War Paint: Women at War (12A)
Directed by Margy Kinmonth

THE scope of Margy Kinmouth’s film ranges far and wide, from the medieval Bayeux Tapestry to Thatcher’s Falkands war, from Sudan’s current civil war to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and many other wars in between.

We see clips from historic films of WWII including of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi officers to Maggie Hambling’s painting of Gulf women preparing for war, to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington with 57,000 soldiers’ names carved into black marble. 

Cornelia Parker’s film of her visit to the British poppy factory tells us that these are exported to 80 countries “where the British have left their footprint” and it includes the traditional two minutes’ silence held annually on November 11.

An interview with Linda Kitson, Britain’s official war artist for the Falklands war, shows her sketchbook made on the battlefield in the Antarctic when she was under fire, and she explains that the she felt under constant pressure to bring back images of the truth of what she saw. 

The Iranian Shirin Nershar who now works in New York, says that she was politicised by the Iranian revolution and that her paintings of women, overlaid by text, aim to convey the contradiction of women’s bodies being seen as both dangerous and exotic. 

A section about British women war artists during WWII contrasts Laura Knight’s Ruby Loftus Screwing A Breech Ring, depicting a factory worker, a propaganda work commissioned by the government’s War Artists Advisory Committee, which glamourises repetitive factory work, with Priscilla Thornycroft’s depiction of a frightened horse rearing up at the sound of a bomb. Yet the film studiously omits this artist’s social commitment.  

It is refreshing to see a film which focuses exclusively on women artists, who are still often marginalised by the art world and its mainstream critics, and hopefully this will embolden female art students to take their own work and aspirations seriously. As such this film fulfils a useful function. 

Yet the curious omission of feminism as a major political movement dilutes its potential power, as does its omission of the wider political context. It fails to mention, for example, Thornycroft’s and Felicia Browne’s works in support of the Spanish republic during its civil war, and the section on WWII art does not identify the evils of Nazism. 

And shockingly, Kathe Kollwitz’s profoundly moving anti-war posters are ignored as is all Soviet anti-war art. 

In selected cinemas today.