Lynda Myles was the world’s first female film festival director, leading the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) during a pivotal 1973 to 1980 period in which the festival was cementing its international reputation. Myles went on to have an impressive career as a film producer, scoring a Bafta in 1992 for The Commitments and holding senior posts at Columbia Pictures, the BBC and the UK’s National Film and Television School, where she was head of fiction.
But Myles’ legacy has been somewhat overlooked, according to filmmaker and University of Edinburgh lecturer Susan Kemp. “A decade ago, people started talking about how few women there were in the film industry,” says Kemp. “There are so many women working in the film industry – but we seem to forget. The labour of women is valued so little in the industry. If you look back to the early years of cinema, there are many women directors working who have had such an impact, we just don’t know them. Lynda was somebody we thought everyone should know about.”
Kemp has founded The Lynda Myles Project, alongside Women Make Film filmmaker and former EIFF festival director Mark Cousins. The project will have its official launch on Saturday (August 19) at Edinburgh’s Everyman cinema, as part of EIFF, with Myles in attendance. She is now retired and living in Scotland.
The idea grew from Kemp putting Myles forward for an honorary doctorate at the University of Edinburgh. While at a pub with Cousins, the pair discussed their belief the doctorate didn’t go far enough in giving Myles the respect she was due. They needed to make a film about her. “It started out small, but then the more you know about Lynda, the more you realise small isn’t going to cover it,” says Kemp.
They decided to make two films, one with more of a poetic approach, using the language of film to explore Myles’ life and love of cinema, and the other putting Myles in a political context.
This year marks 50 years since Scotland-born Myles became festival director of the EIFF. It is also a time in which Edinburgh has some rebuilding work to do, after the near loss of EIFF and the Edinburgh Filmhouse last year owing to the financial collapse of their parent charity, the Centre for the Moving Image (CMI). Kemp is passionate that the local industry should look to the lessons taught by Myles to help move forward.
At this year’s EIFF, a work-in-progress screening of Kemp’s film will be shown, alongside clips of Cousins’ project. Kemp’s film meshes archival footage with interviews with the likes of documentary filmmaker and former Edinburgh Filmhouse director Jim Hickey and US critic B Ruby Rich.
Wendy Griffin, whose credits include EIFF world premiere The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, is producing both films, with funders including Screen Scotland and the University of Edinburgh. The plan is for the films, once completed, to tour the festival circuit.
“There’s no big book of Lynda Myles to go to. We’re creating that knowledge,” says Kemp, who mined Myles herself for her wisdom in the making of the film – something with which Kemp says Myles wasn’t always entirely at ease.
“It’s not easy to constantly talk about yourself when you’re a Scottish woman. I don’t think she found it the most comfortable thing, to have me and Mark picking her brains about her all the time.”
Creative thinking
What lessons should be learnt from Myles? “Lynda talks about how, in film festival culture nowadays, there is an emphasis on industry, and the practical. There isn’t enough space for conversations and in-depth thinking about the aesthetics of film, or critical thinking about film. We lost that connection, and we sort of separated out the academics and the thinkers from the makers and the artists. We can all benefit from mixing that all up again.
“When we bring people together, in film festival culture, that tends to be on industry panels, industry events that are focused on funding and doing, not necessarily about the creative thinking and how important that is.”
This conversation comes at a crucial time for EIFF, with plans ramping up for the festival’s future. 2023’s edition is a scaled-back event, under the wing of the Edinburgh International Festival, and headed up by programme director Kate Taylor and executive producer Tamara Van Strijthem. DNA Films producer Andrew Macdonald is chairing a fresh board that will build the festival back up from 2024 onwards.
“I’m quite angry, still. I think it was really badly done,” says former EIFF employee Kemp of the suddenness of the CMI collapse. “Most of us started at the [Edinburgh] Filmhouse or the film festival. Most people in Scotland working in film culture today come from that small location. It’s hugely influential. With the film festival, there is a chance to re-establish that cultural context.
“Once the shock of it is over, I hope change brings a re-group, and an imaginative re-group. That’s why I feel it is the right time for The Lynda Myles Project, because it might spark a different way of thinking, rather than just repeating what we did before.”
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