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

Scriptwriters Make Movies

Something I've often found as I've grown older is that my movie taste is a little … commercial. I don't watch foreign or independent films and I have a liking for awful horror movies. I've been to the cinema six times since I came back from Christmas, and most of them were what I term "popcorn movies", i.e. popular Hollywood films. I like to be entertained at the cinema but I've often felt like an inadequate intellectual instead of a cultured cinema-goer with my ticket stubs.

Peter Kramer's talk on "Hollywood's Global Imagination" was brilliant for me. He looked at how Hollywood is obsessed with destroying the world, and how it uses alien invasion and world threats to create unity for its audience. He had such energy, talking about global destruction, Hollywood as a global network and how Avatar uses the same ideas that a ton of films have used before.

I won't deny I had geeky moments sitting at the back when Kramer discussed certain blockbusters, mostly in the sci-fi or fantasy genres which I love. All of them point to global threats which bring us together, as we wonder what would have happened if the Nazis had got the Holy Grail, or if Voldermort had decided to think bigger than just Hogwarts.

I think I fitted rather well into the discussion of imagined threats as I sat there in my blue Superman shirt and my Superman-emblazoned socks. There was a clip from Independence Day too, the most patriotic film about the biggest threat of all. What was not to enjoy?


Kelly Lawson