Carla Mereu Keating – författare

The years between the First and the Second World War were tumultuous ones in European cinema. Filmmakers in Western Europe faced not only aesthetic and technological transformations but also economic and political cataclysms that were pronounced by the late 1920s, intensifying in the 1930s. This era of challenges had a profound effect on pioneering women filmmakers, not only well-known directors like Germaine Dulac, Leni Riefenstahl, Elvira Notari and Adrienne Solser, but also on the many female film directors who have been forgotten, who never came to the fore or who were pushed into other areas of film production.The present essays shed light on this understudied albeit important area, illustrating the impact technological transformation and rising fascism had on these women working in the European film industries.Concurrently, this book also illustrates the mentoring and networking strategies these women developed to help each other succeed in the industry and to strengthen women’s autonomy on and off screen.

This open access book investigates film studios in Britain, France, Germany and Italy between the 1930s and 1960s. During this time, studios faces unprecedented challenges including wartime disruptions, post-war fragmentation, movement of labour and the introduction of new technologies. While the study of film studios has been dominated by the centralized Hollywood ‘studio system’, the authors present new research about the often very different histories of Europe’s film studios, comparing their geographic locations, architectures and infrastructural development. They explore a number of well-known studios including Pinewood, Joinville, Babelsberg and Cinecittà, as well as lesser-known production sites such as Manchester, Victorine, post-war West German studios and Tirrenia as diverse creative and economic infrastructures. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, photographs, films, aerial maps and visualizations, the book charts how artistic practices responded to transnational flows in film studio expertise, as studios constituted formative, materially based ‘spaces of the imagination’ that produced some of cinema’s most influential films. How studios worked in the past as dynamic, creative working environments that were profoundly influenced by their locations, architectures and personnel, is foregrounded as the authors produce new understandings of how the collaborative and material environments of studio spaces and technologies shaped film production and cultures.The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.