‘Duddy as a Mayan Indian and Bobby with the Jaguar cub’: Audrey Granville Soames (1900-1990) and early post-colonial participatory media

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Burgess, Zoe (2025) ‘Duddy as a Mayan Indian and Bobby with the Jaguar cub’: Audrey Granville Soames (1900-1990) and early post-colonial participatory media. In: British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Conference 2025 (BAFTSS), 26-28 March 2025, Warwick.

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Abstract

London born Audrey Granville Soames came to amateur filmmaking through her second marriage in 1937 to Ronald Sloane Stanley, during the course of which she elevated her social position from the middle class to the upper echelons of British society. With this new sense of social mobility there was a resultant geographical freedom. As she travelled the world her camera trained in the populist model, mimicked and proliferated post-colonial imagery she had consumed as a member of the audience viewing Pathé newsreels and British Movietone news bulletins. Familiar tropes embedded in her subconscious, are teased out in her work as she, a new entrant to the social group with which she was travelling, adopts the gaze of a colonial ethnographer, tempered with a desire to integrate and ingratiate herself with her new peers.

This paper will explore how early participatory technologies, much like those available today facilitated expressions of creativity within and outside of societal expectations. I will consider how popular forms of media consumption shaped Audrey’s filmmaking practice and consider how her gender has impacted how her work has been archived and discussed. Furthermore, I consider the tricky position of women amateur filmmakers such as Audrey Granville Soames whose international work falls awkwardly outside of the collecting remit of UK regional film archives; and consider, whose history is most at risk of being lost if we continue to value amateur film for local evidentiary qualities alone. Does Audrey’s work fit within a broader field of practice of British colonial women amateurs (Motrescu-Mayes, 2011, 2012; Motrescu-Mayes and Norris Nicholson, 2018), or do her working-class roots betray a more specific positionality?

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects:	Media > Media history and theory
Related URLs:	https://www.baftss.org/
Depositing User:	Zoe Burgess
Date Deposited:	08 May 2025 08:06
Last Modified:	08 May 2025 08:15
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/13521

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