Here is another fascinating BFI compilation from century-old silent movies, this one based on suffragettes and women’s rights. There is newsreel footage of Emily Davison’s suicidal storming of the 1913 Derby and her subsequent funeral, also films of suffragette protest, along with larksome female comedies, knockabout anti-suffragette satire and material relating to suffragettes suspending hostility with the patriarchy after 1914.
The single most extraordinary film is the war office’s 10-minute A Day in the Life of a Munition Worker, showing a young woman working at the Chilwell arms factory in Nottinghamshire. At the time, this would have been nothing more than a rather earnest and patriotic educational film, a solemn example of England’s lion-hearted womenfolk throwing themselves into the war effort. Now it looks macabre, like a challenging piece of contemporary conceptual art: a thoughtful, concentrating young woman in overalls works on a bombshell, fashioning the instrument of death. It’s impossible to watch this film without wondering how and where that particular shell would have ended up. Another excellent archival collection.
