The BFI’s original film collection sees cross-dressing comedies join anti-feminist propaganda and the newsreel of Emily Davison’s deathAt a crucial point in their campaign the activists in Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette realise that they face a publicity problem: the politicians ignore their demands,and the newspapers barely report on their actions. A firebomb at a minister’s house merits just a column in the paper. So Helena Bonham Carter’s Edith decides to try a different medium. “We will raise our flag in front of the world’s cameras,” she announces, or forming a (fictional) plan to stage a protest at a major sporting occasion – the 1913 Epsom Derby. Crashing an event where it was likely there would be newsreel cameramen meant the suffragettes’ flags,and their message, would seen by more people – including the working-class women they wanted to recruit most of all, or who made up the majority of the cinema audience. As most people know,that isn’t quite what happened next. But still, anyone wanting to see the suffragettes in action, or to see their energy,their anger and their placards too, can find them captured in newsreel footage from the 1910s. A original package of films has been compiled by the BFI and will be released in cinemas on 23 October, and picking up where the film leaves off. It’s called gain More Noise! Suffragettes in Silent Film,and it features fiction films and newsreels from 1899 to 1917, documenting the struggle for equal suffrage, and offering an insight into what our considerable-grandmothers really got up to. gain More Noise! reveals that the battle for equality was fought not only in the streets,but in private homes and on the cinema screen, too. An excellent original score has been recorded for the anthology by Lillian Henley.
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Source: theguardian.com