Tonight many of the actors walking up the red carpet to the Bafta awards ceremony in the Albert Hall will be wearing a ribbon in a show of support for the Time’s Up campaign, launched to promote and protect women working in film.
It is clearly a cause still in need of champions, given that half the cinema audience is women and only 4% of major films are directed by them.
But this is not the whole story. For among the major award recipients tonight will be film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, cinema’s ultimate backroom heroine, who has worked alongside Martin Scorsese since he made Raging Bull in 1980.
Schoonmaker, 79, is to be honoured with a Bafta fellowship in recognition of a 50-year career that is testament to the hidden legacy of the women who have quietly shaped the films we have watched since the art form first began.
“People think there were fewer women in Hollywood than there were,” Schoonmaker told the Observer this weekend. “After all, Cecil B DeMille’s editor, Anne Bauchens, actually won an Oscar, and DW Griffith worked with Margaret Booth, and Alfred Hitchcock’s films were edited by his wife, Alma.
“I welcome the push for more diversity in the industry, it is terrific, of course, but I also hope people understand women were there from the start.”
And while Schoonmaker, as a triple-Oscar winner, can hardly claim to be unsung, she does argue that women’s crucial role in film-making has been underestimated.
Listing Dede Allen, Verna Fields and Anne Coates, the artistically powerful Hollywood editors of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, as further evidence of a strong tradition that has continued with the late Sally Menke’s editing of Quentin Tarantino’s films and in the work of Alisa Lepselter for Woody Allen, Schoonmaker suggests women first became involved in the industry as assistants in film laboratories.
“They were there spooling film in the labs, back when it was just one 100ft roll. Then Griffith, and [Sergei] Eisenstein in Russia, started cutting and editing their films and directors needed someone to splice the footage together. These women already knew how to handle film,” she said.
“They would hold up the film and measure it out along their arm like a tailor does, with 3ft considered the right length of time to hold a close-up. In fact, Marty shows Coates doing exactly that in a scene in The Aviator.”
Female editors such as Booth, at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or Barbara McLean at 20th Century Fox, became leading supervisors, brought in to approve or rescue a film, during the heyday of Hollywood studios.
“Then, as soon as editing became a more important job and men saw it was possibly going to be paid better, they started pushing women out,” said Schoonmaker. “I have a feeling it became a plum job after the second world war, when men came back from fighting.”
Schoonmaker also contends women are better physically suited to editing than men. “We are often more dexterous, and also used to multi-tasking,” she said.
“But the major thing is we are more cooperative and collaborative. It is not such of an ego thing for a woman somehow. When two people are battling over a movie, it is very bad for the movie.”
Schoonmaker first met Scorsese by chance on a summer film course in New York and he began to teach her his craft. “Marty felt he could trust me to do what was right for a movie,” she recalled.
“My artistic development came through him. We don’t fight and it has been a wonderful collaboration.”
Part of Scorsese’s skill, Schoonmaker believes, is in thinking like an editor from the moment he conceives a new film. “Editing is his favourite part. I don’t think you can be a great director without a feeling for it.”
For Dame Pippa Harris, chair of Bafta, the value of Schoonmaker’s contribution is difficult to overstate. “Because the work of an editor takes place in dimly lit rooms, often one to one with the director, their influence and skill sometimes gets overlooked,” she told the Observer. “Thelma is a storyteller in her own right, influencing not only the narrative structure, but shaping the rhythm and pacing of the films she works on, the performances of the actors and, ultimately, the emotions of the audience.
“In what is still a male-dominated craft, Thelma has been a towering role model for other women, and I couldn’t be more delighted she is being celebrated.”
Tonight, when the Bafta fellowship, the British film industry’s highest token of recognition, is presented to Schoonmaker it will mean all the more because of the legacy of her late husband, Michael Powell, the English director of The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, Peeping Tom and A Matter of Life and Death.
Powell, a giant of British film history who worked with his creative partner Emeric Pressburger, was introduced to Schoonmaker by Scorsese. When he died in 1990, at 84, he left his widow with an affection for Britain, as well the home they once shared in Kent.
“Michael gave me a view of England that was very unorthodox, and I still go to our cottage whenever I can,” she said.
As a young woman Schoonmaker had avidly watched classic movies, including those of Powell and Pressburger, on American television. Intrigued, she put aside her plans to become a diplomat. “I saw A Matter of Life and Death without knowing I would marry the man that made it. And Marty had been watching his films too, it turned out. He was living in an Italian ghetto, while Michael was born in Kent, but the films connected because they are about humanity.”
It was Scorsese who later, along with film scholars Kevin Gough-Yates and Ian Christie and French director Bertrand Tavernier, became instrumental in reviving interest in Powell’s work. In 1975 when the New York director was invited to the Edinburgh film festival to receive an award, he requested Powell should make the presentation, but few people remembered who Powell was.
Eventually a lunch was set up in London and Scorsese finally met his forgotten cinematic idol, who was by then down on his luck. “Michael said that Marty knew every shot he had ever taken,” Schoonmaker recalls, wiping her eyes. “I am sorry. I always cry when I think of it. You have no idea how Michael had suffered and how bad it was.” Scorsese has since funded the digital restoration, overseen by Schoonmaker, of a succession of Powell’s films.
The influence of the duel scene in Powell’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is evident, Schoonmaker said, in the way Scorsese handled the famous championship fight build-up in Raging Bull. And it is also there now as they work on their current project, The Irishman, starring Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, which is out on Netflix in October. “Michael always told us never to explain and to stay ahead of the audience: to show them some respect, and that is what we are still doing,” she said.
Schoonmaker’s aim, as she finishes restoration of Powell’s 1945 Scottish romance, I Know Where I’m Going, is to persuade young directors to pay attention to film history.
“Film schools tell me they have a hard time getting students to watch older films, particularly black and white ones, and it is devastating,” she said. “That is like throwing away 85 years of the art, when masterpiece after masterpiece were being made.”
