This Techne AHRC funded PhD draws directly from the archive of my British great-aunt, Nita Harvey, who was selected by Hollywood director and producer, Cecil B. DeMille in a worldwide Paramount beauty contest, and signed to Paramount Studios in 1933.

Work in Progress Short from in development 40 Minute Documentary Film by Ellen Nolan

Synopsis

Drawing directly from the archive, using feminist film and photography theory together with approaches of archival studies, radical empathy, oral history, and studies of early Hollywood cinema to underpin my approach, I am exposing Harvey’s hidden history and repurposing archival materials to facilitate new exchanges with the historical past.

I will enter Harvey’s archive through the prism of her story – “I didn’t make it in Hollywood; I refused to go on the casting couch,” – which was often repeated in our family conversations. This oral history will be embedded posthumously, as an unpublished narrative positioning Harvey’s voice within the body of her existing archive. This alternate history and version of events, at odds with 1930’s Hollywood mythology, will give voice to Harvey, and the many women marginalised by the ‘star system’.

I will employ an innovative hybrid model for archival research. In collaboration with atelier Theresa Parker, I have created reproductions of two of Harvey’s archival outfits – a wool suit, and her original Hollywood casting bikini. Wearing Harvey’s remade outfits on visits to the same sites that she stayed in 1933 as an aspiring actress, I establish a dynamic between the embodied subject in the present, and the archival object. These encounters – rich in personal empathic experience – are captured on photography and 16mm film, and through written text.