned to teaching in 1946.

That her brief career in sound was

exceptional rather than ordinary is evidenced by her receiving special

mention in the union’s journal The Cine-Technician in 1946.

It is clear, then, that professional opportunities for women in sound

were exceptionally limited in the mid twentieth century and did not

significantly improve until the 1980s. A pattern of vertical and horizontal

segregation is evident. The majority of women’s war work was confined

to laboratory processing, whilst the small numbers employed in more

prestigious and creative sound roles – often as a result of education

and/or family connections – had careers that were shortlived. Things

improved slightly in the 1950s and 1960s when women were taken on as

sound loaders, sound boom operators, sound librarians and sound

assistants, but numbers were still low. Only seven women in total were

granted union membership in sound roles between 1950 and 1959,

compared to the over 100 men during the same period.

22 See Grace’s Guide to British

Industrial History,<http://www.

gracesguide.co.uk/British_

Acoustic_Films>accessed 4

September 2017.

23 ‘Women’s work’, The Cine-

Technician, vol. 12, no. 58 (1946),

pp. 11, 18.

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.This is not to say that women were entirely absent as soundmakers in the

British film industry, and two women, Elisabeth Lutyens and Daphne

Oram, are especially noteworthy. Between 1946 and the late 1960s

Lutyens made a major contribution to British cinema sound. Whilst her

professional interest was in modernist, avant-garde composition, she used

film work to pay her household bills, scoring documentaries for the

Crown and Gold Coast Film Units in the 1940s before specializing in

scores for horror films in the 1960s. Lutyens was widely recognized both

at the time and subsequently for her significant creative contribution to

horror sound. In a 1974 interview for the film journal Sight and Sound

she reflected on her craft, describing it as ‘a form of musical journalism

which can be excellent of its sort, like an enormously good and

interesting article in a paper’.

Her musical compositions for films by

Freddie Francis such as Paranoiac (1963), Dr Terror’s House of Horrors

(1965) and The Skull (1965), for example, are wonderfully experimental

and modernist, using dissonant elements to build a sense of the sinister

and unease.

Less prolific but equally important is the film work of the pioneering

composer and electronic musician Daphne Oram. Cofounder of the BBC

Radiophonic Workshop, she developed a system of electronic sound

synthesis known as ‘Oramics’ through the 1950s and 1960s. Oram is a

major figure in the history of electronic music, scoring for television,

radio, commercials and occasionally film, with her credits including

Birthright (Sarah Erulkar, 1958), a short documentary produced by Basic

Films for the Family Planning Association. Oram worked on the film as

sound advisor and included live-action and recorded sound, which she

processed creatively through the use of ‘filters, time delays and

reverberation’, pushing the documentary’s sound towards the

expressionistic rather than realistic.

She also contributed to the

remarkable sound of the feature film The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961),

an adaptation of Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898).

The film is widely acknowledged as a masterclass in cinematic horror,

with its use of cinematography rightly singled out for praise, but its

soundwork is similarly inventive. The composer Georges Auric wrote the

score and collaborated with Oram, whose contributions were uncredited.

The score is highly effective in the way it takes seemingly everyday

sounds such as birdsong and children’s laughter and manipulates them to

uncanny effect, generating what Louis Niebur describes as the film’s

‘atmosphere of unease’.

Lutyens and Oram made significant contributions to British film sound

but they are atypical in the history of women and sound. As composers

and musicians their principal work lay outside the British film industry,

and they were hired for their specialist skills on a film-by-film basis

rather than being part of the institutional fabric. Their careers leave

unchallenged the emerging narrative around women and sound which

locates women – where they feature at all – in ancillary rather than

supervisory roles.

24 Lutyens, cited in Sue Harper,

Women in British Cinema

(London: Continuum, 2000), p. 5.

25 Tim Boon, ‘Birthright (1958)’, BFI

screenonline,<http://www.

screenonline.org.uk/film/id/

1402554/>accessed

2 September 2017.

26 Louis Niebur, Special Sound: The

Creation and Legacy of the BBC

Radiophonic Workshop (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2010),

p. 72.

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.How did women’s participation in sound work come to be so gendered?

Importantly, their initial exclusion from the majority of sound roles stems

from practices laid down in the 1930s following the introduction of

cinematic sound. Laraine Porter has demonstrated how, as the film

industry made the transition from silent to sound cinema, it drew on

expertise from the BBC, whose sound technicians were all ‘men in

brown coats’.

They established and then dominated the habits of

production that came to characterize the feature film industry’s sound

departments. Once an all-male environment was established, women

were unlikely to be admitted and indeed were excluded at the point of

entry, a pattern that was consistent with technical grades in areas such as

camera and lighting. In 1975 the ACTT union published a

comprehensive report on gender discrimination in the film and television

industries that highlighted current and historical practices.

It identified

how girls were taken on by film and television companies at eighteen as

clerks, whilst boys were employed in the post-room. From here they

progressed through gendered pathways: male post-room workers into

editing, camera and sound, where they would receive on-the-job training,

gain experience and move up through the ranks; female clerks into

secretarial and production assistant roles.

This system made it

extremely difficult for women to either gain a toe-hold or make a lateral

move. In addition, employers had a set of assumptions relating to

technology that favoured men. One recruiter expected his sound trainees

to have ‘fiddled around with radios or tape recorders a lot’ as evidence of

being ‘mechanically or electrically minded’.

These skills and

competences were widely assumed to be the natural preserve of men. In

the union’s report, for example, a male sound recordist expressed

concerns about women’s physical strength and their inability to ‘get on’

with machinery, comments that were indicative of a wider set of social

and cultural habits, beliefs and practices that worked against women’s

full participation in sound production.

This gendered belief system also

extended to the types of sounds that were deemed appropriate for women

to handle. When women did manage, in the 1970s, to get a toe-hold in

sound grades such as dubbing, they found restrictions placed on their

work. A female dubbing editor reported being denied the opportunity to

dub a battle scene because the subject matter was deemed by her male

employer to be ‘man’s work’.

These were the power dynamics,

manifest in a web of habits, beliefs, practices and traditions, that framed

women’s participation as sound technicians in the British film industry in

the decades between the 1930s and the 1980s.

In light of these systems and structures, such opportunities as there

were for women to work in sound in more comprehensive and ambitious

ways lay outside the feature film industry, in the less prestigious sectors

of documentaries, shorts, industrial and educational films. The

professional profile of Christine Collins, the only female sound

technician to be interviewed for the BECTU History Project, sheds light

on a particular type of career pathway for women in sound in the mid

27 Laraine Porter, ‘From silence to

sound: women working on the

transition to sound in the British

film industry 1927–1933’, paper

delivered at the Doing Women’s

Film and Television Histories

Conference, De Montfort

University, May 2016.

28 Patterns of Discrimination

Against Women in the Film and

Television Industries (London:

ACTT, 1975).

29 Ibid., p. 7.

30 Ibid., p. 6.

31 Ibid., pp. 7, 9.

32 Sarah Benton, ‘Women’s work:

dubbing bird song or battle

scenes?’, Film and Television

Technician, March 1974,

pp. 22–23.

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.twentieth century. Collins started work in 1956, aged fifteen, as a Girl

Friday for Armand and Michaela Denis, a husband-and-wife team who

made pioneering animal wildlife films for cinema and the BBC,

including their trademark show On Safari (BBC, 1957–59, 1961–65). As

a small, independent outfit, the Denises had a support team of just four.

Collins started out sweeping the floor but was soon trained up on all

aspects of production, from lacing the projector to dubbing and mixing

music and sound effects for the films’ soundtracks.

Working to tight

deadlines and in a small team meant that, in Collins’s words, ‘everybody

had to learn to do everything’, and she quickly became skilled as a sound

technician. When the editor David Garner left the company, Collins

became head of the On Safari team.

This meant taking full

responsibility for the programme’s soundtracks, with Collins recalling

that Armand Denis, as a producer, took a hands-off approach: ‘He was

never there when we were doing it’.

Armand would provide a track of

commentary and occasionally one of non-synched location sound effects,

although his tendency to ‘just record anything’ meant that Collins might

be left with material ranging from ‘five minutes of flamingos at Lake

Naivasha’ to ‘dogs barking and mongooses’.

To these Collins would

add music and material from ‘primitive records of sound effects ...

usually birds, water’.

Under her leadership, On Safari evolved from

early programmes using only recorded music to later ones with

soundtracks that she describes as ‘much more up to date and much more

real ... they got much more sophisticated’.

The programmes proved so

popular with audiences that the BBC increased the Denises’ broadcast

slot from fifteen to thirty minutes.

On Safari established many of the

genre conventions of the animal wildlife programme, and Collins played

a major part in developing its sound style.

When the BBC ended its contract with the Denises in 1967, Collins

moved to Gateway Film Productions, a bigger outfit that specialized in

industrial and educational films and commercials. Collins joined as

assistant editor in the sound department under the supervision of the

company’s sound engineer and recordist, but when the engineer became

ill she stepped into his role, taking responsibility for mixing, dubbing,

managing the effects library and location sound recording. As she recalls

in her BECTU interview, ‘after about two or three years I suppose I was

totally in charge’. The company’s client list was diverse – including

Imperial Tobacco, the National Children’s Home, charities and religious

organizations – and Collins’s work varied from recording sound in a steel

foundry to deciding how best to mic-up the novelist Barbara Cartland,

who was wearing a pink evening dress and ermine stole for a

promotional film about health foods.

Collins worked as a sound recordist and dubbing editor from the mid

1950s into the 2000s, her fifty-year career indicating that greater

opportunities existed for women in nonfiction film than in mainstream

features. There is more work to be done to establish how representative

33 Christine Collins, BECTU

interview no. 345 (1995), BECTU

History Project, transcribed by the

AHRC-funded project ‘Histories of

Women’s Work in the British Film

and Television Industries,

1933–1989’.

34 Ibid.

35 Christine Collins, interview with

Martyn Harries, Wild Film

History, 17 March 2010, <http://

wildfilmhistory.org/oh/67/

ChristineþCollins.html>

accessed 4 September 2017.

36 Ibid.

37 Collins, BECTU interview.

38 Collins, interview with Martyn

Harries.

39 Caroline Boucher, ‘Michaela

Denis’, The Guardian, 13 May

2003, <https://www.

theguardian.com/media/2003/

may/13/broadcasting.

guardianobituaries>accessed

4 September 2017.

40 Collins, BECTU interview.

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.Collins’s experience was, but research I have conducted elsewhere on

women working as directors and editors indicates that the nonfiction film

sector, which flourished in Britain between 1950 and the 1970s, did

indeed offer more employment opportunities to women filmmakers than

the features sector.

Certainly there are tantalizing references in Collins’s

interview to other women members of the On Safari team who

contributed to sound, including Mrs Winnie Dunn, whom Collins

describes as ‘a whiz’ at mixing voiceover commentary.

This suggests

an as yet uncovered history of women’s soundwork, although whether

the documentation exists to write that history is uncertain. It is worth

noting that despite her eleven years as a sound technician, Collins only

received union membership when she joined Gateway Film Productions,

presumably because the Denises’ company was so small it operated

under the radar of union administration. This highlights one of the

limitations of union records as a source through which to trace the work

of film technicians. Whilst this observation applies to both men and

women, it is likely to be gendered if, as seems feasible, more women

through necessity worked for small production companies. It is through

these types of recording mechanisms and documentation processes that

women’s labour is doubly hidden and their contribution to British sound

history elided. This occlusion paradoxically brings into view how the

processes of writing women’s film history can also revise our perspective

on how we understand British film production, widening the frame to

include non-features and smaller companies.

Women continued to look beyond the features sector for soundwork

in the 1970s and 1980s, although now opportunities were filtered through

the lens of second-wave feminism. Some women elected to work outside

the mainstream in either avant-garde or collective practice, others

took the feminist principle of women-only groups and applied it to film

training. In 1974 a ‘Day School for Women’ was held at the newly

formed National Film School, with the remit of giving women in the film

industry opportunities to learn about professional equipment, including

cameras, sound recording equipment and a dubbing suite.

The Day

School and similar subsequent training events arose as women became

increasingly vocal about their exclusion from the film industry and its

restrictive employment and training practices. By organizing collectively

they were able to develop initiatives offering an alternative to the

‘on-the-job’ training traditions that had historically excluded women.

Some of the new pathways into soundwork for women were steeped in

the old prejudices of production hierarchies that privileged the visual

over sound. The sound recordist Elaine Drainville, who worked for the

Amber Film Collective in the 1980s, recalled that her first introduction to

sound on a 1970s student film happened when she was left with the role

because ‘nobody else wanted to do sound. It’s not the most popular

grade.’

Similar prejudices were echoed by the documentary filmmaker

Melanie Chait, who recalled being treated as ‘just a technician’ by some

directors when she worked as a sound recordist in the early 1980s – the

44 Elaine Drainville (2015),

interviewed for the AHRC-funded

‘Histories of Women’s Work’

research project.

41 See Melanie Bell, ‘Rebuilding

Britain: female creative workers

and non-fiction short film

production’, in Feminist Media

Histories (forthcoming, 2018).

42 Collins, BECTU interview.

43 The Film and Television

Technician, November 1974.

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.term used pejoratively to indicate the lower status of sound relative to

camera on set.

It was through a combination of greater training

opportunities and production hierarchies – which took place against a

backdrop of increasing levels of media production after the economic

recession of the 1970s – that the number of women working as sound

technicians increased in the 1980s. Records from the union database

show that half of the total number of female sound technicians registered

with the union (124 of 248) came into the profession in this decade, in

roles such as sound recordist, sound assistant and sound effects librarian,

working for television and commercials companies, the grant-aided

sector and in sound equipment hire. Of the twenty-eight women

registered with the union as sound recordists in the 1980s, some

freelanced, others worked for small outfits specializing in non-broadcast

video, and many were employed by the grant-aided workshops that

flourished in Britain from the 1970s onwards, such as the Sheffield Film

Co-op (Moya Burns, Christine Bellamy), Four Corners (Elisabeth

Rhodes), Cinema Action (Julia Fricker) and Amber (Elaine Drainville).

These groups had a distinct political agenda, worked collectively and

operated outside mainstream production, distribution and exhibition

structures.

The experience of Burns illustrates the type of career pathways that

were open to sound women in the 1980s. After a degree in photography

and film at Sheffield Art College, Burns worked in the BFI’s Bradford-

based resource centre, recording music and developing an effects library.

From here she worked as a sound recordist on a range of feminist shorts

and documentaries, including Doll’s Eye (Jan Worth, BFI/Channel 4,

1982), Bred and Born (Joanna Davis and Mary Leece, Four Corners,

1983) and Red Skirts on Clydeside (Jenny Woodley and Christine

Bellamy, Sheffield Film Co-op, 1984). With this experience behind her

she was well placed to take advantage of the opportunities for

filmmaking that were being offered by new independent production

companies in Britain such as Channel 4. In a 1992 interview Burns

reflected that ‘independent filmmakers ... didn’t have the old traditional

attitudes towards women, and were very flexible’. Changes to financing

and genre preferences made the feature-film industry more open to

women. Burns found that ‘there are not so many hard-boiled areas, like

big budget features [... and that] Channel 4 ... have a different emphasis

on the type of film they want to make, and this filters right down to the

type of crew they want to employ’.

Burns subsequently made the shift

from documentaries and experimental work into independent features,

working on Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The

Long Day Closes (1992).

The experience of Burns is echoed by the director and sound

recordist Melanie Chait (Bred and Born,Veronica 4 Rose [1983]) who

describes making a conscious decision to work in the independent

sector because ‘the people who employ me often have some tenuous

understanding of women’s issues’.

This relatively more hospitable

47 Muir, A Woman’s Guide,

pp. 291–92.

45 Melanie Chait, personal

correspondence with author,

9 May 2016. Indeed when

starting her career in the mid

1970s Chait was advised to take

up sound ‘as a way of having

access to filmmaking’, indicating

its status as a stepping-stone

grade rather than an end in its

own right. Melanie Chait

interview, in Anne Ross Muir, A

Woman’s Guide to Jobs in Film

and Television (London: Pandora,

1987), p. 289.

46 In Camera, Spring 1992, p. 4.

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.environment still presented challenges, including ‘scepticism about my

abilities and the feeling that you have to prove yourself in a way that

men don’t’. It was preferable, however, to shooting abroad, where

Chait found she was often the only female crew member and regularly

had to deal with sexual harassment.

The onus was on her to ‘get out

of it in as delicate a way as you can, because you have got to live with

these people for three weeks and you don’t want the whole crew

dynamics to go sour’.

These examples highlight the gendered power

dynamics and production contexts in which women sound technicians

worked at this time.

The 1980s was a time of modest success for women sound technicians in

Britain, with more entrants into the profession than in previous decades and

across an increasingly diverse range of roles. Nonfiction and independent

feature films afforded women opportunities for soundwork, but commercial,

big-budget features remained the preserve of male sound technicians. No

sound women worked on the decade’s most high-profile British films, such

as The Killing Fields (Roland Joffe´, 1984), Gandhi (Richard Attenborough,

1982) and A Passage to India (David Lean, 1984). More research is needed

to establish whether this trajectory continued into the 1990s and beyond,

and how women negotiated changes to the production landscape such as the

demise of the workshop sector and the film production branch of Channel

4. That is, however, outside the scope of this essay and the statistical data

available to me through the ACTT database. Provisional work by the sound

editor and academic Adele Fletcher promises to provide much needed

scholarship on this contemporary history of women and British sound.

Where sound women did prosper in feature film production was in the role

of the Foley artist, and it is to this, and to the career of ‘the mother of Foley’

Beryl Mortimer, that I now turn.

Mortimer worked as a Foley artist in the British film industry from the

mid 1950s to the end of the 1990s. By the time she retired her

professional reputation was so well established that younger Foley artists

credited her as ‘the mother of us all. She was the most creative and had

staying power.’

During her forty-year career she provided Foley effects

for a significant number of feature films – the exact number is difficult to

establish, as Foley artists did not receive screen credits until the mid

1980s, but my research suggests a conservative estimate of at least fifty.

These include many films widely acknowledged as central to film

history, from epics such as Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962),

2001, A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Superman (Richard

Donner, 1978), Batman (Tim Burton, 1989) and the Alien and James

Bond franchises, to non-mainstream classics including The Gold Diggers

(Sally Potter, 1983), Caravaggio (Derek Jarman, 1986) and Welcome to

Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom, 1997). She was recognized nationally

and internationally by her peers for her professional contribution to the

field, winning a BFI Award for Sound Effects in 1981 and a nomination

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 Adele Fletcher, ‘Exploring the film

industry through the ears of a

woman’, paper presented at the

‘Breaking the Sound Barrier:

Women Sounding Out in British

Film and Television’, symposium

held at the BFI, London, 18 June

2016.

51 Jack Stew, quoted in ‘Trade

secrets’. For Jason Swanscott

she was ‘The greatest foley artist

in Great Britain’ (ibid.).

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.for a Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel award in 1995 for her

work on GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995). Appreciation of

Mortimer’s skills as a craft specialist extended beyond the film industry

to the visual arts, and in 1996 she was the subject of Tacita Dean’s sound

installation Foley Artist, hosted at the then Tate Gallery. Known within

the industry as ‘Beryl the Boot’ for her skills as a footstepper (the term

historically used in Britain to describe Foley work), when she died in

2001 the trade press described her as ‘an icon in her field’.

My research for this essay suggests that Mortimer was not alone as a

woman working in this area of the industry. To her name we can add

those of Jean Sheffield (Oliver!,Carry On films, Brassed Off), Jennie

Lee Wright (Shakespeare in Love,Die Another Day), Pauline Griffith

(Waterland,Evita), Pam Finch (Hilary and Jackie), Diane Greaves

(Orlando,Twelve Monkeys,Billy Elliot), Felicity Cottrell (Sexy Beast,

28 Days Later,Troy), Sue Harding (Quantum of Solace,Mission

Impossible, Rogue Nation), Andie Derrick (The King’s Speech,Casino

Royale,Band of Brothers) and Andrea King (The Martian,Jason

Bourne).

As Foley work is a niche area of production, with the British

industry generally supporting between ten and fifteen professionals

working at any one time, the relatively high proportion of women in the

workforce is suggestive. The body of scholarship on Foley work, both in

its own right or as an element of a film’s sound design, is small and

focuses on contemporary Hollywood.

This leaves unexamined the

historical development of Foley in British cinema and what seems to be

the gendering of the role in the British context. It is useful to examine the

role and its function, focusing on skills, training and career trajectories,

before moving on to analyse in more detail Mortimer’s career and her

Foley work on Lawrence of Arabia. My aim is to construct a

microhistory of the role through the career trajectory of one of its

founding figures, and from that to reflect critically on questions of gender

and film history.

The American Foley artist Vanessa Theme Ament describes Foley as

‘the art and craft of designing and recording performed sound effects in

sync to the film [...] the footsteps, props and cloth movement of all the

characters’.

Historically footsteps were the most common effect made

by a Foley artist, but the scope of Foley now extends to cover almost all

aspects of onscreen action, from character movements to armaments.

The British Foley artist Sheffield outlines the process and some of the

skills required:

It can take several tracks to build up a Foley sequence – first you do

the footsteps, then you might do the clothing noises before going back

to do the effects – kettles boiling, cutlery clattering etc. You’ve got to

be quick and sometimes you’re required to do dance steps. You almost

have to feel like the character and you can’t get that from digital

samples. A lot of Americans use libraries of footsteps but they’re not

practical and always going out of sync.

52 Stan Fiferman, Beryl Mortimer

obituary, Stage, Screen and

Radio, September 2001, p. 22.

53 Credits listed here are indicative

rather than comprehensive.

54 See Whittington Sound Design

and Science Fiction; Benjamin

Wright, ‘Footsteps with

character: the art and craft of

Foley’, Screen, vol. 55, no. 2,

(2014), pp. 204–20; Matt Lewis,

‘Ventriloquial acts: critical

reflections on the art of Foley’,

The New Soundtrack, vol. 5, no. 2

(2015), pp. 103–20.

55 Vanessa Theme Ament, The Foley

Grail: The Art of Performing

Sound for Film, Games and

Animation (Burlington, MA: Focal

Press, 2009), p. xiv.

56 Whittington, Sound Design and

Science Fiction, p. 140.

57 ‘Trade secrets’, p. 11.

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.Character identification is a recurring motif in descriptions by Foley

artists of their work. Derrick explains it as ‘not just about creating a basic

sound, it’s also about getting into the characters ... if there are a lot of

cuts (or bad cuts), that can change the rhythm and, if the actors’

movements go out of sync you can feel it’.

To perform a character’s

sound effects you have to understand both the character and the rhythms

of performance, which suggest strong links between Foley and acting,

and indeed many performers come from a background in theatre, music

or dance.

Foley artists emphasize skills in improvization, creativity,

timing and versatility. They might have to walk like an eighteen-stone

man and tap-dance like a twelve-year-old boy, as Greaves did in Billy

Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000).

They have to, in her words, ‘learn how

to create sounds’, and she uses the example of recreating skateboard

sounds in a studio:

Blades on their own don’t make a noise so you have to work at

creating a sound which makes the film sound exciting. Sounds have

got to be believable, even though they are not the real sounds – that is

the difficulty of the job.

Directors recognize the contribution that good Foley sound makes to the

finished film. Kevin Brownlow, who worked with Mortimer on his 1965

film It Happened Here, described how she ‘supplied the noises with

uncanny precision: the little hesitations on the edge of the pavement, the

flatter sound on the steps’, concluding ‘these simple noises brought each

shot alive’.

As a director Brownlow is well aware of the ways in which

craft specialists such as Mortimer make a significant creative contribution

to the collaborative process of filmmaking.

In accounts of Foley work, many performers draw a hierarchical

distinction between library sound and the live action sound that they

provide. Jack Stew (Slumdog Millionaire,Jason Bourne) explains, ‘you

can find car crashes on CDs ... but libraries of sampled sounds and

sampled effects could never replace what we do ... [which] is specific to

the picture’.

Stew’s comments, like Derrick’s on ‘basic sound’, suggest

that Foley artists understand their own practice as more than merely

replicating the sound of screen images. For them it is an artistic practice

where they produce a bespoke sound that contributes to the narrative in a

more subtle and responsive way than library sound. In his research on

sound design, Whittington describes Foley as giving ‘the two-

dimensional image greater depth and credibility’, rounding out and

layering the soundscape of the story world.

The art critic Richard Cork,

on encountering Mortimer’s work for Dean’s Foley Artist, described it as

‘a form of sonic sculpture [... with] an astonishingly three-dimensional

impact’.

These descriptions and definitions point to the creative

contribution Foley and its artists bring to the filmmaking process, and

how attending to their work can add a new dimension to our

understanding of film and how meaning is created.

65 Richard Cork, Breaking Down the

Barriers: Art in the 1990s

(London: Yale University Press,

2003), p. 149.

58 Ibid., p. 12.

59 Of the nine British women

mentioned above, five come from

a performing arts background.

60 Interview with Diana Greaves, in

Barbara Baker, Let the Credits

Roll: Interviews with Film Crew

(London: Aston House Press,

2003), p. 225.

61 Ibid., p. 228.

62 Kevin Brownlow, How It

Happened Here (Bristol: UKA

Press, 2005), pp. 179–80.

63 ‘Trade secrets’, p. 12.

64 Whittington, Sound Design and

Science Fiction, p. 140

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.There are methodological challenges to studying Foley, however,

especially when researching historically. Practitioner interviews and

memoirs are an invaluable source, particularly as the kind of empirical

materials that document Foley work, such as cue sheets and sound logs,

are rarely retained by producers or studios, and therefore seldom make it

into archives.

Nor are Foley artists represented in the ACTT union

database, despite their contribution to British film sound. This is explained

by the delay in recognizing the job as a distinct occupational category, the

timeframe for compiling screen credits and the hierarchies of film

production cultures. In the USA, for example, it was 1962 before the

practice of direct-to-picture recording was referred to as ‘Foley effects’,

and some years later before Foley performers were inserted into the labour

structure of the Hollywood sound production team.

Some Foley workers

were members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and others of the Editors

Guild, yet many had no union or guild affiliation at all.

Britain followed a similar pattern. Foley performers or footsteppers

could not be easily accommodated in the dubbing editor grade, whilst the

sound effects role was used in the industry to refer to on-set technicians

who provided ‘gunpowder and smoke’ – explosions, firearms and cloud

machines.

Foley performers were not part of the sound recording

department that worked on the film shoot, but were hired by a dubbing or

sound editor who managed postproduction work. This put them in an

ancillary role, and their invisibility relative to the production team was

compounded by the practice of compiling screen credits before

postproduction work was completed.

Or perhaps, as the British sound

editor and Foley artist Lionel Selwyn astutely observed, ‘could it be that

their contribution is not considered sufficiently important to justify that

recognition?’

Their absence from trade union records means that key

information about numbers of practitioners and rates of pay is missing,

and raises wider questions about which forms of craft work were

acknowledged within the industry and by whom. Foley performers do

not have a presence in the kinds of professional publications one might

reasonably expect: the union’s own trade journal The Cine Technician,

for example, or the Journal of British Kinematograph, Sound and

Television Society.

These are the types of absence from official

documentation that frame how we research and write film history. In my

discussion of Mortimer I have drawn on the correspondence and

memoirs of her coworkers, as no extant written material or commentary

by Mortimer herself has thus far come to light. I supplement this with an

analysis of a key scene from Lawrence of Arabia to which Mortimer

contributed Foley sound. From these sources I piece together a

speculative narrative about her professional career and

her soundwork.

Searching for Mortimer in the BFI’s database shows her first entry for

uncredited Foley work on Lawrence of Arabia, but a memoir written by

66 Whittington makes a similar point

in Sound Design and Science

Fiction, p. 149.

67 Wright, ‘Footsteps with

character’, p. 207.

68 Ibid.

69 Action! Fifty Years in the Life of a

Union, p. 127.

70 Jack Stew, personal

correspondence with the author

(2016). See also Lionel Selwyn,

‘Stepping out’, Association of

Motion Picture Sound (AMPS)

newsletter (2003). This practice

was certainly the case when

working on film rather than

digital production.

71 Ibid.

72 The former dates from the 1930s,

the latter from the 1960s, thus

both cover time periods where

Foley performers were an active

part of the filmmaking process. It

is only with the creation of AMPS

in the mid 1980s that Foley

began to have a voice in industry

publications in Britain.

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.the sound editor Selwyn describes her as ‘the footstepper [...] of the

fifties’.

Selwyn recalls meeting Mortimer at Ealing Studios, where he

worked from 1953 onwards, and his description of her suggests she had a

well-established career and was already widely-known as a Foley

professional. Selwyn’s account includes hearsay evidence that Mortimer

had entered the film industry as an actress, working as an understudy for

Helen Cherry. There is some corroboration to support this. The sound

editor and Foley artist Stan Fiferman, who was one of Mortimer’s Foley

partners for many years, claimed that Mortimer was ‘Discovered by the

famous Harry Miller (sound editor) at Pinewood Studios’ where she was

doing location work.

The only film which Cherry and Miller worked on

together was They Were Not Divided (Terence Young, 1950), which

dates Mortimer’s acting career as late 1949/early 1950; Stew, a fellow

Foley artist who worked with Mortimer in the 1980s, dates it to 1948 and

a small uncredited speaking part on The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and

Emeric Pressburger, 1948). According to Stew, Mortimer claimed she

had been a member of the Rank Charm School in Britain, a training

ground for aspiring young actors in the late 1940s and early 1950s,

whose famous alumni include Diana Dors and Joan Collins.

As Rank

typically recruited young actresses aged between eighteen and twenty-

two, Mortimer would have been approximately twenty in 1948, which

would place her date of birth at around 1928. From these scraps of

information, a biography and pre-Foley career for Mortimer begins to

come into view.

There are two accounts of how Mortimer made the transition from

aspirational actress of the late 1940s to established Foley artist of the mid

1950s, although they are not mutually exclusive. Fiferman, in his

obituary notice for Mortimer, credits the sound editor Harry Miller with

introducing Mortimer to Foley work. In contrast, Stew claims that

Mortimer worked as an assistant to Fred Bell and ‘Laddie’ Ladbrook,

two BBC sound effects men who moonlighted in the British film

industry in the early 1950s. The assistant role would have given

Mortimer plenty of opportunity to watch the men at work and learn Foley

techniques. Sound effects men would have been interested in having a

woman as part of the team, as historical accounts suggest that Foley

artists were hired in twos, with a preference for teams of one man and

one woman. In Ament’s account of Hollywood, she suggests that women

were thought to be ‘more coordinated’ than men, which may suggest a

belief in superior skills in synching sound to image, whilst in the British

context men were expected to provide ‘heavier sound effects such as

smashing doors’.

What happened in practice in the sound studio may

not have fulfilled these gendered expectations, but the industry

preference for mixed Foley pairings where possible would have assisted

Mortimer and other women into the role. Mortimer’s segue from acting

into Foley, and her on-the-job training, is a fairly typical mode of entry

into the Foley profession in Britain, and one which is still in evidence

today.

77 Jennie Lee Wright, Pauline

Griffith, Dianne Greaves and

Andie Derrick came into Foley

from a performing arts

background.

73 Selwyn, ‘Stepping out’.

74 Fiferman, Beryl Mortimer

obituary, p. 22.

75 Personal correspondence with the

author.

76 Ament, in The Foley Grail, p. 10,

comments that historically

women were employed for

footsteps and prop sounds in the

USA, with many recruited from a

dance background, a tradition

which grew out of post-sync work

on Hollywood musicals. In the UK

there was a tendency for men to

do ‘heavier’ sounds and women

‘lighter’ (‘Trade secrets’, p. 9).

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.Due to the lack of screen credits, the full extent of Mortimer’s work in

the 1950s, and indeed those who trained her, is not yet known, although

evidence in the form of a ‘chance mention’ is revealing.

Cynthia

Moody, who worked as an assistant editor on the feature-length

documentary The Queen in Australia (1954), recalled vividly in an oral

history interview her first meeting on the film with ‘Beryl the footsteps

lady’, and Mortimer’s professionalism in post-synching ‘Queenie’s

footsteps’.

Moody’s testimony suggests that by 1954 Mortimer’s Foley

work must have been of sufficient quality for her to be trusted with a

high-profile production. Whilst the number of fellow performers in

competition for employment is not known, film production levels were

buoyant in the 1950s, meaning that work was readily available. Miller,

the sound editor who ‘discovered’ Mortimer, worked on between three

and four films per year in the decade, all of them ‘A’ features, and if

Mortimer became the preferred Foley artist for Miller and others like him

she would have been kept busy. We can be sure that by the early 1960s

her professional reputation was such that she could secure Foley work on

prestige productions such as Lawrence of Arabia, and I want to examine

her soundwork on this film in more detail.

It is not known how much of Lawrence of Arabia was Foleyed.

According to sound editor/Foley artist Selwyn, the practice in British

studios in the 1950s had been to use footsteps ‘only where strictly

necessary’, but the 1960s saw a change in industry practices, with

distributors requiring a separate music and effects track for every

English-speaking film that was dubbed for foreign markets.

Lawrence of Arabia was a big-budget film and, with its perfectionist

director (Lean) and a producer ambitious for worldwide sales (Sam

Spiegel), it is likely that the Foley work was considerable. Mortimer is

the only Foley performer listed on the film’s BFI database entry,

although Fiferman, in his obituary notice for Mortimer, claimed he

worked with her on the film. The precise mechanics of how the pair

worked together is unknown, and sources such as the David Lean

papers at the BFI do not contain any documentation pertaining to Foley

sound on Lawrence.

This is one of the challenges to teasing out

individual levels of creative contribution in roles that are highly

collaborative and poorly documented.

What type of Foley work did Lawrence of Arabia need? The film is a

three-and-a-half-hour historical epic following the literal and

metaphorical journey of soldier T.E. Lawrence across the Arabian desert.

As the action ranges from battle sequences to scenes in the officer’s

mess, Foley sounds include footsteps on marble and sand, the cloth

movements of stiff military uniforms and gossamer Arabian robes,

innumerable armaments (swords, guns, daggers), ice in glasses of

lemonade, and animal sounds, principally camels. I want to focus here on

the scene in which Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) first meets Lawrence (Peter

O’Toole) at a desert watering hole. In long shot and with a long take,

Sherif appears mirage-like on the horizon and gradually comes into the

78 Gledhill and Knight (and other

scholars) make the point that

nontraditional forms of evidence

are central to women’s film

history, in Doing Women’s Film

History, pp. 3–5.

79 Cynthia Moody, interview no. 176

(n.d.) BECTU History Project.

Indeed working on the film made

a deep impression on Moody and

she credits the experience as a

key moment in her professional

development.

80 Selwyn, ‘Stepping out’.

81 Similarly the documentation held

in the Lean archive at the

University of Reading does not

pertain to Lawrence of Arabia.

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.foreground, watched by a mesmerized Lawrence and his nervous friend

Tafas. The scene is without music, has minimal dialogue and is based

around Sherif’s dramatic shooting of Tafas, and a tense exchange

between the two remaining men. Frequently singled out as ‘the film’s

most celebrated sequence’, critical commentary typically focuses on

Lean’s direction and the cinematography of Freddie Young.

Mortimer’s

Foley work, however, adds significant dramatic tension. It signals

the footsteps of the men on the sand, and their variety in tone and texture

– from quick steps to cautious footfalls and stumbling trips – suggests

conflicting emotions of fear and curiosity. Foley sound illustrates the

wordless desperation of Tafas, his hand scrabbling at the cloth saddlebag

to wrench out a gun, whilst his death is indicated by the heavy thud of his

gun falling to the sand. The most striking Foley effect is the sound of the

camel’s hooves as it makes its way into the foreground of the scene.

Elegant and lightly trotting, they carry a dramatic weight in the scene,

announcing Sherif as an impending threat and signalling his arrival with

a ‘harrumph’ of breath when the animal stops, its body sinking to the

ground as Sherif disembarks to confront Lawrence.

According to the director Brownlow, the Foley sound is Mortimer’s

work. Describing her as ‘the best known effects expert’ in the field, ‘a

wizard’ and ‘a miracle worker’, Brownlow recalls that before he worked

with her in 1965, Mortimer had recently ‘padded on all fours in a box of

sand, recording the hoof-beats of camels for Lawrence of Arabia’.

The

significance of the scene was recognized by the director Lean, who

recalled that

when Omar Sharif comes out of the desert, Win Ryder put in the pad,

pad, pad of the camel’s feet. It wasn’t a real sound, but it added

immeasurably to the silence of the desert, the size of it all [...] the

soundtrack ... is almost as important as the pictures.

It is no surprise that Lean should credit Ryder with sole creation of the

scene’s sound, because as a director he would not usually meet the Foley

artist in person. Mortimer would have been hired directly by Ryder in his

capacity as sound editor and head of the post-sync department.

Lean’s

comments about the feet not being ‘real sound’ but adding immeasurably

to the scene are astute, instinctively identifying one of the recognized

characteristics of the best Foley work as its capacity for ‘emotional

resonance’, to communicate the feeling behind an action or sound.

Performers of Mortimer’s calibre were invaluable, adding the kind of

depth and dimension to a film that could lift a soundtrack from the

ordinary to the memorable. Her efforts were rewarded when Lawrence of

Arabia won an Oscar for sound, although it was John Cox who received

the honour as ‘sound director’ for the film.

Despite the lack of official screen credits there is plenty of evidence to

suggest that Mortimer worked regularly throughout the 1960s and 1970s,

notching up Foley credits on many films that used British studios at

Shepperton, including 2001: A Space Odyssey,Superman,Alien (Ridley

82 Melanie Williams, David Lean

(Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 2014), p. 166.

83 Brownlow, How It Happened

Here, p. 179.

84 In Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A

Biography (London: Faber and

Faber, 1997), p. 474.

85 It is for these reasons that David

Lean’s papers contain no archival

traces relating to the creative

work of Foley artists.

86 Wright, ‘Footsteps with

character’, pp. 214–15.

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.Scott, 1979), McKenna’s Gold (J. Lee Thompson, 1969), and many films

in the James Bond franchise.

By the 1980s, with the expansion of

independent filmmaking through Channel 4 and the BFI, Mortimer was

providing Foley sound for experimental filmmakers such as Peter

Greenaway (Drowning by Numbers [1988], The Belly of an Architect

[1987]), Sally Potter (The Gold Diggers [1983]) and Derek Jarman

(Caravaggio [1986]), in addition to animation sound for The BFG (Brian

Cosgrove, 1989). Her range as a Foley performer was considerable,

moving across the body genres of Alien, with its iconic sounds of

frenzied footsteps, male birth and disintegrating synthetic bodies, to the

precise dance sequences that fused cabaret tap and classical ballet in

Potter’s experimental film. By now she had been working in the

profession for over thirty years and had established her place as its

doyenne, revered by her peers for her creativity and her ability to quite

simply ‘do anything’ in Foley work.

Yet the fact remains that someone

who achieved so much in her professional life has no presence in existing

film histories.

Nor was she alone as a woman in this field. Stew, who started his

Foley career in the 1980s, remembers feeling he was ‘unusual’ in a

profession which was dominated by ‘elderly women who’d been doing it

for a while’.

Alongside Mortimer were women such as Pam Finch, Jean

Sheffield, Jennie Lee Wright and Pauline Griffiths, who collectively

were, in Stew’s words, a ‘formidable’ presence who had cornered the

market. The industry preference may initially have been for mixed teams,

but in Stew’s account it was often the case that a team of two women did

all the Foley sound for a film, a characteristic of the British film industry

that he dates from the 1970s. More research is needed to corroborate this

account and to identify the push and pull factors that might explain it

(changes in production levels, greater professional opportunities for men,

and so on) but the relative dominance of women demands our attention,

as does the critical neglect of their role in film histories.

It is likely that women’s over-representation in the role contributed to

its under-representation in film history, as scholars have found this be the

case in other female-dominated areas such as continuity and costume.

In addition to gender, and indeed imbricated with it, are four factors that

have played a part in obscuring Foley work. First is the industry’s delay

in recognizing it as a distinct occupational category. As late as 1985, for

example, Mortimer was still receiving credits as a ‘sound effects editor’

and a ‘dubbing editor’ for what I understand to be her Foley work, a

peculiarity that is explained by the classification systems the industry

used for sound work.

This lack of industry recognition has similarly

blinded film historians to the role. Second, Foley is a postproduction role

whose function, like that of editing, is to work with and amend the

existing production track. This gives it secondary status in production

hierarchies. Interwoven with this are a set of commonly held beliefs that

its function is more imitative than creative, its principal goal being to

accurately sync sound to image and reproduce sounds in a ‘realistic’

91 Wright also makes this point in

‘Footsteps with character’,

pp. 207–8, as does Ament in The

Foley Grail,p.7.

87 Stew, personal correspondence

with the author, and ‘Trade

secrets’.

88 Stew, personal correspondence

with the author.

89 Ibid.

90 Melanie Williams, ‘The continuity

girl: ice in the middle of fire’,

Journal of British Cinema and

Television, vol. 10, no. 3 (2013),

pp. 603–17, and Miranda J.

Banks, ‘Gender below-the-line:

defining feminist production

studies’, in Vicki Mayer, Miranda

J. Banks and John Thornton

Caldwell (eds), Production

Studies: Cultural Studies of

Media Industries (New York, NY:

Routledge, 2009), pp. 87–98.

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.manner – a misconception that has only recently been challenged through

practitioner interviews and a greater understanding of what the role

entails. Third, the industry practice of Foley artists working in pairs

presents a challenge to traditional film histories. Filmmaking processes

are, as Gledhill and Knight acknowledge, ‘essentially collaborative [in]

nature’, but practices such as ‘partnerships’ and ‘co-creation’ fit

awkwardly with conventional notions of authorship, and this leaves them

vulnerable to marginalization in scholarship.

Finally, the lack of

documentation through which to research Foley work illustrates not only

questions of role value and status but reveals something about us as

historians. Mapping Foley work specifically, but also women’s

soundwork more generally, means piecing things together from scraps of

information including anecdotes and hearsay, and being prepared to

engage in a greater level of speculation about their significance. As a

research process this is something that can be professionally

uncomfortable for historians used to dealing with more robust forms of

evidence and processes of verification. As the scholar of early Russian

cinema Michelle Leigh has shown, when faced with these circumstances

we gravitate towards the visible and the verifiable, which has profound

consequences for the film histories we produce.

In the opening to this essay I drew on Lacey and Hilmes’s call to investigate

the power dynamics that frame women’s impact on media and their presence

in the historical record. In the case of Foley, women’s absence from the

historical record is explained by industry classification systems, production

hierarchies and the notions of authorship at play in film scholarship, all of

which are sharply gendered. The relative invisibility of sound women like

Collins is due to the low status of genres such as nonfiction shorts in which

she and others worked. These genres have received relatively little attention

in film scholarship, although this is gradually changing.

What does the history of women’s soundmaking in British film tell us?

When I started this research, the results of my initial union database

enquiries were disheartening if not entirely unexpected, which itself

reveals something of how women’s participation in the post-silent

filmmaking era has been understood.

The numbers of sound women in

the database were so low it seemed there was nothing to be said on the

subject other than noting that women had made small, temporary in-

roads during World War II into what was a male stronghold. From this

unprepossessing start emerged the long careers of Mortimer and Collins,

who made significant creative contributions to British film sound.

Importantly it seems plausible they may not be atypical or exceptional

women – as were the composers Oram and Lutyens – but representative

of a larger cohort, although more research is needed to establish whether

this constitutes a tradition of women soundmakers. It seems that the story

of women’s creative input to British film sound history – from Foleying

classic scenes in Oscar-winning films to laying down the sound

95 The assumed exclusion of women

from sound-era cinema (in

anything other than low-status or

noncreative roles) has become a

well-established narrative in film

scholarship, one which has only

recently begun to be challenged

by the research on Hollywood by

Erin Hill, Never Done: A History

of Women’s Work in Media

Production (New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers University Press, 2016),

and on British film by Sue Harper,

Women in British Cinema: Mad,

Bad and Dangerous to Know

(London: Continuum, 2000).

92 Gledhill and Knight (eds), Doing

Women’s Film History, pp. 6–7.

93 Michele Leigh, ‘Reading between

the lines: history and the studio

owner’s wife’, in Gledhill and

Knight (eds), Doing Women’s Film

History, p. 49.

94 Landmark publications such as

Haidee Wasson and Charles R.

Acland (eds), Useful Cinema

(Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2012), and Patrick Russell

and James Piers Taylor, Shadows

of Progress: Documentary Film in

Post-war Britain (London: BFI

Publishing, 2010) have

significantly extended our

understanding of nonfiction film

and appropriate research

methodologies for its excavation

and analysis.

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.characteristics of the wildlife genre – is only just beginning to be heard.

But the significance of this research extends beyond histories of

soundwork. Thinking methodologically, this study has illustrated that

absence of documentation does not necessarily amount to absence of

women’s (or indeed men’s) creative labour, and that writing history from

fragments – for all its historiographic challenges – has the power to

significantly revise our thinking of film production beyond the features

sector that dominates film discourse. Its further value for future

scholarship lies in its potential to bring into view the professional careers

and creative lives of historical below-the-line workers – many of them

women – who have thus far been absent from traditional cinema

histories.

This research was supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I would like to thank the Council, the

BECTU Oral History Project, interview participants and peerreviewers for their contribution to this research.

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