Glasgow Film Theatre is hosting a really
exciting event to mark International Women’s Day to highlight the
importance of women artists based in Glasgow to protest movements. They will be screening Hell Unltd, a film by
Helen Biggar and Norman McLaren, with a specially commissioned live score
performed by Kim Moore (Zoey van Goey) and Gareth Griffiths. In addition they’re showing Traces Left
(1983) ‘a documentary about the Glasgow art and political scene in the 1930s
and 40s’. I only wish I could get up to Glasgow to see it!
Their focus is on Helen Biggar (1909 – 1953), a Glasgow
School of Art graduate who in 1936 created the important anti-war film Hell
Unltd with Norman McLaren. The film is a
real call-to-action to everyone to actively oppose war and is as effective now,
in my view, as it was then. I know we
see images of the horror of war every day and you could say that we’ve become anaesthetised
or immune to it but for me this film reminds us all that we can play a part in
opposing war, and it brings home the disparities between Government spending on
armaments versus education, health, culture etc.
In childhood Helen Biggar suffered from a number of
illnesses but she succeeded in gaining admission to Glasgow School of Art at
the age of 16 in 1925. She worked in
filmmaking, sculpture and theatre design and was very involved in politics. She was part of Glasgow Kino, an organisation
I hadn’t heard of before, who toured films to raise funds for the Spanish
Republican cause. From 1938 onwards she
designed stage shows for the Glasgow Workers’ Theatre Group. She moved to
London in 1945 and from 1950 she was wardrobe mistress and costume designer for
Ballet Rambert. She died, young, of a
brain haemorrhage in 1953.*
Helen Biggar sounds like a fascinating individual and I wish
there were more resources about her online. Where is her archive? Why isn’t she
better known? Annoyingly some references I’ve found to Hell Unltd refer to it
as a ‘Norman McLaren’ film completely ignoring the fact that it was made as one
of many collaborations between McLaren and Biggar. There is a good biography of her on the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography but if you don’t have a subscription
for that there is a shortened biography
on IMDB.
If you end up going to this event at the GFT I‘d love to
hear how it went!
Related archives:
I can’t find any information online about the papers of Helen
Biggar, maybe they are at Glasgow School of Art, maybe they are in London
somewhere, or maybe they are still with family?
Norman
McLaren archive at the University of Stirling Archives
The National Film Board of Canada also has some of Norman
McLaren’s films available to watch online
*Biographical information taken from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
