Faculty Professor wins 2023 Screen Essay award for article of ‘remarkable depth and archival rigour’
A Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures has won the 2023 Screen Essay award
A Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures has won the 2023 Screen Essay award for an article hailed by the international panel of judges for its ‘remarkable depth and archival rigour’.
The Screen Award, launched in 1994, recognises the best paper submitted to the journal Screen during a two-year period.
Melanie Bell, Professor in Film History at the School of Media and Communication, won the award for her article ‘Feminist histories of costuming film: Gordon Conway, 1930s British cinema and the collaborative world of Mayfair sewing’, which was published in Screen 64:2, Summer 2023.
The judges – Professor Tim Bergfelder (Screen), Professor Lucía Nagib (University of Reading), Professor Jean Ma (University of Hong Kong) and Professor Joshua Yumibe (Screen) – praised Professor Bell’s article as ‘a model of innovative research’, highlighting its ‘remarkable depth and archival rigour’.
They said:
“From the archival discovery of designer Gordon Conway’s diaries and scrapbooks, the author develops a cogent argument on the importance of costume design for film in 1930s Britain, which was a realm exclusively inhabited by women, from the modest seamstress to the sagacious socialite designer, whose specialist skills define the female star’s own acting style. Bell excavates through extensive archival research the nature of the contract work Conway carried out on British films to reconstruct the elaborate workflows and depth of expertise that went into costume design in the 1930s. Helping to deconstruct the idea of the male director as the supreme creator of a film, the paper unveils a fascinating facet of cinematic authorship, grounded in the society of the time but leaving a lasting legacy in cinema worldwide.”
Professor Melanie Bell said:
“I am honoured to receive the Screen Essay award for my research on the pioneering women who designed and made costumes for the British film industry. The journal Screen has been central to the development, evolution and ongoing resonance of Film Studies in the Arts and Humanities landscape, and I'm grateful to them for their support which puts feminist film history and film costume firmly in the spotlight.”
Professor Melanie Bell is a prize-winning scholar of British Film Studies and Feminist Film History. Her research analyses the economic and creative contribution of women to film production through a feminist lens, opening up questions of collaboration, authorship and value. She works with oral histories, archival records and screen “ephemera” to amplify marginal voices in film history, and examines how the legacies of past experiences of work resonant with the challenges facing today’s media workers.
