Jane Arden (1927- 1982) was a film director, actor, screenwriter, playwright, songwriter and poet.

In the late 1940s, after studying at RADA, her career started to form as she began to play parts on television and in London theatres. As the 1950s progressed, Arden concentrated on writing for stage and television, working with some of the key figures of British theatre and cinema such as Sheila Allen, Joan Simms, Jack Bond, David de Keyser, Alan Bates, Victor Spinetti, Albert Finney, Charles Laughton, Harold Pinter, and Philip Saville (whom she married). In the 1960s her work became increasingly radical as her interest and involvement in feminism and the anti-psychiatry movement grew. In 1969 she produced the play Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven, which ran to a packed house for six weeks at Arts Lab in London. From this she formed the radical feminist theatre group Holocaust and then wrote the play , which was to become the film The Other Side of the Underneath (1972).

Arden died in 1982 and, after an initial tribute at the National Film Theatre in 1983, the films were suppressed; her name consequently fading from the public realm.

In 2009, the BFI re-released Separation (1967), The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) and Anti-Clock (1979), creating a previously unavailable platform for a new generation to see her work. However the depth and social relevance of this work commands that Arden’s output receive greater recognition and award her deserved status amongst her contemporaries.

By asking women artists to respond to the viewing of two of her films, Separation and The Other Side of the Underneath, this project aims to draw attention, not only to Arden’s work, but the influence and stimulus her work is able to bring to a new generation of artists, writers and filmmakers. Formed of two parts the culminating bookwork will first reproduce certain pivotal texts and new commissioned material that provide a contextual and biographical history of Arden’s oeuvre. Following this the second part will publish the contributions of a number of female artists, in the form of printed matter, audio and moving image. There will be an exhibition in June, showcasing the book alongside these multimedia works. This blog will operate as a space where a dialogue surrounding the work can develop, anchoring the progression of the project and acting as a point of information in relation to the expanded nature of my practice. Focusing on the import of her creative output in the contemporary dialogues of feminism and the anti-psychiatry movement, this active research project and the culminating bookwork will stress the still necessary endeavour to revisit and revaluate these radical histories.

Charlotte Procter