RACHEL FABIAN

Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston

ABSTRACT This essay examines the work of British “cinefeminist” Claire Johnston, whose
activism, writings, and filmmaking during the 1970s and 1980s merged innovative feminist
media production practices with new modes of theoretical inquiry. Johnston’s 1973 essay
“Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema” was crucial to feminist film theory’s development, yet
the essay’s canonization has reduced her thinking to a handful of theoretical concerns. To
grasp the full political promise of Johnston’s work, this article reconsiders the essay in three
related contexts, examining: the historical circumstances in which it was published and
the feminist debates it participated in; its ties to Johnston’s less noted writings; and its relation
to Johnston’s filmmaking while she was a member of the London Women’s Film Group, a
feminist filmmaking collective committed to building coalitions among women media workers.
This article won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Writing Prize
in 2016. KEYWORDS The Amazing Equal Pay Show (1974), cinefeminism, counter-cinema,
feminist documentary, women’s cinema

At first glance, I was surprised at how unassuming the groundbreaking essay col-
lection Notes on Women’s Cinema () appeared when I discovered it on a
library bookshelf. At forty pages, the eight-by-six-inch pamphlet edited by
British film theorist and filmmaker Claire Johnston was almost lost in the
stacks. The title frames the pamphlet’s contents as “notes,” reflecting its spartan
quality and suggesting that the volume is primarily an informal tool for discus-
sion. The title, however, belies its content, which features the dynamic voices
of feminist film critics and women filmmakers committed to developing theo-
retical models and production strategies to advance the political goals of the
women’s liberation movement.
Johnston’s famous essay “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema” was first
published in this pamphlet, yet it is rarely discussed in context—as part of the
collection of essays, or as only one dimension of Johnston’s much larger body
of work. I begin this essay with my initial encounter with Notes on Women’s
Cinema as a kind of allegory for the material limitations of engaging with

Feminist Media Histories, Vol. , Number , pps. –. electronic ISSN -. ©  by the Regents
of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy
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244
archives of s feminist theory, filmmaking, and activism. The portability
of Notes on Women’s Cinema was key to its dissemination during the s, but
today the pamphlet’s larger significance as an artifact of key developments in
s feminist film theory and practice—and of Johnston’s extensive involve-
ment in such developments—risks being overlooked. Though the “Counter-
Cinema” essay has been reprinted in numerous anthologies and has become a
crucial text in teaching feminist media studies today, its canonization has re-
duced Johnston’s work to a handful of theoretical concerns when, in fact, she
wrote as a theorist and a filmmaker on a variety of topics during the s.1
The films Johnston produced as a member of the London Women’s Film
Group (LWFG), an independent feminist filmmaking collective that operated
from  to  whose members included Midge Mackenzie, Linda Dove,
Barbara Evans, Fran Maclean, Sue Shapiro, Esther Ronay, and Francine
Windham, drew on theoretical debates regarding feminist documentary aes-
thetics to create moving accounts of working-class women’s political organizing.2
In addition to producing feminist films, Johnston and her fellow LWFG
members worked to redress the media industry’s rampant exclusion of women
by organizing filmmaking workshops and lobbying the union heads of the
Association of Cinematograph and Television Technicians (ACTT) to priori-
tize women media workers’ demands. In this article, I argue that contextual-
izing Johnston’s “Counter-Cinema” essay in terms of her broader cultural
activism and filmmaking activities offers a more complex understanding of
s “cinefeminism’s” investments in feminist film history and the politics of
women’s cinema as both theory and practice.3 As I discuss, Johnston’s theori-
zation of “women’s counter-cinema” holds in tension seemingly contradictory
aims: to isolate the roots of women’s universal oppression and to respond to
particular lived experiences of women in more localized and historically con-
tingent terms. Whereas Johnston addressed the former by adopting psychoan-
alytic and post-structuralist theoretical models, her approach to the latter drew
on her efforts to devise histories of women’s filmmaking for the women’s film
events she planned during the decade, as well as her filmmaking and activist
collaborations with women media workers in the UK.
To grasp the full feminist political promise of Johnston’s work that exceeds
the theoreticism that is often attributed to her, this article offers a rereading of
the “Counter-Cinema” essay in three related contexts: in terms of the historical
circumstances in which the essay was published and the feminist film events and
critical debates in which it participated; in relation to Johnston’s less noted
writings and the other essays in the Notes on Women’s Cinema pamphlet; and

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 245

in relation to the film productions and activism initiated by Johnston and the
members of the LWFG, in particular the  film The Amazing Equal Pay
Show and the  ACTT campaign advocating for women media workers.
Tracing Johnston’s more expansive engagements with women’s counter-
cinematic practices challenges assumptions that s feminist film theory was
strictly concerned with destroying identificatory pleasure via avant-garde film-
making strategies, and offers an index of the diverse filmmaking activities and
cultural activism that Johnston and her peers were involved in during this
period.
Following the examples of Meaghan Morris and Mandy Merck, my
approach to Johnston’s oeuvre reconstructs the “conjunctural terms” in which
Johnston framed her polemical statements in the “Counter-Cinema” essay.4
Specifically I am interested in the ways in which examining these “conjunctural
terms” can create new dialogues between feminist media studies’ past and pres-
ent political engagement with women media workers. With the recent fortieth
anniversary of the ACTT report Patterns of Discrimination against Women
in the Film and Television Industries, a  study by researcher Sarah Benton
that was initiated by Johnston and the LWFG members’ protests against gender
discrimination in UK media industries, there has been renewed interest in
examining relations between s feminist film theorizing and women’s orga-
nizing around media labor disputes.5 Furthermore, Johnston’s early interro-
gation of the value of “lost-and-found” histories of women film directors
serves as a precursor to current debates regarding how to “do women’s film his-
tory” while attending to gender’s discursive and historical constructed-ness. As I
discuss, Johnston was acutely aware of the political stakes of publicizing wom-
en’s roles in the histories of commercial and noncommercial filmmaking, as re-
flected in her writings on directors Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino. Her work
consistently cautioned feminist film critics against dismissing the possibility for
feminist filmmaking within the patriarchal hierarchies of the Hollywood indus-
try, but she also remained wary of instituting Arzner and Lupino as part of “a
pantheon of women directors” to be simply emulated.6 Johnston’s work thus
addressed some of the pitfalls of defining women’s film history as the excavation
of feminist “role models,” gesturing to more recent efforts by feminist film his-
torians to acknowledge fractures “between feminist perspectives now and the
perspectives within which historical subjects worked” and distinguish the differ-
ing political stakes of women’s filmmaking activities.7
My engagement with Johnston’s archive is concerned as much with uncov-
ering the range of activities she participated in as a historical figure as it is with

246 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

uncovering the modulations and contradictions that condition the feminist au-
thorial voice of her work and its critical reception. I too face limits in my
engagement with Johnston’s work, relying as I must on secondhand accounts
of her activities, her published materials and completed films, and related archi-
val materials held at the British Film Institute and the Women’s Library at the
London School of Economics. Little information is available about Johnston’s
life prior to the s, and her career was cut short by a battle with mental ill-
ness that resulted in her suicide at the age of forty-seven in . The dearth of
biographical information about Johnston is perhaps surprising given that not
much time has elapsed since her death. Whereas Johnston’s peers have had
opportunities to refine and qualify their theoretical investments and polemical
writings from the s, Johnston’s passing has forestalled scholarly reconsider-
ations of her expansive career, which poses important questions regarding the
politics of remembrance for feminist radicals who have passed away, or who
have been otherwise left behind, in feminism’s own progressive narrative of
first, second, and third “waves.”8 Recent research initiatives, such as the online
Women and Film Project and the Pembroke Center’s Feminist Theory
Archive, have begun the work-intensive process of amassing materials and
ephemera to establish new archives of s cinefeminism for future scholars,
enabling possibilities for more dialogue among contemporary scholars and ear-
lier generations of feminist filmmakers and critics. The desire for boundary
crossing and cross-temporal collaborations that motivate these recent projects
in a way echoes Johnston’s aspirations for her writing and activism during the
s and s, which simultaneously affirmed the value of theoretical ab-
straction and worked to foreground past and present experiences of women ac-
tivists and filmmakers. Looking to Johnston’s work now in the context of her
diverse intellectual and activist commitments, thus, reveals resonant political
strategies and aspirations that until this point have been muted by the field’s
singular focus on her “Counter-Cinema” essay.

I N T R O D U C I N G N OT E S O N W O M E N ’ S C I N E M A

Though unevenly documented, Johnston’s activities during the s put her at
the center of a rapidly changing independent film culture in the UK. She was
involved with the British Film Institute (BFI); the Society for Education in
Film and Television (SEFT), a BFI-funded organization providing resources for
film instructors teaching new courses on film in schools, colleges, and adult
education programs; and the Independent Filmmakers Association (IFA), an
organization that brought together film critics and independent filmmakers to

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 247

lobby the BFI and the union heads of the ACTT. As historians of UK film cul-
ture during this period note, the grassroots political and cultural movements
that took place across Europe in  galvanized many young filmmakers, edu-
cators, and activists in the UK to become involved in both film education and
independent, politicized filmmaking.9 The journal Screen (published by SEFT)
became a key publication for forging connections between activist filmmaking
and film theorizing in the UK and in France, publishing original film scholar-
ship alongside English translations of and commentaries on the vanguard works
of the Cahiers du cinéma collective. The degree to which Screen’s remit included
the development of radical filmmaking was subject to debate among the jour-
nal’s editors, SEFT educators, and BFI governors. Though debates regarding
Screen’s purpose were fractious during the early s, the journal’s develop-
ment reflected broader efforts by politically committed individuals to exert pres-
sure on the BFI and other cultural organizations post-.
Johnston positioned her work as part of this wave of cultural activism and
became a regular contributor to Screen, and as the decade continued, her work
became more explicitly concerned with the feminist political goals articulated
by the international women’s liberation movements. She worked as a freelance
cultural critic and activist in London prior to joining the BFI Members’ Action
Committee in the summer of . This group of young, London-based inde-
pendent filmmakers, writers, and university lecturers protested, among other
things, the BFI Board of Governors’ disinterest in developing new research and
distribution initiatives that would sustain mainstream film production in the
UK as well as political and avant-garde filmmaking.10 In addition to challenging
the BFI’s policies, Johnston was involved in a women’s cinema study group
during this time, which was initiated by Screen editors and contributors to pro-
mote film screenings and discussions related to women’s movement activities. The
group was informally organized and attracted key feminist figures, including
the labor activist Jean McCrindle as well as Laura Mulvey.11 With Mulvey and
Lynda Myles, Johnston co-organized the first women’s cinema program at the
Edinburgh Film Festival (EFF) in . This festival became the subject of
the LWFG’s first collective project, a film featuring interviews with Johnston and
Mulvey produced for broadcast on BBC Two’s Film Night. In April of ,
Johnston also oversaw the first season devoted to women’s films at the National
Film Theater in London, an extension of the EFF’s women’s cinema program.
Notes on Women’s Cinema was published in the UK by SEFT later that same
year in response to these women’s film events. The pamphlet’s eclectic mix of
interviews, original articles, and reprinted essays from authors spanning North

248 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

America and Europe illustrates Johnston’s view that the questions posed by fem-
inists at the EFF’s women’s program and the National Film Theater women’s
season extended beyond the immediate developments in British film culture.
The pamphlet includes a reprinted essay by Naome Gilbert analyzing films
screened at the First International Festival of Women’s Films in New York in
June  (originally published in the US feminist film publication Women and
Film), an interview with the Argentinian-born French filmmaker Nelly Kaplan
conducted in  by Toronto-based scholar and critic (and, later, documentar-
ian) Sarah Halprin (formerly Barbara Halpern Martineau), an original essay by
Halprin on Agnès Varda’s films, and Johnston’s “Women’s Cinema as Counter-
Cinema.”12 Notes on Women’s Cinema was one of several pamphlets published in
the s under the auspices of the BFI and the EFF that Johnston either edited
or contributed to, but these pamphlets mostly focused on individual auteurs,
as with, for example, Johnston’s pamphlet on Frank Tashlin published the same
year as Notes on Women’s Cinema and her later pamphlets on Arzner and
Lupino.
In addition to being one of the few women contributors to Screen, Johnston
also wrote for a variety of specialist, scholarly, and popular publications, includ-
ing the film journals Framework, Sight and Sound, and Jump Cut and the femi-
nist magazine Spare Rib. These publications featured Johnston’s essays on the
Berwick Street Collective’s experimental documentary The Nightcleaners
(), her interview with US filmmaker Cinda Firestone about the  doc-
umentary Attica, and a review of the recent works of Malcolm Le Grice and the
members of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op.13 Johnston also collaborated with
her fellow LWFG members to publish the instructional booklet Film Notes in
 as well as other filmmaker statements and film program guides. As LWFG
member and documentary scholar Barbara Evans explains, the group’s publica-
tions were directed at women with little to no filmmaking experience and
directly reflected the group’s “commitment to sharing skills and understanding
the technical aspects of filmmaking not only among [group members], but also
with other women, and as widely as possible.”14
This survey of Johnston’s publications suggests why, as the editor of Notes
on Women’s Cinema, she felt it was important to bring together a diverse set of
feminist perspectives in the pamphlet. In the introduction, which has never
been republished, Johnston explicitly discusses the social and historical context
the pamphlet’s authors are responding to—namely, the emerging women’s film-
making co-ops and collectives in the United States and the UK, the growth of
feminist publications and writings on women and film, and the EFF women’s

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 249

film event and first season of women’s cinema held at London’s National Film
Theater in . Johnston frequently reminds readers that the pamphlet’s con-
tents, including her “Counter-Cinema” essay, are only one means through
which to establish a “dialogue about the nature of women’s cinema.” This pro-
visional framing of the pamphlet’s contents is belied by its bold red cover, which
polemically states in bold lettering: “The image of women in the cinema has
been an image created by men. The emergent women’s cinema has begun the
transformation of that image. These notes explore ideas and strategies devel-
oped in women’s films” (fig. ). The cover positions the pamphlet as a tract-like

FIGURE 1. Cover of Notes on Women’s Cinema, , edited by Claire

Johnston.

250 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

publication—a notable departure from the catalog style of the other BFI and
EFF pamphlets—that seeks to delimit and make legible an “emergent women’s
cinema.” Interestingly, in her introduction Johnston almost immediately dis-
abuses readers of the view that “women’s cinema” exists as an uncontested cate-
gory, calling attention to the limits of its polemic value:
The Women’s Movement has brought about a reevaluation of the role
of women in the arts in general. A greater emphasis has been placed on
women’s creativity than ever before. Quite clearly, there is a need for such
polemics—indeed, polemics are vital to our strategy—but without any
analysis or theory to back them up, they could become narcissistic and
ultimately self-defeating.15
One of the primary goals of the pamphlet, according to Johnston, is to re-
work feminist polemical writing on film so that it can address larger complexi-
ties of women’s sociopolitical struggles. To achieve this goal, the pamphlet does
not set out to present a unified manifesto about what constitutes women’s
counter-cinema, but rather offers heterogeneous reflections and provocations
from women directors and feminist film critics regarding the state of women’s
filmmaking and on-screen representation. Johnston’s involvement in multiple
spheres of women’s cinema as a critic, filmmaker, activist, and programmer in-
formed her decision to assemble the pamphlet in this manner. The pamphlet’s
introduction channels her experiences, in turn providing several points of entry
for readers to engage the multiplicity of voices that comprised “women’s cin-
ema” and refigure feminist polemical claims.

BEYOND CINEFEMINIST POLEMICS AND TOWARD HISTORICAL

CONJUNCTURES

As Johnston acknowledges in the introduction to Notes on Women’s Cinema,

the polemical form had specific value for feminist film theoretical writing of
the s. In her contemporary analysis of Laura Mulvey’s iconic essay
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (), Mandy Merck situates
Mulvey’s and her feminist peers’ polemical writing style in relation to their
interstitial position in British academia and film culture: “In Britain, the
feminist movement of the early s was mostly composed of educated
middle-class women, but relatively few were employed as academics in a
male-dominated profession. . . . The film studies of the early s were not
undertaken in the country’s universities, but in the British Film Institute,
the film societies, journals ranging from Movie to New Left Review,

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 251

exhibition sites such as the National Film Theatre and the Film-Makers’
Co-Op, events like the EFF, and—importantly—secondary schools.”16
During this period, there were limited opportunities for Johnston and her
cohort to pursue film studies and feminist thought in the academy, but by
 key developments in women’s movement activism in the United States
and the UK helped foster a community of feminist activists, scholars, and film-
makers that Johnston channeled in Notes on Women’s Cinema. Johnston’s spe-
cific involvement in organizing women’s cinema programs while compiling the
pamphlet challenged her to devise a critical framework for addressing women’s
historical involvement in filmmaking that employed the insights of auteurist
and post-structural film analysis, without neglecting women’s past and present
social realities. Her “Counter-Cinema” essay in particular marks her early attempt
to articulate this framework and to evaluate women’s film criticism’s relation to
the women’s movement’s activist strategies.
From the beginning, attracting media coverage was a central component of
the women’s movement’s political activism. Feminist art historian Siona
Wilson points to the  protests of the Miss World Beauty Contest at
London’s Albert Hall as marking “Britain’s first public action in the name of
second-wave feminism.”17 The demonstration was inspired by the US women’s
protest of the  Miss America Beauty Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey,
one of the more visible “beginnings” of the women’s liberation movement in
North America. At the second protest of the Miss World Beauty Contest in
, the London Women’s Liberation Theatre Group, accompanied by the
all-male Gay Street Theatre Group, performed The Flashing Nipple Show, in
which the performers wore black bodysuits decorated with blinking lightbulb
bikinis.18 These well-publicized actions provided the women’s movement with
radical forms of visibility, and pointed to the larger possibilities of employing
media spectacle for feminist activism. Michelene Wandor describes the protest-
ing performers’ unique use of spectacle as follows:
The form the interruption took echoed the pattern of many similar events
initiated by post- student protest: a spectacular interruption of a public
“spectacle,” disrupting an occasion in order to express anger at it and arouse its
audience from their passive consumer roles. But the objective and the pro-
testers were different: feminists were registering anger at the commercializing
of women’s sexuality as it was imagined and packaged for profit by men.19
This commentary emphasizes the increased investment among feminist activists
in developing critical understandings of women’s representation in mainstream

252 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

commercial media. Such critiques became crucial not only for spurring feminist
consciousness and arousing “anger,” but also for creating new kinds of “spectac-
ular” media events that could counter sexist representations of women.
Feminist activism of the early s contributed to the growth in women’s
film criticism during this period. Two works published by US critics Molly
Haskell and Marjorie Rosen gained popularity for developing the “images of
women” approach to analyzing the representational histories of women in film.
Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape () and Rosen’s Popcorn Venus ()
offered a chronological survey of the stereotypical roles women had been con-
fined to in Hollywood cinema throughout the twentieth century.20 Their argu-
ments that Hollywood cinema had failed to provide politically progressive
images of women was a central foil for Johnston in “Counter-Cinema.” She
wrote in the essay’s first paragraph:
Much writing on the stereotyping of women in the cinema takes as its starting
point a monolithic view of the media as repressive and manipulative. . . .
The idea of the intentionality of art which this view implies is extremely
misleading and retrograde, and short-circuits the possibility of a critique
which could prove useful for developing a strategy for women’s cinema. If we
accept that the developing of female stereotypes was not a conscious strategy
of the Hollywood dream machine, what are we left with?21
The introduction goes on to explain that “dream machine” critiques of Hollywood
cinema risk being interpreted in “retrograde” and anti-populist terms and, more
significantly, reduce feminist film criticism to listing positive and negative qualities
of a given film’s depiction of women. Responding to the reductive aspects of
this mode of criticism, Johnston employs Roland Barthes’s Mythologies () to
elaborate how stereotypes of women in film might be considered as something
other than “a distorted mirror image of real women.” While Johnston’s use of
Barthes’s and post-structural theory has been thoroughly discussed by scholars and
thus will not be rehearsed again here, I wish to call attention to her fleeting men-
tions of these theories in “Counter-Cinema” to highlight the issues they posed for
her readers.22 In contrast to the programmatic chronologies provided in Haskell’s
and Rosen’s monographs, the introductory section of “Counter-Cinema” seems
irreverent in its passing references to Erwin Panofsky’s writings, the fetishistic ele-
ments of Mae West’s star persona, and Andrew Sarris’s “derogatory treatment of
women” in The American Cinema ().23
Johnston’s quick transition from her critique of “reflectionist” approaches to
women in cinema to her advocacy of Barthes’s, Peter Wollen’s, and the Cahiers

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 253

du cinéma collective’s development of auteur theory attracted criticism from
feminist film critics at the time.24 Specifically, E. Ann Kaplan wrote in 
that Johnston’s privileging of auteur theory in “Counter-Cinema” “loses sight
of individual films and of the experience of watching a single film.”25 In addi-
tion to critiquing auteur theory’s neglect of the experiential aspects of film view-
ing, Kaplan also pointed to certain flaws in the essay’s tone and structure:
Johnston tries to do too much in a very short space, so that while many new
ideas are introduced, none is fully developed. . . . While Johnston’s essay
importantly asserts the need for a complex, self-conscious theory of feminist
film criticism, her objection to what she derogatorily calls “simplistic”
sociological criticism is misleading. . . . Since Johnston cites no particular
authors, books or articles, one suspects her of setting up an imaginary
opposition.26
Kaplan’s critique of the ambitious nature of Johnston’s essay highlights the con-
tradictions that the “Counter-Cinema” essay poses when read on its own as an
academic article. Yet, as was the case with Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema,” Johnston’s essay was not strictly intended for an academic
audience, but rather was written from the perspective of a feminist activist and
filmmaker invested in hypothesizing the forms of a potential feminist counter-
cinema. Johnston’s brisk rhetorical maneuvering is emblematic of what Mulvey
has more recently described as early feminist film criticism’s sense of urgency,
in which “things had to be said not from choice but from political necessity.”27
As Merck notes of Mulvey’s early essay, the “polemical and unequivocal” tone of
her writing was tempered by its framing as a theoretical treatise—not an aca-
demic article—authored by a feminist activist and independent filmmaker writ-
ing for Screen.28 Johnston’s unwavering dismissal of “sociological” feminist film
criticism was similarly tempered and nuanced by the divergent viewpoints pre-
sented in other essays in Notes on Women’s Cinema and in her other writings,
which many critics like Kaplan did not take into account in their responses to
“Counter-Cinema.”
For example, in “Feminist Politics and Film History,” published in the same
 issue of Screen as Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”
Johnston, as if in response to Kaplan’s earlier criticism, provides a critical anal-
ysis of Haskell’s and Rosen’s books as well as Joan Mellen’s  book Women
and Their Sexuality in the New Film. She acknowledges that these histories
marked important advances in feminist film criticism by cataloging the over-
arching development of women’s roles on-screen. However, for Johnston, these

254 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

monographs also illustrated the significant limits that feminist film critics faced
in developing approaches that could be enabling for women filmmakers, since
Haskell’s and Rosen’s chronologies ultimately devolve into accounts of
Hollywood’s failures and offer no real possibilities for women working in com-
mercial cinema. Echoing the sentiments she expressed in her introduction to
Notes on Women’s Cinema, Johnston observes that the authors’ sweeping
denunciation of Hollywood relies on a bourgeois artistic ideal that cinema can
represent real-life women in a kind of mirror image. Her frustration with this
form of criticism is that it neglects cinema’s mediation of meaning through spe-
cific signifying processes and thus fails to acknowledge that cinema does more
than simply reflect reality. In this review of Haskell’s, Rosen’s, and Mellen’s
studies, Johnston advocates the use of recent models of textual analysis that
draw on psychoanalytic perspectives, as advanced by the Cahiers du cinéma col-
lective, to trace the production of cinematic meaning, recalling the points she
made more succinctly in “Counter-Cinema.” In the conclusion of her review,
though, Johnston offers an important auto-critical disclaimer for adapting these
theoretical models, warning that they could “lead to a kind of a-historical vol-
untarism, in which the particular historical conjuncture in which the films
function is considered irrelevant.”29
Johnston’s concern regarding of the hermetic tendency of textual analysis is
not stated in such pointed terms in “Counter-Cinema,” but her framing of
Notes on Women’s Cinema demonstrates her openness to multiple theoretical
models and feminist approaches to film criticism. For Johnston, the priorities
of feminist film criticism should remain flexible in order to better speak to the
specific circumstances shaping women’s political struggle. Such flexibility might
mean that feminist film critics and filmmakers will likely have conflicting views,
and Johnston foregrounds this potential for such conflict in the pamphlet’s in-
troduction. In her preview of Sarah Halprin’s and Naome Gilburt’s essays, she
points out that both authors employ the same sociological approaches to study-
ing women’s cinema that she directly critiques in “Counter-Cinema”:
Quite clearly, the views expressed in this pamphlet share a great deal of
common ground; they also constitute very different and ultimately irrecon-
cilable positions on the cinema. If film criticism . . . is to have any use, it is
that it should provide a greater understanding of how film operates, which
will ultimately feed back into filmmaking itself.30
The word “irreconcilable” at first suggests a certain failing on behalf of the
contributors to formulate complementary views of women’s counter-cinema.

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 255

However, Johnston’s editorial decision to assemble these diverse works reflects
her broader commitment to feminist film criticism’s intellectual diversity. For
Johnston, sustaining diversity would help safeguard feminist film criticism’s
“use value” for feminist filmmaking efforts and, importantly, prevent feminist
film criticism from becoming a noncontradictory and insular discourse.
The pamphlet’s investment in combining works that both shared “common
ground” and featured “irreconcilable” positions speaks to Johnston’s experience
programming the  National Film Theater season of women’s cinema and
the  EFF women’s event. In her comments to a London Times reporter cov-
ering these events, Johnston explained the goal of the programs primarily was
“to build up a women’s cinema by showing that it has a history and giving it
some kind of historical perspective.”31 Specifically, the EFF women’s event and
the National Film Theater season of women’s cinema included films spanning
three “categories”: “Hollywood” films directed by Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino,
and Lois Weber; “s” art films directed by Agnés Varda, Nelly Kaplan, and
Nadine Trintignant; and the “liberation movement films” Three Lives () by
the American director Kate Millett, and Women Talking () by the British
director (and Johnston’s fellow LWFG member) Midge Mackenzie.32 In the
publicity for these events, Johnston clarified that the programs did not offer an
exhaustive historical survey, but rather were organized to encourage attendees to
draw new connections among films spanning distinct production conditions,
historical periods, and national contexts.33 Johnston’s interest in creating festi-
val programs that foregrounded different genealogies of women’s cinema—as
well as the connections among them—sheds light on her editorial framing of
Notes on Women’s Cinema’s diverse interventions. Furthermore, her explicit aim
to provide a “historical” perspective on women’s involvement in filmmaking
through these programs further troubled Haskell’s and Rosen’s accounts that
viewed commercial cinema as inherently patriarchal and denigrating toward
women, as clearly Arzner’s, Lupino’s, and Weber’s filmmaking indicated other-
wise. In Johnston’s approaches to women’s cinema history, then, there is the rec-
ognition that gender operates as a socio-discursive category that can in certain
historical moments be mobilized for potentially feminist ends. However, the fact
that Arzner and other women directors eschewed the “feminist” label also alerted
Johnston to the ways in which the concept of “women’s cinema” could flatten
out key distinctions among different historical experiences of “womanhood.”34
In addition to highlighting historical perspectives, Johnston’s programming
activities were overtly committed to fostering women’s contemporary film-
making. For example, a Spare Rib report by the LWFG on the National Film

256 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

Theater season pointed out that Johnston’s program featured an “open screen-
ing for women only, at which any woman could show her work in the context
of a sympathetic audience.”35 This commitment is similarly evident in the Notes
on Women’s Cinema pamphlet, which features an interview with filmmaker
Nelly Kaplan. Kaplan’s inclusion in the pamphlet reflects a significant trend in
Johnston’s written work, which consistently featured filmmaker statements
and/or incorporated interviews with directors. In part this reflects a trend in
film criticism during this period, but it also points to Johnston’s effort to engage
directors’ perspectives, providing readers with access to accounts in which
directors detailed in their own words challenges they faced in producing and
distributing their work. Indeed, Kaplan’s interview gave Johnston the
opportunity to juxtapose her theory of counter-cinema with a filmmaker’s
own perspective on how women filmmakers conceptualize their work as margi-
nalized members of the filmmaking community. Including these interviews
further allowed Johnston to directly insert questions about women filmmakers’
production practices as part of the work of theorizing women’s counter-cinema.
Perhaps in an effort to establish a critical distance between herself and the
filmmakers she interviewed, Johnston never acknowledged her own involvement
with the LWFG in her individual writings, and so she was never granted the
benefit of having her theoretical work considered alongside her filmmaking
activities in the same way that Mulvey did. This omission was aligned with the
LWFG’s avowed commitment to working collectively and placing the feminist
goals of the group above individual claims of artistry. Though Johnston herself
did not disclose her filmmaking experience in her writing, in the “Counter-
Cinema” essay she analyzes the contradictions that undergird any feminist claim
of authorial intention, whether the author in question is a Hollywood director
or an activist filmmaking collective. In so doing, she confronted the utopian im-
pulses of the women’s liberation movement with which the LWFG was directly
involved. Yet this confrontation did not result in Johnston’s dismissal of such
utopian ideals for a feminist counter-cinema, but rather refigured them as emerg-
ing out of the dialectic encounter of film theory and practice.

POLITICIZING WOMEN’S MEDIA WORK: JOHNSTON AND THE LONDON

WOMEN’S FILM GROUP

Johnston’s involvement with the LWFG served a testing ground for the
“Counter-Cinema” essay’s trenchant critiques of “sociological” approaches to
examining women’s media representation, and provided her with a practice-
oriented perspective for considering the degree to which “idealist and utopian”

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 257

claims regarding “women’s creativity” were necessary for sustaining feminist cul-
tural activism. Johnston and her fellow LWFG members described the group’s
origins in a  statement, noting that it formed in direct response to women’s
liberation political organizing. One significant event that informed many of the
group’s members was the  Women’s Conference at Ruskin College at
Oxford University, which brought together five hundred women, including
feminist thinkers like Sheila Rowbotham and Juliet Mitchell, and launched the
four political demands of the movement: equal pay, equal education and
job opportunities, free access to contraceptives and abortion, and free twenty-
four-hour nurseries.36 This conference attracted mainly white educated middle-
class women, yet participants made a conscious effort to align their demands with
those that had already been voiced by working-class women involved in recent
industrial disputes, namely the  Ford Dagenham Strike. The strike was a key
event that galvanized solidarity actions among women workers throughout the
UK and contributed to the passing of the Equal Pay Act by British Parliament
in .
The rise of cooperative, worker-controlled factories helmed by women, such
as Fakenham Enterprises, a co-operative shoe factory founded in Fakenham,
Norfolk, by women workers who protested the factory’s closure in spring
, provided further inspiration to movement organizers who wished to sup-
port the political agency of working-class women who were challenging hierar-
chical, corporatized, exploitative labor practices. These examples of working
women’s political activism fostered a broader feminist interest in radical working-
class histories and labor organizing strategies that focused on women’s unique
oppression under capitalist society.37 The wave of student protests in Europe in
 and the New Left political organizing also galvanized women students
and workers in the UK to participate in public protests, but, as has been well
documented, women’s political demands were overwhelmingly marginalized
within the New Left. The women-only political events and protests men-
tioned above, thus, were not only crucial for UK women to make demands
at a policy level, but were also important for countering the suppression of
women’s voices in union organizing and leftist politics.38
The political meetings and labor activism described above were the focus of
many feminist films of the period, and movement filmmakers were inspired by
these events to form women-only skill-sharing workshops and film collectives.
In , the first meeting of what would become the LWFG was advertised
in the Women’s Liberation Newsletter and Time Out by Midge Mackenzie, a
London native and trained filmmaker. Mackenzie was involved in a number of

258 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

women’s movement activities during the late s in the United States and
the UK, and directed the documentary Women Talking in , featuring
Kate Millett and Betty Friedan in conversation with other feminists, as well as
the  BBC television series about early suffragists, Shoulder to Shoulder.39
The first meeting attendees included women with differing levels of involve-
ment in women’s movement activities and filmmaking. Establishing film train-
ing sessions became a primary goal of the early meetings, with the more
experienced filmmakers teaching other members how to make a film in a
hands-on manner, and ultimately inspired the group to self-publish an instruc-
tional filmmaking booklet for women, Film Notes, in .
The success of these training activities revealed the potential for coalition
building among women in the media industries, and one of LWFG’s key initia-
tives became campaigning around discrimination against women workers in the
UK media industries. Soon after its formation, the LWFG lobbied ACTT
union leaders to hire Sarah Benton, an independent researcher, to conduct a re-
port detailing the current job conditions of women media workers across labor
grades. The final report, titled Patterns of Discrimination against Women in the
Film and Television Industries, thoroughly documented the structural barriers
faced by women seeking work in higher labor grades. These barriers included
insufficient training programs for women, lack of on-site day-nursery facilities,
frequent union gatherings and sponsored “Stag Nights” that were exclusive to
male members, and rampant job segregation that feminized lower labor grades,
such as television production assistants, who were “typecast as ‘glorified secretar-
ies’ and regularly passed over for promotion” (fig. ).40 The report directly chal-
lenged ACTT union heads to acknowledge the endemic gender inequality
within both independent and mainstream film and television sectors, and, im-
portantly, the union’s own sexist attitudes toward women workers. The report
was also significant in that it served as an actionable document for women
union members struggling for better employment conditions. Furthermore, the
report motivated the union to establish training schemes for women working in
lower pay grades, and LWFG members took on an active role in running these
union-sponsored training workshops.41
Benton’s report relied in part on the support of Johnston and her fellow
LWFG members, who all appeared on BBC Two’s Open Door program to dis-
cuss the significance of Benton’s findings as well as their experiences “working
in the context of a male-dominated film industry.”42 Johnston also utilized her
connection with Screen to publicize the LWFG’s campaign against gender dis-
crimination and Benton’s report in her  article “Women in the Media

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 259

FIGURE 2. A protest against the male-only “Stag Night” fundraiser
hosted by leaders the Association of Cinematograph and Television
Technicians (ACTT). Members of the London Women’s Film
Group participated in the protest to call out the hypocrisy of the
“Stag Night” in light of their recent efforts to lobby the ACTT to
publish the  report Patterns of Discrimination against Women in
the Film and Television Industries. Photo: Laurence Sparham, from
Jill Nichols, “United We Stag,” Spare Rib, February .

Industries.” In this article published in Screen, Johnston applauds the report’s

“distinctly feminist” and egalitarian perspective, explaining that it provides an
important step for helping “women in the communications industries see the
need to struggle as workers to change the sexist nature of the media in which
they are employed. . . . The feminist critique of the media must of necessity
make these connections.”43 This quote serves as a rare instance in which the
concerns of women media workers were brought to bear on Screen’s film theo-
retical projects, which at that point had been largely concerned with the ideo-
logical underpinnings of film texts, not media industry disputes. Moreover,
the article demonstrates Johnston’s broader conviction that it was possible for

260 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

women media workers to advance feminist political goals and transform the
mainstream media industries from within, something that Rosen and Haskell
did not see as a possibility.
At first glance, Johnston’s critique of polemic claims regarding “women’s cre-
ativity” in the “Counter-Cinema” essay seems to discount women filmmakers’
critical agency and their creative approaches to film work. Johnston’s use of
auteur theory offers a significant intervention for rethinking the polemic claims,
yet as critics have pointed out, it also obscures the actual struggles media work-
ers face in trying to transform mainstream media production. Johnston’s
involvement with the LWFG’s ACTT campaign, though, indicates that she
acknowledged some of the critical blind spots of her theoretical writing. Her
commitment to the group’s collective approach to film production also compli-
cated her view regarding the limits of feminist utopian ideals for women’s film-
making. Early in “Counter-Cinema” Johnston critiques the utopianism of
collective filmmaking efforts, yet in her conclusion she points out that “the
development of collective work is obviously a major step forward; as a means of
acquiring and sharing skills it constitutes a formidable challenge to male privi-
lege in the film industry; as an expression of sisterhood, it suggests a viable alter-
native to the rigid hierarchical structures of male-dominated cinema and offers
real opportunities for dialogue about the nature of women’s cinema within it.”44
Here Johnston admits that her own skepticism of feminist ideals is incapable of
overruling her desire to see women gain better access to media production train-
ing and develop alternative modes of media work. These concluding remarks
also position the “Counter-Cinema” essay not only as a film theoretical tract,
but as only one among many forums in which a “dialogue about the nature of
women’s cinema” might be staged. Johnston’s filmmaking with the LWFG
affords another opportunity to track the contours of this dialogue, specifi-
cally in terms of the debates around feminist documentary strategies, and
her film work in many ways situates her perceived theoretical investments
in more nuanced terms.

COUNTERING COUNTER-CINEMA: REALIST AESTHETICS, REAL

AUDIENCES

In “Counter-Cinema,” Johnston’s critique of the “sociological” approach in

feminist film criticism focuses primarily on its flawed assumption that films
can simply mirror the “reality” of the social circumstances in which they are
produced. This logic informed much early feminist filmmaking, which em-
ployed realist aesthetics to produce films about the struggles of “real women”

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 261

(that is, non-actors whose commentary was not scripted). In “Counter-
Cinema,” Johnston singles out the work of Varda, Millett, Mackenzie, and
Shirley Clarke, challenging their noninterventionist approach to making
films about the lives of women. According to Johnston, these directors do
not truly challenge cinema’s role in reproducing patriarchal ideology because
they assume a “bourgeois and idealistic notion that the cinema can represent
the struggles of real women.”45
Johnston’s views galvanized debates among feminist filmmakers and critics
regarding the place of documentary portrayals of women’s lived experience in
her model of women’s counter-cinema. Christine Gledhill and Julia Lesage
offered two compelling counterarguments to Johnston’s critique of realism, call-
ing attention to the significance of documentary for the spread of the women’s
movement in the United States and the UK. Writing in , Gledhill pointed
out that while Johnston’s intervention importantly spurred feminist filmmakers
to reflect on and interrogate realist filmmaking strategies, Johnston’s mono-
lithic categorization of “realist filmmaking” obscured the different uses of this
aesthetic mode among various oppressed groups. Gledhill also took issue with
the ways in which critiques of realism advanced psychoanalytically defined no-
tions of spectatorship, in the process overlooking “the audience as it is consti-
tuted outside the text in different sets of social relations such as class, gender,
race, etc.”46 That same year Lesage chronicled the development of feminist doc-
umentary filmmaking in the United States, explaining that feminist documen-
tary was informed by women’s testimonial exchanges that took place in
consciousness-raising groups. Furthermore, Lesage elaborated that, as opposed
to naively believing in “the camera’s innocence,” feminist filmmakers saw doc-
umentary film as an invaluable tool for ensuring that feminist films would be
distributed to wider audiences: “If feminist filmmakers deliberately used a tradi-
tional ‘realist’ documentary structure, it is because they saw making these films
as an urgent public act and wished to enter the mm circuit of educational
films especially through libraries, schools, churches, unions, and YWCAs to
bring Feminist analysis to many women it might otherwise never reach.”47
Johnston’s “Counter-Cinema” essay did not anticipate Lesage’s and Gledhill’s
critiques of her theoretical dismissal of “realist” filmmaking, but it is important
to note that Johnston’s critique of realism was informed by and revised through
her involvement with the LWFG, whose early films were very much invested in
the feminist documentary ethos Lesage described. As LWFG member Barbara
Evans notes, the group’s early documentaries, such as Betteshanger ’ (), a
film documenting a Kentish woman’s efforts to organize miners’ wives during

262 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

the  miners’ strike, were explicitly committed to working-class women’s
struggles. Betteshanger ’ was the first film that LWFG produced collectively,
and its focus on the political activities of working-class women drew on the doc-
umentary techniques of films made by individual members before they became
involved in LWFG. For example, earlier in  LWFG member Sue Shapiro
filmed Fakenham Occupation, a documentary featuring interviews with women
shoe factory workers who had attracted national attention for organizing a
work-in to protest the factory’s closure. As mentioned, the Fakenham work-in
was a key event for the growing women’s movement in the UK, and Shapiro’s
film influenced the LWFG members’ approach to making documentaries that
foregrounded the women’s movement’s commitment to working-class struggle.
Barbara Evans also explains that the  documentary Women of the
Rhondda, filmed by Shapiro, Mary Kelly, Mary Capps, Margaret Dickinson,
Esther Ronay, and Brigid Segrave, was one of the more popular works produced
by the group.48 The documentary focuses on oral histories of Welsh women’s
experiences organizing activities during the miners’ strikes of the s and
s. The film was shot in black and white with the assistance of Humphry
Trevelyan of the Berwick Street Collective, since LWFG members had not yet
been fully trained to use cameras. Like many feminist documentaries of the pe-
riod, Women of the Rhondda does not employ voice-over narration, but rather
gives full documentary authority to the accounts of the older generation of
women activists. Each woman is shown in a close-up as she recalls her experien-
ces, but the close-ups are intercut with archival images of men striking and con-
temporary footage of the women doing housework. This image sequence points
out the absence of women in visual records of these early labor disputes, and by
juxtaposing footage of women engaged in the invisible labor of housework with
the hypervisible and celebrated images of striking miners, it offers a feminist cri-
tique of the gendered biases of union organizing.
The  LWFG film The Amazing Equal Pay Show marked a distinct shift
in the collective’s filmmaking, which resulted from their concerns about the po-
litical effectiveness of their documentaries. In a  statement, Johnston and
fellow LWFG members discussed their frustrations with trying to communicate
specific messages regarding women’s struggles in their documentaries, writing,
“Women of the Rhondda and Betteshanger ’ worked within a realist naturalis-
tic tradition; the material was intended to speak for itself. Both films ask the
audience to make their own deductions, and we hoped or assumed their deduc-
tions would be the same as ours. But we learned that audiences weren’t neces-
sarily in accord with our views unless they were already previously committed to

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 263

feminism.”49 This perceived failure to engage with women audiences spurred
the collective to adapt different formal techniques in their films. The collective
goes on to explain in their  statement how The Amazing Equal Pay Show
was inspired by their desire to “make a political film which was entertaining,”
yet still overtly didactic.50 The hour-long film, which combines documentary
filmmaking techniques alongside elements of the Hollywood musical genre
with Brechtian agitprop performance styles, was the first narrative film project
the collective undertook, taking two years to produce.
The film is based on a play—a burlesque depicting recent struggles faced by
working-class women fighting for equal pay and union recognition—collectively
written by the theater group that performed The Flashing Nipple Show at the
 Miss World protests in London. The Amazing Equal Pay Show adopted
the source play’s Brechtian use of the theatrical tableau format, such that the
central villain, Mr. Marvo, serves as the ringleader for an oppressive capitalist
circus (fig. ). Throughout the film, we see different groups of women struggling
against Marvo and various government officials in an effort to pass the 
Equal Pay Act. The film stages comic yet acerbically critical reenactments of re-
cent clashes between the British working class and heads of state and industry,
such as the strike at the Ford Dagenham plant, with the women performers in
the seven tableaux performing caricatures of the social types embroiled in the

FIGURE 3. The Women’s Street Theatre Group performs The Amazing Equal Pay Play,
on which The Amazing Equal Pay Show is based. The characters, from left to right,
are the housewife “who produces future children,” the misogynist trade union official,
and the burlesque’s ringleader Mr. Marvo. Photo: Fran McLean, from Marsha Rowe,
“The Art of Women’s Liberation Propaganda,” Spare Rib, August .

264 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

conflicts (the misogynist union head, the steadfast leader of the protesting
women, the biased BBC news reporter, and so on).
Importantly, the LWFG incorporated another dynamic of the original play
by filming a documentary-style sequence featuring the daily life of a working
mother, Ina. This scene deploys realist filmmaking conventions, using a mostly
fixed, fly-on-the wall perspective with an accompanying voice-over of Ina de-
scribing her frustrations with being overworked and undervalued by her hus-
band and her employer. This scene breaks from the bawdy tableau scenes,
and at first it is not immediately clear whether the woman depicted is an actress
or if we are being shown documentary footage of someone going about her day-
to-day activities. We are first introduced to Ina as she enters her small apart-
ment with her children. The audio alternates between diegetic sounds of Ina
doing banal household chores and what we presume to be her voice-over narra-
tion. As Ina recounts her struggles as a working mother, we see her preparing
the evening meal, tidying up the apartment, and ironing in front of the televi-
sion set. Her voice-over concludes with the aspirational statement, “Sometimes
I lie in bed and think, ‘I’m not getting up today,’ then I lie in bed and think of
all the things I might do if I had a day to myself.” Whereas the other tableau
scenes in The Amazing Equal Pay Show foreground the sheer spectacle of the
on-screen performance and largely take place in public, outdoor settings in front
of a diegetic audience, the scene depicting Ina meditating on her experience as a
working mother as she completes household chores calls on the documentary
conventions used in earlier LWFG productions like Women of the Rhondda.
Johnston’s writing in the “Counter-Cinema” essay has been critiqued for its
reductive claims about feminist documentary, but her work with the LWFG
illustrates that she viewed realist aesthetics as having a continued strategic value
for feminist filmmaking projects. The LWFG’s experimental approach to fore-
grounding spectacle in The Amazing Equal Pay Show speaks to Johnston’s own
theoretical investments in merging political and entertainment filmmaking strat-
egies. Yet the LWFG’s collaboration with the women’s movement–associated
London Women’s Theatre Group and its inclusion of the documentary-style
footage of Ina illustrate the members’ commitment to feminist filmmaking’s
grassroots orientation and documentary modes of address. The film in many
ways anticipates Gledhill’s  call to revise feminist film theoretical interests
in semiotics and psychoanalysis to more fully encourage further dialogue with
the political goals of the women’s liberation movement. Johnston’s involvement
in the LWFG’s filmmaking effort demonstrates that she experimented with the
possibilities of documentary conventions in her model of counter-cinema and,

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 265

importantly, was willing to challenge her own theoretical investments in re-
sponse to the concerns of actual women audiences who attended screenings of
LWFG’s films.

CONCLUSION

In adapting a collective structure, the LWFG deliberately drew on forms of ac-

tivism that emerged from the women’s movement’s political organizing and
community building activities (namely, consciousness-raising groups and femi-
nist study groups). The LWFG was not the only women’s film collective work-
ing at the time, although Johnston, writing in Spare Rib about the group’s
attendance at the  International Women’s Film Seminar in Berlin organized
by Claudia von Alemann and Helke Sander, observed: “A surprising fact was
that in spite of the emphasis on collective work in the Women’s Movement, we
from the London Women’s Film Group seemed to be among the very few who
have attempted to put our ideals into practice and actually work together in a
group, exchanging skills. . . . But what have we really achieved in our own terms
in the last two years?”51 The challenge posed here by Johnston, to “attempt” to
put the women’s movement’s “ideals into practice” and to ask, “What have we
really achieved in our own terms?” reflects the sense of urgency that grounded
the theoretical interventions of the “Counter-Cinema” essay and Johnston’s
writing and film work throughout the decade.
In , the LWFG dissolved as its members either moved away or left the
group to pursue other projects that were less demanding than the collective’s
mostly unpaid work.52 Two years later, Johnston co-organized a Feminism and
Cinema event at the EFF with Mulvey, Lynda Myles, and Angela Martin, which
included panel discussions with leading feminist film critics and filmmakers
reflecting on “the relationship of theory to practice in representations of and for
women” almost a decade after EFF’s first women’s cinema event in .53 In
addition to the panel discussions, the  event featured premiere screenings of
now-canonical feminist films, including Michelle Citron’s Daughter Rite (),
Sally Potter’s Thriller (), Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling’s The Song of
the Shirt (), and Jan Worth’s Taking a Part (). As B. Ruby Rich states,
these premiere screenings served as “points of unification” in contrast to the
panel participants’ “theoretical antagonisms.”54 In , Johnston published an
essay in Screen titled “The Subject of Feminist Film Theory/Practice,” which re-
flected on the debates voiced during the event by critics like Pam Cook, Gledhill,
Rich, Mulvey, and others. In the essay, Johnston considers how these debates
attempted to “locate feminist politics within a conception of film as a social

266 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

practice, on the dialectic of making and viewing and on film as a process rather
than object.” After noting and responding to Gledhill’s critiques of the totalizing
aspects of psychoanalytically informed theories of cinematic identification,
Johnston firmly states her view that feminist film criticism is foremost “a dialec-
tical discursive activity, embedded in the real, and always exceeded and trans-
formed by practice—a constant dialectic with the aim of breaking of exchange
for use.” Specifically she explains that while the focus on textual analysis was cru-
cial for framing cinema as a site of ideological struggle for the burgeoning wom-
en’s movement, “theoretical work on the relationship between text and subject
and the historical subject is now more important.”55
This statement suggests a radical change in Johnston’s thinking, given the
prominence of her work in advancing the theoretical models that Gledhill cri-
tiqued. However, Johnston’s view that theory should be continually tested and
informed by filmmaking practice reflects her earlier efforts in the Notes on
Women’s Cinema pamphlet to establish a dialogic relation between critics and
filmmakers. Johnston’s endeavors to relate theories of the cinematic apparatus
to cinema’s capacity to engage political struggle marked a productive tension in
her work throughout the decade, one that reflected the diverse components of
the emerging feminist film culture of the period. Johnston’s activism with
LWFG moreover illustrates feminist film theory’s early intersections with femi-
nist labor organizing activities, and her involvement in the ACTT antidiscrim-
ination campaign in particular expanded the scope of feminist film criticism to
address the struggles of women media workers. And while Johnston mobilized
a rhetoric of urgency along with her fellow LWFG members in their lobbying
efforts, her activism was also acutely informed by the historical perspectives of
earlier generations of women filmmakers whose perspectives she included in her
programming and editorial work.
By the end of the s, women’s studies and film studies became established
in universities, providing feminist film critics and filmmakers with new institu-
tional support and professional identities. At the grassroots level, women activists
in the UK were facing public attacks strengthened by the rise of Thatcherism,
which dealt a blow to women’s movement organizers and other activist groups
that continues to reverberate today. The ideals of egalitarianism and collectivity
that motivated feminist activists as well as movement filmmakers suffered under
such attacks and became crippled by the withdrawal of state funding from femi-
nist cultural organizations.56
In  Johnston stopped publishing altogether, and she worked as a lecturer
in film studies at Middlesex University until  (fig. ). Reflecting on the

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 267

Claire Johnston, from her obituary written by Verina
FIGURE 4.
Glaessner for The Independent (London), November , .

timing of Johnston’s passing, Meaghan Morris notes that while it is tempting to

ask “why Johnston’s activism could not endure the s, what ‘went wrong’?”
it is even more important to “wonder how it survived the s—in other words,
what went right.”57 Indeed, as I have argued, reading Johnston’s “Counter-
Cinema” essay in light of her broader involvement in feminist media activism in
the s, and in some cases against the unequivocal tone of essay itself, it is clear
that the foundation of a feminist counter-cinema does not rely on the dictates of
any one theorist, but rather on a continued productive tension between feminist
theoretical projects and the cultural practices and historical phenomena they
seek to address. Acknowledging this tension seems particularly vital in an argu-
ably “postfeminist moment,” in which scholars and activists increasingly look to
archives of feminist activism to devise political strategies for the present. This ef-
fort is echoed in Alexandra Juhasz’s recent invitation to engage “the future of
feminist media scholarship” by beginning “with a return [to the s]: a home-
coming to the feminist media community and movement from whence it was
born,” in which feminist media critics affirmed their “solidarity with the makers,

268 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

viewers, programmers, distributors, and institutions,” to foster a feminist media
culture that reverberates with the political aspirations of those who have passed
but are not forgotten.58

R ACHEL F ABIAN is a PhD candidate in the Film and Media Studies department at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. She is the former managing editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture,
and Media Studies and also served as the editor for the Media Fields Journal special issue “Access/
Trespass.” In 2016 she received the Joan R. Challinor Dissertation Research Award from the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is currently completing her disserta-
tion, entitled “Collectivity and Its Discontents: Transnational Figurations of 1970–80s Collective
Media-Making and Activist Affects.”

NOTES

I would like to thank Constance Penley, Janet Walker, and Charles Wolfe for their
encouragement during the early stages of writing this article, and Shelley Stamp and
Christine Gledhill for their incisive comments and editorial feedback.
. A chronological list of the key reprintings of Johnston’s essay “Women’s Cinema as
Counter-Cinema” is as follows: in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley:
University of California Press, ), –; in Sexual Stratagems: The World of
Women in Film, ed. Patricia Erens (New York: Horizon, ), –; in Feminist
Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (New York: New York University Press,
), –; in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, ); in Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, ), –.
. Importantly, the filmmaking backgrounds of the LWFG members varied. See
Barbara Evans, “Rising Up: A Memoir of the London Women’s Film Group,
–,” Feminist Media Histories , no.  (): –.
. B. Ruby Rich, introduction to Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist
Film Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Rich’s volume draws out
a history of feminist filmmaking and activism in the s and s that was not always
accounted for in the academic writings of feminist film scholars like Laura Mulvey and
Johnston. Though Rich’s writing is highly critical of the psychoanalytic models employed
by feminist film theorists and their neglect of other areas of women’s experience and
cultural engagement, her work inspires my own study of the social and cultural contexts
out of which cinefeminism emerged.
. Meaghan Morris, “Too Soon Too Late: In Memory of Claire Johnston, –,”
in Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
), xiii–xxiii; Mandy Merck, “Mulvey’s Manifesto,” Camera Obscura, no.  ():
–.
. This resurgence is reflected in recent events like the  Doing Women’s Film
and Television History III Conference in Leicester, England, which featured panel
discussions commemorating the recent fortieth anniversary of the Patterns of
Discrimination report.

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 269

. Claire Johnston, “Dorothy Arzner: Critical Strategies,” in The Work of Dorothy
Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema, ed. Claire Johnston (London: British Film Institute,
), .
. Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight, eds., introduction to Doing Women’s Film
History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future (Champaign: University of Illinois Press,
), .
. Examples of these critical reassessments by feminist film scholars involved in the
s cinefeminist debates include Laura Mulvey, “Looking at the Past from the Present:
Rethinking Feminist Film Theory of the s,” Signs , no.  (): –;
Constance Penley, “Interview with Constance Penley by Jon Cruz and Lisa Parks,”
European Journal of Cultural Studies , no.  (): –; E. Ann Kaplan,
“Unfixings: Archiving the Future,” Camera Obscura, no.  (): –; and the
recent retrospective of the work of Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Beyond the Scorched Earth
of Counter-Cinema, presented by Whitechapel Gallery, London, May –, .
Questions regarding the politics of remembering feminist radicals of the s were
recently posed in response to the  death of Shulamith Firestone, who authored The
Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution in ; see Susan Faludi, “Death of a
Revolutionary,” New Yorker, April , , https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/
///death-of-a-revolutionary. See also Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The
Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).
. While there is insufficient space here to detail the key roles these institutions and
events played in the development of independent and activist filmmaking activity
during the s in the UK, in recent years there has been a concerted effort to
document this period by those who were directly involved in these shifts. For exemplary
accounts, see Margaret Dickinson, Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, –
(London: British Film Institute, ); Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Christophe Dupin,
eds., The British Film Institute, The Government and Film Culture, –
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, ); Terry Bolas, Screen Education: From
Film Appreciation to Media Studies (Bristol: Intellect, ); Laura Mulvey and Peter
Wollen, “From Cinephilia to Film Studies,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee
Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –.
. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “The  Crisis at the BFI and Its Aftermath,” Screen ,
no.  (): . Johnston was a very visible actor of the Members Action Committee,
as described in a  Times article on the reactions of BFI governor George Hoellering
and BFI Production Board officer Bruce Beresford to the Members Action
Committee’s “attack” on the BFI. As the article explains, Hoellering and Beresford
both threatened to sue Johnston and Time Out for publishing the Members Action
Committee’s “libelous” accusations that Hoellering and Beresford had abused their
authority at the BFI. “BFI Attack Ends in Legal Action,” London Times, January ,
, .
. The official starting date of the group is unclear, though Terry Bolas states that
Johnston’s involvement predated the publication of Notes on Women’s Cinema. Bolas,
Screen Education, .

270 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

. Naome Gilburt, “To Be Our Own Muse: The Dialectics of a Culture Heroine,”
–; Nelly Kaplan, “Nelly Kaplan Interviewed by Barbara Halpern Martineau with an
Introduction by Claire Johnston,” –; Barbara Halpern Martineau, “Subjecting Her
Objectification or, Communism Is Not Enough,” –; Claire Johnston, “Women’s
Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” –, all in Notes on Women’s Cinema, ed. Claire
Johnston (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, ). My subsequent
notes citing Notes on Women’s Cinema are from this  edition.
. Johnston’s Spare Rib publications include her analysis of the documentary The
Nightcleaners, which was excerpted and republished in the US film journal Jump Cut. See
“The Nightcleaners (part one),” Spare Rib, no.  (): ; and Claire Johnston, “The
Nightcleaners (part one): Rethinking Political Cinema,” Jump Cut, nos. / ():
–. She also published in Spare Rib a report on the  Women’s Film Event at
Edinburgh, cowritten with her fellow members of the London Women’s Film Group,
and an interview with Cinda Firestone on the politics of Firestone’s documentary Attica
(). London Women’s Film Group, “Women’s Film Festival,” Spare Rib, no. 
(): ; Claire Johnston, “Cinda Firestone,” Spare Rib, no.  (): –.
Johnston cowrote the essay on LeGrice with Jan Dawson. See Jan Dawson and Claire
Johnston, “More British Sounds,” Sight and Sound ():–.
. Evans, “Rising Up,” .
. Claire Johnston, “Introduction,” in Notes on Women’s Cinema, .
. Merck, “Mulvey’s Manifesto,” . See also Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema,” Screen , no.  (): –.
. Siona Wilson, Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in s British Art and
Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .
. Michelene Wandor, Carry On, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics (London:
Routledge, ), .
. Ibid., .
. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies
(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, ); Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus (New
York: Avon, ).
. Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” .
. For discussions of Johnston’s engagement with auteur theory, see Judith Mayne, The
Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema Reconsidered (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, ), esp. chapter , “Female Authorship Reconsidered”; E.
Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York: Methuen, );
Shohini Chaudhuri, Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de
Lauretis, Barbara Creed (New York: Routledge, ).
. Specifically Johnston references Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Meaning in the
Motion Pictures (),” in Film: An Anthology, ed. D. Talbot (Berkeley: University of
California Press, ), –; and Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and
Directions, – (New York: Dutton, ).
. Johnston cites Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Jonathan Cape, ); Peter
Wollen, Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (London: Secker and Warburg, ); and

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 271

Cahiers du cinéma collectif, “Morocco de Joseph von Sternberg,” Cahiers du cinéma, no.
 (), reprinted as “Morocco,” in Sternberg, ed. Peter Baxter (London: British Film
Institute, ), –.
. E. Ann Kaplan, “Aspects of British Feminist Film Theory: A Critical Evaluation of
Texts by Claire Johnston and Pam Cook,” Jump Cut, no.  (): –.
. Ibid.
. Laura Mulvey, introduction to Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, ), viii.
. Merck, “Mulvey’s Manifesto,” –.
. Claire Johnston, “Feminist Politics and Film History,” Screen , no.  (): .
. Johnston, “Introduction,” in Notes on Women’s Cinema, .
. Claire Johnston quoted in Geoffrey Wansell, “Cinema Women: Making Films to
Destroy a Man-Made Image,” London Times, April , , .
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
. Dorothy Arzner interviewed by Gerald Peary and Karyn Kay in Johnston, The
Work of Dorothy Arzner, –.
. London Women’s Film Group, “Anti-Phallocratic Cinema?,” Spare Rib, no. 
(): .
. For detailed accounts of the  Women’s Conference, see Michelene Wandor,
Once a Feminist: Stories of a Generation (London: Virago, ); Anna Coote and
Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation (London:
Picador, ).
. Judy Wajcman, Women in Control: Dilemmas of a Workers Cooperative (New
York: St. Martin’s, ); Sheila Rowbotham and Beatrix Campbell, “Class Struggle in
Britain,” Radical America , no.  (): ; Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, “The
British Women’s Movement,” New Left Review, no.  (): .
. Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments:
Feminism and the Making of Socialism (London: Merlin, ); Lynne Segal, “The
Silence of Women in the New Left,” in Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty
Years On, ed. Robin Archer et al. (London: Verso, ), .
. Angela Neustatter, “Midge Mackenzie,” The Guardian, February , , https://
www.theguardian.com/news//feb//guardianobituaries.film.
. Valerie Antcliffe, “Broadcasting in the s: Competition, Choice, and Inequality?,”
Media, Culture, and Society , no.  (): . See also Sarah Benton, Patterns of
Discrimination against Women in the Film and Television Industries (London: Association
of Cinematograph and Television Technicians, ); Christine Aziz, “ACTT Research
into Discrimination,” Spare Rib, no.  (): . For accounts of the LWFG’s
involvement in the report, see Jill Nicholls, “Discrimination in the Film Industry,” Spare
Rib, no.  (): ; Marsha Rowe, “The Art of Women’s Liberation Propaganda,”
Spare Rib, no.  (): –.
. Antcliffe, “Broadcasting in the s,” ; Jill Nicholls, “United We Stag,” Spare
Rib, no.  (): .
. Radio Times, February , , ; Radio Times, February , , .

272 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES SUMMER 2018

. Claire Johnston, “Women in the Media Industries,” Screen , no.  (): .
. Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” –.
. Ibid., .
. Christine Gledhill, “Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism,” Quarterly
Review of Film Studies , no.  (): .
. Julia Lesage, “The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film,”
Quarterly Review of Film Studies , no.  (): .
. Evans, “Rising Up,” .
. London Women’s Film Group Information Sheet, n.p.; reprinted as “
London Women’s Film Group Notes,” in Dickinson, Rogue Reels, .
. Ibid.
. Claire Johnston, “International Women’s Film Seminar,” Spare Rib, no.  (): .
. As Evans notes, the group’s dissolution also was a response to the fact that the
number of women filmmakers had increased significantly since , and thus
organizing women workers and holding training workshops was seen as no longer
necessary. Evans, “Rising Up,” –.
. Alison Beale, “An Analysis of The Song of the Shirt,” Cineaste , no.  (): .
. See Rich, Chick Flicks, . As Mandy Merck and Helen MacKintosh noted in their
review of the event for Time Out, “Neither the varying theoretical perspectives nor the
films themselves went undisputed . . . as successive arguments over the place of ‘theory
and practice,’ formal experiment and accessibility, filmmaking, film watching and film
criticism were enthusiastically (if not vehemently) aired.” Mandy Merck and Helen
MacKintosh, “Rendezvous D’Edinburgh: Helen MacKintosh and Mandy Merck Report
on the Festival’s ‘Feminism and Cinema’ Week,” Time Out, September –, ,
–. See also Lesley Stern, “Feminism and Cinema: Exchanges,” Screen , nos. /
(): –.
. Claire Johnston, “The Subject of Feminist Film Theory/Practice,” Screen , no. 
(): ,  (emphasis on “use” in original, other emphasis mine).
. As Dickinson notes, whereas much independent and activist filmmaking of the
early s relied on coalition building among different groups of filmmakers to secure
support, the government’s hostile view of state-funded art severely limited funding
during the s, forcing groups to compete with one another for grants. Dickinson,
Rogue Reels, . Additionally, the elimination of the Greater London Council and
other local agencies by Margaret Thatcher in  left a number of feminist groups
without funding or institutional support. See Joni Lovenduski and Vicky Randall,
Contemporary Feminist Politics: Women and Power in Britain (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, ); Adam Lent, “The Labour Left, Local Authorities and New
Social Movements in Britain in the Eighties,” Contemporary Politics , no.  (): –.
. Morris, “Too Soon Too Late,” xvi.
. Alexandra Juhasz, “The Future Was Then: Reinvesting in Feminist Media Practice
and Politics,” Camera Obscura, no.  (): –.

Fabian | Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston 273