Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival Conference: how anthropology could inform artists

Very honoured to have had the opportunity to talk about the making of my film 'Because Goddess is Never Enough' last week at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival Conference. ​

I was inspired by Tilly Losch and her creative life because she is pushed and pulled by all these men, she suffers miscarriages, and a mental breakdown, but she keeps on going, doing her own thing at a time when the barriers to doing that as a woman were extremely difficult, and she continues a creative life after dance by turning to painting.

As the film stands, as a feminist viewpoint on the credibility of creative women in the 1920s to 40s, the extent to which we have progressed in the last 100 years and the distance we still have to go to have equality, I think it is largely successful. The film was a personal response to the material, through an oblique telling of a story of a now largely side-lined woman. But there was so much in the source material that I did not really know how to navigate…

Throughout my research I was aware that I was interested in, but avoided deeply interrogating underlying social and cultural aspects of my subject. I think a visual / media anthropologist could have given me the insight I was missing. My presentation was a discussion around the questions raised by the material I researched.
Some examples: 

• How to approach the Hollywood films that Tilly appeared in, in which she is invariably the ‘exotic’ dancer? She is portrayed as ethnically other than her own appearance. Did Tilly have any agency in this? What might her attitudes have been? 
• I needed greater understanding of women’s position and status in the arts and performing arts in the 1920s to 1940s. How did celebrity culture, social class, life in high society impact Tilly and her creative work?
• Tilly seems to attempt to transform herself and her status through marriage. Is she driving this? Or is she pushed into it? Or was it inevitable?