Margaret Thomson (10 June 1910 – 30 December 2005) [1] was an Australian-born documentary filmmaker who divided her forty-year career between New Zealand and England. She was the first female film director active in New Zealand.
Margaret Thomson was born in Australia to Gertrude Thomson and James Allan Thomson, a geologist. [2] He was appointed head of the Dominion Museum in Wellington, so Margaret spent most of her childhood in New Zealand. [1] She attended Canterbury University, graduating with a degree in zoology. [2]
She moved to England in 1934. [1] Her first film-related job in England was with Gaumont-British Instructional Films, for whom she worked initially as their film librarian and subsequently as editor for a series of films on the ecology of Great Britain. [1] [2] [3] She left in 1938 and worked as a film editor elsewhere, eventually joining Realist Film Unit (RFU) in 1941. [3] Partly due to the onset of World War II, which opened opportunities for women while men were at war, she worked on a large number of RFU film projects, many aimed at educating people about dealing with wartime conditions. [1] [2] She shot two postwar projects, Children Learning by Experience (1946) and Children Growing Up with Other People (1947), in a proto-cinéma vérité style in order to capture the children's behavior with as little interference as possible. [4] She stayed at RFU for six years, developing a reputation as an outstanding director who conveyed complicated information clearly and without talking down to her audiences. [1] [2] [3]
In 1947, she was offered a position as a director for New Zealand's National Film Unit (NFU), and she returned to the country where she had been raised. [2] Her NFU short film Railway Worker (1948) is now considered a classic, and the NFU's head called it the best thing the NFU had produced up to that point in its history. [2] One of the things that set the film apart from others of its era is that it showed the workers' home lives as well as their work lives. [2] Thomson's own favorite among her NFU films was another short, The First Two Years at School (1949), which offered a close look at a school for Māori children. [2]
Thomson eventually became unhappy over the amount of government oversight of the NFU, which she felt had the potential to stifle controversial material and limit the independence of viewpoints expressed by NFU films. [2] She returned to England in 1950, taking up a job as director for the Crown Film Unit. [2] Crown closed a year later, but she continued making films in England for another two decades as a freelance filmmaker and producer, mostly of documentary shorts. [1] [2] In the 1950s, she set up a production company with her husband, Bob Ash. [4]
The only feature film Thomson directed was Child's Play (1954), a science-fiction film for Group 3 about children who managed to split the atom and thereby create a new form of popcorn. [2] [5] She coached child actors for other films, including The Kidnappers (1953), which won its two child stars juvenile Academy Awards. [1] [2]
Thomson retired from film making in 1977. She was the subject of a 1995 documentary, Direction... Margaret Thomson, and her work was featured in the documentary War, Peace and Pictures (1989). [2]
Year | Title | Credit | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
1941 | Cultivation | Direction | Documentary short |
1942 | Hedging | Direction | Documentary short |
1942 | Clamping Potatoes | Direction | Documentary short |
1942 | Making a Compost Heap | Direction | Documentary short |
1943 | Reseeding for Better Grass | Direction | Documentary short |
1944 | Clean Milk | Direction | Documentary short |
1944 | The Signs and Stages of Anaesthesia | Direction | Documentary short |
1946 | Children Learning by Experience | Direction | Documentary short |
1947 | Children Growing Up with Other People | Direction | Documentary short |
1948 | Railway Worker | Direction | Documentary short |
1949 | The First Two Years at School | Direction | Documentary short |
1950 | A Family Affair | Direction | Documentary short |
1954 | Child's Play | Direction | Feature film |
1955 | Friend of the Family | Direction and writing | Documentary short |
1957 | Yorkshire Imperial on Thames | Direction and writing | Documentary short |
1960 | Understanding Aggression | Direction and writing | Documentary short |
1962 | A Sense of Belonging | Direction and writing | Documentary short |
1964 | Frontier | Direction | Television documentary |
John Edward Boulting and Roy Alfred Clarence Boulting, known collectively as the Boulting brothers, were English filmmakers and identical twins who became known for their series of satirical comedies in the 1950s and 1960s. They produced many of their films through their own production company, Charter Film Productions, which they founded in 1937.
Frank Humphrey Sinkler Jennings was an English documentary filmmaker and one of the founders of the Mass Observation organisation. Jennings was described by film critic and director Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as "the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced".
Phyllis Hannah Murray-Hill, known professionally as Phyllis Calvert, was an English film, stage and television actress. She was one of the leading stars of the Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s such as The Man in Grey (1943) and was one of the most popular movie stars in Britain in the 1940s. She continued her acting career for another 50 years.
Philip David Charles Leacock was an English television and film director and producer. His brother was documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock.
Jill Craigie was a British documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and feminist. She was one of Britain's earliest female documentary makers. Her early films demonstrate Craigie's interest in socialist and feminist politics, but her career as a film-maker has been "somewhat eclipsed" by her marriage to the Labour Party leader Michael Foot (1913–2010), whom she met during the making of her film The Way We Live (1946).
Sir Horace Shango Ové was a Trinidadian-born British filmmaker, photographer, painter and writer based in London, England. One of the leading black independent filmmakers to emerge in Britain in the post-war period, Ové was the first black British filmmaker to direct a feature-length film, Pressure (1976). In its retrospective documentary 100 Years of Cinema, the British Film Institute (BFI) declared: "Horace Ové is undoubtedly a pioneer in Black British history and his work provides a perspective on the Black experience in Britain."
Maxim Anderson was a British director and producer of documentaries. He worked with the GPO Film Unit from 1936 onwards, and later changed to Crown Film Unit. He directed documentaries such as The Harvest Shall Come (1942) and Four Men in Prison (1950).
Basil Charles Wright was an English documentary filmmaker, film historian, film critic and teacher.
Millions Like Us is a 1943 British propaganda film, showing life in a wartime aircraft factory in documentary detail. It stars Patricia Roc, Gordon Jackson, Anne Crawford, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, Moore Marriott and Eric Portman.
The National Film Unit (NFU) was a state-owned film-production organisation originally based in Miramar, New Zealand. Founded in 1936 when the government took over a private film studio, Filmcraft, the NFU produced newsreels, documentaries and promotional films about New Zealand, and for many years was the only significant film-production facility in the country. Many people who became prominent in the development of the modern New Zealand film industry were trained by the NFU.
John Elston Taylor was a British documentary filmmaker.
Cheer Boys Cheer is a 1939 British comedy film directed by Walter Forde and starring Nova Pilbeam, Edmund Gwenn, Jimmy O'Dea, Graham Moffatt, Moore Marriott and Peter Coke.
Stuart Legg was a pioneering English documentary filmmaker. At the 14th Academy Awards in 1941, Legg's National Film Board of Canada film Churchill's Island became the first-ever documentary to win an Oscar.
Margaret Kathleen O'Brien was a New Zealand film director, dance teacher, and radio presenter. One of the first New Zealand women to direct films, she spent 20 years working for government filmmaking body the National Film Unit.
The BFI Production Board (1964-2000) was a state-funded film production fund managed by the British Film Institute (BFI) and "explicitly charged with backing work by new and uncommercial filmmakers." Emerging from the Experimental Film Fund, the BFI Production Board was a major source of funding for experimental, art house, animation, short and documentary cinema, with a continuing commitment to funding under-represented voices in filmmaking.
Sarah Erulkar was a prolific and multi-award-winning Indian-born Jewish British filmmaker, specialising in sponsored documentary shorts.
Kay Mander was a British non-fiction film director and shooting continuity specialist.
Life in Her Hands is a 1951 drama film sponsored by the British Ministry of Labour with the aim of recruiting women to the nursing profession. It was produced in response to addressing the short supply of qualified nurses in Britain after the Second World War, caused to some degree by the needs of the newly founded National Health Service (NHS). It was produced by the Crown Film Unit and distributed widely across all major cinemas by United Artists. The film was written by Anthony Steven and Monica Dickens, and directed by Philip Leacock. The cast included Bernadette O'Farrell, Jenny Laird, Jean Anderson and Kathleen Byron.
Donald Alexander (1913–1993) was a British documentary film-maker who worked as producer, director, writer and editor of films documenting social and industrial conditions, most notably in the coal-mining industry, between the 1930s and 1970s. The movement of which he was part is now regarded as the golden age of British documentary. Its leading figures also included Paul Rotha, John Grierson, Edgar Anstey, Humphrey Jennings, Basil Wright and Arthur Elton.
Ruby Isabel Grierson was a Scottish documentary film-maker and leading authority in the early documentary movement. Her brother John Grierson and her younger sister Marion Grierson also made films.