We're bringing into focus a wide range of women amateur filmmakers whose creative work has been overlooked and unacknowledged in the archives.
Working closely with two partner archives, the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) and the Irish Film Archive (IFA), we have conducted new research into existing collections of largely unknown women amateur filmmakers.
Our work
By identifying significant gaps in knowledge at the level of cataloguing, accession records, historical research, and metadata – and by adopting feminist methodologies that allow us to challenge existing practices – we have developed a toolkit that will allow any archive with a moving image collection to create more effective, useful and accessible records about women filmmakers.
The Filmmakers
As part of this work, we have produced a set of biographies that highlight some of these amazing creative women. As a small step to making such women’s filmmaking more broadly available, below you will find small selection of women amateur filmmakers from across the UK and Ireland collections.
Sister Maureen MacMahon OP (b.1918), also known as Sr Maureen and Sr Grignon, is an artist, writer, educator, filmmaker and Dominican nun. She worked for many years in Art Education at both the secondary and college levels and was an active painter and filmmaker.
She was a founding member of the High Loft Painting Group and the Black Raven Film Group. The Black Raven Film Group, comprised of MacMahon, Sean Brophy and Owen Carton, produced a number of amateur films in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Sister Maureen MacMahon in From Cliff to Kiln (1969). Courtesy of the Irish Film Archive
MacMahon was born in Rathgar in 1918 and began boarding at the Dominican Convent in Wicklow in 1931. She entered the Irish Congregation of Dominican Sisters at Cabra in 1936, officially professing in 1938. In 1943, she was admitted to the Dominican Froebel College of Education in Sion Hill, which had been established that year by the Dominican Sisters to educate potential national school teachers in the Froebel model of education.
From 1943 to 1947, MacMahon studied Education and upon graduating was assigned to her first teaching position at Muckross Park Junior School, where she taught art. MacMahon would go on to teach art in various institutions from 1947 to 1977, also becoming a painter herself in that time and eventually making art and art education a primary theme of her filmmaking.
In 1950, MacMahon took over the Art Department at the Dominican’s Senior Girls School in Cabra where she taught until 1962 when she returned to Sion Hill. While at Sion Hill, she became interested in photography and filmmaking.
In her own account of that time she writes, “One day an incident occurred and I remarked that I would love to know more about how to use a camera. A little voice beside me said: “My daddy would teach you, he is a very good photographer” (MacMahon Papers, Archive of Dominican Sisters).
The student in this anecdote was Mary Brophy, daughter of Sean Brophy, who would become part of the Black Raven Film Group along with MacMahon and Owen Carton. MacMahon did contact Sean Brophy and writes that from him she learned “the intricacies of the cameras of the day —f stops, apertures, lenses, camera speed, film speed, focusing, depth-of-field, far away and close-up procedures.”
Black Raven Film Group. Courtesy of Archives of the Dominican Sisters
MacMahon and the Black Raven Film Group also made the film Kay at Sion Hill. Written, produced and scored by MacMahon, Kay was filmed in Dun Laoghaire, on Killiney Strand and in the art studio at Sion Hill, and is based on an interview MacMahon conducted with a 6th year pupil at the school.
The film follows the student, Kay Lavelle, as she paints what MacMahon calls “her idea of the intense industrialisation of the human spirit.” MacMahon writes that Lavelle had recently returned from Germany and “was waking up to the adverse effects of the industrial revolution the human psyche.”
Kay went on to win the National Film Institute of Ireland’s Amateur Cine Competition in 1968. The previous year the Black Raven Film Group tied for first place in the NFI Amateur Cine Competition with their film Puppet Project (Evening Herald, 1968). This film again revolved around MacMahon’s pupils, this time focusing on her 3rd class students at Sion Hill as they sculpted characters and acted out scenes from a musical.
After her time at Sion Hill, MacMahon attended the National College of Art, Dublin and received an ATC Certificate and Diploma in Art Education in 1970. From 1971-1974 she worked as the Head of the Audio-Visual Department at the Catholic Communications Centre in Booterstown, after which she became a part-time lecturer in Education at Trinity College Dublin, and worked for eight years as a part-time lecturer in Art at St. Patrick’s Training College.
In 1974, she was invited to give a series of public lectures on Art History, including “Landscape Painting Down the Ages,” at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (Irish Independent, 1974). In 1979, she started The High Loft Painting Group, which is still running today in Dublin and of which she was the Director until 2004.
MacMahon has also written numerous articles on European art and art history, as well as a book entitled, Sister Maureen’s Selection of Irish Art: With Reflections, published by Columba Press in 2009. Her background and interest in art and art education is often present in her filmmaking, as evidenced by the films Kay, From Cliff to Kiln, Puppet Project, and the experimental film, No Straight Lines, amongst others.
In 2022, the Irish Film Institute held a public screening of MacMahon’s work, which she attended at the age of 104 years old.
Filmography
FISEC (1970) Irish Film Archive.
From Cliff to Kiln (1969) Irish Film Archive.
Kerdiffstown: A Memory (1973) Archives of the Dominican Sisters, Cabra.
Kay (1968) Irish Film Archive.
Look Again (1969) Irish Film Archive.
No Straight Lines ( 1970) Irish Film Archive.
Physical Education in Ireland (1967) Irish Film Archive.
Bibliography
Archives of the Dominican Sisters, Cabra (ADSC). “Sr Maureen MacMahon OP Collection.”
Duggan, Maura OP. 2016. Congregation of Dominican Sisters ‘Froebel’s Gifts: History of Froebel College Sion Hill 1943-2013.’ 23 May. [Online] Available at:
https://www.dominicansisters.com/2016/froebels-gifts-history-of-froebel-college-sion-hill-1943-2013/ [accessed 23 January 2023]
Evening Herald. 1968. ‘More and More.’ 29 Feb, p. 9.
Irish Film Archive. 2021. Sr Maureen MacMahon Collection, Detailed Filmographic. Dublin, Ireland.
Irish Film Archive. 2022. Sr Maureen MacMahon Collection. Dublin, Ireland.
Irish Independent. 1973. ‘City Scene.’ 12 Dec, p. 11.
MacMahon, Maureen OP. 2009. Sister Maureen’s Selection of Irish Art with Reflections. Dublin: Columba Books.
Maynooth University Froebel Department of Primary and Early Childhood Education. [Online] Available at:
https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/froebel-department-primary-and-early-childhood-education [accessed 23 January 2023]
Other Sources:
Selection of articles written by Sr Maureen MacMahon for The Irish Spirit. [Online] Available at: https://theirishspirit.com/author/srmaureenmacmahon/ [accessed 23 January 2023]
Our partners
This work comes from a joint UK-Ireland collaboration between the University of East Anglia, Maynooth University, and the University of Sussex; funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Irish Research Council (IRC), as part of the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities scheme.
