Clodagh Finn: The women filmmakers rescued from the cutting-room floor

Take the short documentary Kay, for instance. Made in 1968, it features sixth-year secondary school pupil Kay Lavelle, whose artistic expression is actively encouraged by her art teacher (and film-maker), Sr Maureen MacMahon, at Sion Hill in Dublin.

The respect shown to an emerging young female artist is extraordinary. In 12-and-a-half gloriously shot minutes, Owen Carton on camera and Sr Maureen in production present Kay Lavelle as a talented budding artist who has something to say and, as the voiceover puts it, “she says it beautifully in paint”.

Listening to the artist explain her own work is a revelation.

“Why do I paint?” Kay Lavelle asks the question herself before giving an answer reminiscent of Moira Shearer in the 1948 film Red Shoes. When the Scottish ballet dancer and actor is asked why she wants to dance, she replies: “Why do you want to live?”

In this real-life study of the impulse to create art, an exceptionally wise young Dublin woman simply says: “I just have to.”

She goes on to explain that her main reason for painting is to try to express herself exactly.

The camera then homes in as she works in oil on a painting which the commentator describes as “a stylised form verging on the grotesque”. But, as the artist explains, she is simply trying to express the inexpressible: “In this painting, I’m trying to show how man has been drained of some of his manhood by the terrific influence of big business. The idea hit me when I was in Germany this year.”

Here is a young woman in her teens talking about finding a way to express what she thinks and feels in an Ireland which was not renowned for allowing anyone, least of all young women, say what they thought.

At the end, she says she’d give it up if she could — she doesn’t like the smell of paint — but she can’t because she feels compelled to “keep on painting and painting”.

A short skip down another digital rabbit-hole reveals that Kay Lavelle is now Katherine Andjelopolj and she is still painting in her adopted home of South Africa. Of course she is

Her former teacher Sr Maureen is not still making films but, in 2022 at the age of 104, she did go to the Irish Film Institute (IFI) in Dublin when it held a public screening of Kay, the award-winning film she produced so many decades before with the Black Raven Film Group.

“A lot of these early filmmakers did not put a value on what they did,” says Kasandra O’Connell, head of the IFI Irish Film Archive.

That was also true of Cork filmmaker Flora Kerrigan who, during the late 1950s and 60s, produced numerous, internationally recognised shorts with the Cork Cine Club.

Happily, she was recalled on these pages just last year when Marjorie Brennan wrote an evocative piece about her and the exciting project, run by the IFI with Maynooth University and several academic partners, which is bringing the contribution of women filmmakers back into focus.

It’s interesting to go even further back into the archives of this newspaper to see how Flora Kerrigan’s work was received at the time:

Here’s a snippet from ‘Mainly About People’ by Stephen from the Cork Examiner of March 17, 1961: “Tall, blonde, willowy 20-year-old Flora Kerrigan, who is secretary of the Cork Cine Club, is piling up awards for 8mm films which she either makes herself [or] in conjunction with a friend, Cormac Langford. Last May she started to make cartoon films and to date, she has completed eleven. She tells me that it takes almost 2,000 cut-outs for a two-minute cartoon. It’s work that requires infinite patience but it is very satisfying and less expensive than the ordinary filmmaking.”

The physical description might raise an eyebrow now, but it’s clear the first-name-only columnist was an admirer of her work. He wrote with enthusiasm of K&L Productions, the new production company she was setting up with Cormac Langford; her love of black-and-white film (“there’s too much fuss made of colour”), and filming on Patrick Street at 6 in the morning.

Flora also enlisted the help of her sisters. One of them, Frances, spoke recently of being involved and having starred in a number of her films.

Her subject matter was “often darkly comedic and hauntingly existential”, according to the IFI.

The Seventh Day, which you’ll find on the IFI Archive player, is an extraordinary four-and-a-half minute animation depicting the dawn of time through a series of images of cogs, pulleys and hour-glasses.

“Eventually,” to quote the programme notes, “humans become time-based mechanisms themselves, harassed and harried across the screen by time’s fussy technology.”

I had no idea that amateur Irish filmmakers, let alone female ones, were making work such as this in the 1960s.

And, happily, we have but scratched the surface. Archivist Kasandra O’Connell’s own interest in amateur filmmaking and the work of female filmmakers — “two areas that are traditionally overlooked in terms of critical studies” — led the IFI Irish Film Archive to work with Women in Focus. The collaborative project does just that; it puts the focus on overlooked women.

Sr Maureen MacMahon and Flora Kerrigan are two of the five independent filmmakers featured in the IFI’s easily accessible archive.

The others are Margaret Currivan and Agnes Heron, two business women, and Beres Laidlaw, a member of a prominent Anglo-Irish family. (Interesting fact: her biographical notes say she was a skilled embroider who possibly learnt the craft from former Taoiseach Charles Haughey’s mother, Sarah McWilliams Haughey.)

Some of these talented and creative women were recognised in their lifetime. Director Margaret Currivan, for instance, beat off competition from the predominantly male filmmakers of the time to win the ‘Film Shows Cup’ at the 1961 Dublin Amateur Cine Society competition.

Sadly, though, many were later forgotten, in part because some of the women themselves minimised what they did. That is changing now thanks to this excellent project of retrieval from the IFI and its partners.

And best of all, there is more to come. This curation of five films is not the final cut. A larger selection of films will be made available on the IFI Archive Player next year. See you down the rabbit hole.