17/10/2026
'Escaping Authorship': A Panel Discussion
https://wfthn.com/?p=12407
Saturday 14 November, 2026
11.00 – 13.00 GMT
ON TEAMS
WFTHN presents a panel discussion around the theme of authorship addressing the following questions:
How and why does authorship continue to be a key focus for film studies in relation to women directors?
How concepts of genre and reception complicate the idea of authorship?
Can ‘authorship’ be replaced by a concept of women's ‘agency’ and what are its implications for film histories?
In what ways might film-making be seen as ‘an instance of ‘distributed cognition’’ where ‘cognition’ refers to the different skills and understandings different contributors bring to making a film? (Pearlman, 2023)
How does this cognition differ across different film forms?
Melanie Bell (Leeds), Lee-Jane Benion (UAL), Christine Gledhill, Angela Martin and Karen Pearlman (Macquarie) and will present short provocations in response to these questions from their different perspectives as film scholars and historians, filmmakers, and practitioner-researchers, followed by audience discussion.
Chair: Lizzie Thynne, filmmaker and Professor Emerita of Film, University of Suss*x.
Suggested reading
Pearlman, K. (2023). ‘Distributed Authorship: An et al. Proposal of Creative Practice, Cognition, and Feminist Film Histories. Feminist Media Histories, 9(2), 87–100. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.87
Please note this is an event for those with full membership of WFTHN. If you have not yet paid the small annual subscription for members that we have introduced to support the network’s activities, please follow instructions on our website's membership page before registering for this event. https://wfthn.com/join/
PLEASE REGISTER FOR 'ESCAPING AUTHORSHIP' HERE: 0b1ec1c1-4f51-42d6-aa61-f6487228fb36@1888e824-febb-4e67-b443-2f33261bc7e4?source=copyLinkOneEventsShareDialog" rel="ugc" target="_blank">https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/0b1ec1c1-4f51-42d6-aa61-f6487228fb36@1888e824-febb-4e67-b443-2f33261bc7e4?source=copyLinkOneEventsShareDialog
A Teams link will be sent to registered participants by 12 November.
Panellist Bios:
Melanie Bell is Professor of Film History at the University of Leeds. Her monograph Movie Workers, the Women Who Made British Cinema (2021) draws on oral history and trade union records to recover women's physical, emotional and creative labour in British film production. Her latest project - Film Costumes in Action - is a study of costumes' material culture through a feminist lens.
Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon is a fiction filmmaker, director, researcher and Senior Lecturer in Film and High-End Television Production at the University of Derby. Her practice-based research explores collaborative creativity, authorship and how knowledge emerges through fiction filmmaking. Drawing on her experience directing short films, she investigates how creative decisions develop through negotiation, compromise and shared understanding, challenging individualised notions of authorship and examining whose creative contributions become visible, valued and recognised.
Christine Gledhill has published widely on feminist film criticism, British cinema, film genre, and theatrical and film melodrama. With Julia Knight she established the Women's Film and Television History Network (WFTHN) and co-edited the volume Doing Women's Film History (2015). She edited the collection Gender Meets Genre (2012) and, with Linda Williams, Melodrama Unbound (2018). Recently she co-edited with Elisabeth R. Anker and Laura Horak, a collection, Melodrama as Provocateur, based on a long, post-humous essay by Linda Williams.
Angela Martin is a film and video editor. She was previously an editor of publications at the BFI before cutting, among other projects, for Channel 4, Spinster (1990), Bringing It All Back Home (1987), Refuse to Dance (1986) and Coal not Dole (1984). She taught film studies and production at Sheffield Hallam University. Her publications include ‘Refocusing Authorship in Women’s Filmmaking’ in J. Levitin et al (eds) Women Filmmakers Refocusing (UBC Press,2003)
Karen Pearlman researches creative practice, distributed cognition and feminist film histories. Her trilogy of short films about historical women editors (2016, 2018 & 2020) have won 34 highly competitive national and international awards from peak industry bodies and film festivals, including three for best editing, three for best directing and six for best documentary. Her 2020 film, ‘I want to make a film about women’, was nominated for an Australian Academy Award (AACTA).
