About

This practice-based PhD draws directly from the heterogeneous archive of my British great-aunt, Nita Harvey, who was selected by Hollywood director, Cecil B. DeMille in a worldwide Paramount beauty contest, and signed to Paramount Studios in 1933, in a three-picture contract. I inherited her archive in 2007, after it had been stored in my aunt’s garage since Harvey’s death in 1987. The archive exists in my sole, private ownership and is housed physically and digitally in my home.

Drawing directly from the archive, using feminist film and photography theory together with methodologies of archival studies, radical empathy, oral history, trauma 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 familial 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 This oral history will be embedded posthumously, as an unpublished narrative positioning Harvey’s voice within the body of her existing archive.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 will establish a dynamic between the embodied subject in the present, and the archival object. These encounters – rich in personal empathic experience – will be captured on film and photography, and through written text.

You find more of Ellen's work at www.ellennolan.com.