Margaret Thomson (10 June 1910 – 30 December 2005) was an Australian-born documentary filmmaker who divided her forty-year career between New Zealand and England. She was the first female film director active in New Zealand.

Family and education

Margaret Thomson was born in Australia to Gertrude Thomson and James Allan Thomson, a geologist. He was appointed head of the

Dominion Museum The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is New Zealand's national museum and is located in Wellington. ''Te Papa Tongarewa'' translates literally to "container of treasures" or in full "container of treasured things and people that spring fr ...

Wellington Wellington ( mi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara or ) is the capital city of New Zealand. It is located at the south-western tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Remutaka Range. Wellington is the second-largest city in New Zealand by metr ...

, so Margaret spent most of her childhood in New Zealand. She attended

Canterbury University The University of Canterbury ( mi, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha; postnominal abbreviation ''Cantuar.'' or ''Cant.'' for ''Cantuariensis'', the Latin name for Canterbury) is a public research university based in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was f ...

, graduating with a degree in zoology.

Film career

She moved to England in 1934. Her first film-related job in England was with

Gaumont-British The Gaumont-British Picture Corporation produced and distributed films and operated a cinema chain in the United Kingdom. It was established as an offshoot of the Gaumont Film Company of France. Film production Gaumont-British was founded in 1 ...

Instructional Films, for whom she worked initially as their film librarian and subsequently as editor for a series of films on the ecology of Great Britain. She left in 1938 and worked as a film editor elsewhere, eventually joining Realist Film Unit (RFU) in 1941. Partly due to the onset of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

, which opened opportunities for women while men were at war, she worked on a large number of RFU film projects, many aimed at educating people about dealing with wartime conditions. She shot two postwar projects, ''Children Learning by Experience'' (1946) and ''Children Growing Up with Other People'' (1947), in a proto-

cinéma vérité Cinéma vérité (, , ; "truthful cinema") is a style of documentary filmmaking developed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda. It combines improvisation with use of the camera to unveil truth or ...

style in order to capture the children's behavior with as little interference as possible. She stayed at RFU for six years, developing a reputation as an outstanding director who conveyed complicated information clearly and without talking down to her audiences. In 1947, she was offered a position as a director for New Zealand's National Film Unit (NFU), and she returned to the country where she had been raised. Her NFU short film ''Railway Worker'' (1948) is now considered a classic, and the NFU's head called it the best thing the NFU had produced up to that point in its history. One of the things that set the film apart from others of its era is that it showed the workers' home lives as well as their work lives. Thomson's own favorite among her NFU films was another short, ''The First Two Years at School'' (1949), which offered a close look at a school for

Māori Māori or Maori can refer to: Relating to the Māori people * Māori people of New Zealand, or members of that group * Māori language, the language of the Māori people of New Zealand * Māori culture * Cook Islanders, the Māori people of the C ...

children. Thomson eventually became unhappy over the amount of government oversight of the NFU, which she felt had the potential to stifle controversial material and limit the independence of viewpoints expressed by NFU films. She returned to England in 1950, taking up a job as director for the

Crown Film Unit The Crown Film Unit was an organisation within the British Government's Ministry of Information during the Second World War. Formerly the GPO Film Unit it became the Crown Film Unit in 1940. Its remit was to make films for the general public in ...

. Crown closed a year later, but she continued making films in England for another two decades as a freelance filmmaker and producer, mostly of documentary shorts. In the 1950s, she set up a production company with her husband, Bob Ash. The only feature film Thomson directed was '' Child's Play'' (1954), a science-fiction film for Group 3 about children who managed to split the atom and thereby create a new form of popcorn. She coached child actors for other films, including ''

The Kidnappers ''The Kidnappers'' (US: ''The Little Kidnappers'') is a 1953 British film, directed by Philip Leacock and written by Neil Paterson. Plot In the early 1900s, two young orphaned brothers, eight-year-old Harry (Jon Whiteley) and five-year-old ...

'' (1953), which won its two child stars juvenile Academy Awards. Thomson retired from film making in 1977. She was the subject of a 1995 documentary, ''Direction... Margaret Thomson'', and her work was featured in the documentary ''War, Peace and Pictures'' (1989).

Filmography

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Thomson, Margaret 1910 births 2005 deaths New Zealand women film directors New Zealand documentary filmmakers University of Canterbury alumni Australian emigrants to New Zealand Women documentary filmmakers