Reviews and comment from the Demon Crew - creative writers at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Wednesday 27 February 2019

From home to Hollywood


Nita Harvey was imaginative, radiant and driven.

Before this Cultural Exchanges Festival I knew nothing of Nita - nor of her great-niece Ellen Nolan , but that's another name I won't forget. Throughout this capsule collection we were not only spectators to a celebration of family history, but were presented with insightful narratives from both Ellen and Nita. Nita's contsant companion was the camera as we followed her adventure from the back gardens in suburban Golders Green to the rooftops of London theatreland on St Martin's Lane.

Nita's archive, curated by Ellen, is more than just photographs; it's a memoir of a woman finding her self-portrait, a relationship with the lens, an evolution of experimentation to expectation. It makes the viewer witness to the development of playfulness and theatricality to awareness and femininity of a young actress of the 1920s. Then comes a transition to brutal objectification in Hollywood depicted through a 360-degree silent video scanning her body - and the sense of playfulness is lost. But Nita's friednship with the camera persists and remains true until the end.

'She is still beautiful'

I left that lecture theatre inspired by Ellen, who took seven years to understand what she needed to do with the archive, maintaining control by funding her own work. Ellen and Nita make me want to produce my own project, influenced by Nita’s artistic flare and the emotions she evokes even as she poses for her early photographs with domestic objects such as pillows, piano stools, beads and bedsheets. Ellen's Instagram is flooded with ideas she's experimenting with, including elements from the archive.


s.m.blair

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