The Nita Harvey Archive: Hidden History, Experience and Objectification in the 1930s Hollywood Star System
Author: Ellen Nolan
Format: Video Essay
Duration: 13′ 02″
Published: July 2025
https://doi.org/10.37186/swrks/15.2/3
Embedded Files
Practice
Practice
Descriptive transcript will be uploaded on 4 August.
Research Statement
Research Statement
Research Questions
Research Questions
“Why does the archive exist? Was Nita Harvey creating a witness through her archive? I will argue that Nita Harvey collected both for herself and for a future audience. Collecting, cross-referencing and analyzing ephemera that demonstrates Harvey’s expectation of an audience, (descriptions on backs of photographs, her annotation over her press cuttings and diaries), I contend that Harvey’s archive maintained a form of control over her own experience, shifting her feelings of objectified powerlessness in 1930s Hollywood, to a position of powerful witness. (Petit and Pozorski, (2018), Azoulay, (2008) and Best, (2016). By examining industry and personal ephemera, as well as Harvey’s rebellious decision to ‘walk out’ of her Paramount contract, I will offer an alternative 1930s Hollywood history and make new contributions to knowledge, aligning with recent findings in the # MeToo movement.
What is my positionality in this research? This research is grounded in key archival principles of provenance, considering where the archive originated, how it was created and used by Harvey, and how I am engaging with it now. As a former fashion photographer with extensive industry experience, my approach draws on the hybrid nature of fashion photography, which uniquely bridges the reals of fine art and commerce.
This aligns with both my and Harvey’s genealogical experiences, and resonates with the practice described by Ullrich, (2019), in which actors use their bodies as “artist devices”. Both Harvey, through her archival presence, and I, through my performative practice, use our bodies and the archival garments we inhabit to convey meaning, our bodies transcending mere pose to become performative instruments.
By embodying and performing the intersection of fashion photography and acting, and aligning this feminine archival dialogue with the familial, Harvey and I reveal the fluidity of the archive while simulatenously challenging its structure. I am bringing Harvey’s archive alive by creating new images, and my performance work is crystallised into my 16mm performance films, photography, and a 40-minute documentary, each serving as a research outcome.
My questioning and exploration of the embodied archive, through performance as a methodology and tool for research, is important because it establishes original contributions to knowledge. Siri Gurudev (2021) addresses fabulation within performance as a valuable research methodology, and Saidiya Hartman’s ground-breaking work on historiography is also important to my approach in reminding us that history is told from a position of power.
Context / Significance
Context / Significance
I first encountered the archive as a child, through regular visits to my great aunt’s home in Richmond, Surrey (1979-1987). Sitting on Harvey’s sofa, I watched, captivated, as she produced large black and white photographs of herself in 1930s Hollywood. She often repeated, “I didn’t make it in Hollywood because I refused to go on the casting couch.” Harvey’s narrative became an embedded part of how I viewed the photographs.
Martha Langford talks about photography as a non-exclusively visual medium that can be (e.g., the family album) animated through performed or narrated oral histories. Langford offers new ways of understanding the mnemonic role of photography and memory when performed as an oral history. Since Harvey attached a narrative by performing the photographs to me as a child, she offered me an animated experience, a retelling of the photographs, and her Hollywood story shifted the glamorous images into a darker place. And the photographs became inscribed with the embedded signs of Harvey’s trauma and objectification.
Whilst acknowledging and drawing from the limits of theoretical empathy and trauma studies with extreme histories such as the Holocaust and slavery, my research sits elsewhere, and as such addresses a gap in knowledge in archival studies, specifically on objectification and marginalized histories and lived experience. Harvey’s archive provides new information about 1930s Hollywood, and this information questions the meanings and values that Harvey gave to her belongings. For example, Harvey’s collecting of her 1933 Hollywood casting reel. As concepts of archival arrangement and theory are necessary, I started archival training with the archivist Anna McNally in 2023. The archive will be distilled to reveal the relationship between different ephemera, exposing hidden aspects of Harvey’s life that singular archival documents cannot reveal.
The industry material that Harvey collected is required to contextualise her more personal material and the potent agency she represents in her performative vernacular photography. Using the concept of provenance, I argue for Harvey’s authorship and her reasons for keeping. Harvey wanted to be seen. Like many young women in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Harvey was interested in cinema and fashion. As a very young woman, Harvey responded to the silent films and fashion magazines that were an integral part of her liberal and creative cultural milieu. She soaked up the theatrical drama of the silent era performing its drama and erotism by dressing up, draping costumes out of sheets, fabric and a ‘dressing-up’ box of bohemian style, a silk scarf around her waist or tied round her head to emulate the contemporary flapper style, in a look synonymous with feminine freedom and against societal norms. Harvey cut her long hair into a ‘Jazz Age’ bob, which she wore throughout the 1930s, empowering herself through sleek simplicity. Harvey’s make-up was in keeping with actresses of the era, such as Theda Bara and Mary Pickford, with kohl rimmed eyes and dark lips to add dramatic suspense to her expressions, as the young Harvey moved through the archive in multiple domestic narrative sequences, performing her costumed body through dance, gesture and pose. The difference between what Harvey was doing and what many other young women were undoubtedly doing either in their imaginations or in front of the mirror was that Harvey, along with her family, photographed her performances for years and collected the photographs into one place. In this way, the archive is both ordinary and extraordinary.
The archive sits within my practice, and the ongoing dialogue between the archive and my work fuels my research methodology. The archive is only animated and alive when I am working with it, both in my research and my practice, and my trajectory aligns with this very personal relationship. In this way, the formation of the archive exists like an ammonite, at the centre of my practice, and its living and continuing spiral represents my responsive body of work.
As a former fashion photographer (and dancer), archival embodiment captures a communion with the historical past, with Harvey’s experience, which is made possible through performance photography as a research methodology. Harvey’s two-piece wool suit (that was part of her working wardrobe) is the closest I have come to wearing a ‘power suit’; wearing it in my performances made me stand tall and proud. The wool suit, combined with heels and the Hollywood heat, restricted and slowed my movements and positioned my walking stride into an enforced short step, creating a deep swing and movement of my hips, and, along with the help of the heels, I found myself walking with an unfamiliar ‘femme fatale’ wiggle.
Conversely, wearing the Hollywood Casting Bikini because of its pattern cut, its lack of fabric or support, I felt bare, powerless, humiliated, and lacking in any agency. The fact that when the bikini was sketched and pattern cut by atelier Theresa Parker, it revealed a one-size-fits-all nappy, aligns with my experience, and the infantilization of its wearer. Harvey’s stark powerlessness and fear when wearing the Hollywood Casting Bikini are palpable in her archival casting reel, no matter how much she tries to smile. And with care, attention to detail, and empathy as a form of sensuous knowledge, both my body and Harvey’s body, along with our embodied experiences, together play a central role in the development of knowledge creation and dissemination.
Methods
Methods
As described above, my approach is performative and mediated through the body in an embodied dialogue with Harvey and her archive. Using film and photography to capture my performances based on key archival images and locations that Harvey visited, my contemporary performances in the U.S sites that Harvey visited in 1933 are photographed and filmed, and my findings and experience become text. Commissioning atelier Theresa Parker in 2022 to pattern-cut two archival outfits worn by Harvey: the two-piece suit and the Hollywood Casting Bikini, was both an early intervention and a pivotal point in the project and research. We are currently working on a third, named The Goddess, because of its green-blue silk georgette cape, mesh leotard with mermaid scales and silver crown. In the archive, Harvey is photographed wearing this outfit from below, standing on a podium in a Hollywood studio. I will take the outfit out for walks, performing through London’s Soho film district (where Harvey worked and later lived), and then on the road to Hollywood. My performances, embodying Harvey’s archive, are my outputs: performance photographs,16mm film stills, 16mm films, and writing. The 40-minute documentary film that I am in the process of making is an output that collects my photography and 16mm film outputs into its narrative to tell the story of Harvey’s archive and my response to it.
The combination of extensive industry experience, academia and fine art practice has helped position this intersectional knowledge framework and innovative hybrid approach in my field of research and practice.
Outcomes
Outcomes
Using an empathic approach is inclusive to both the archive community (1930s Hollywood marginalised history), the archive creator (Harvey), and to a wider international audience and public. I utilise ‘ethics of care’ as a feminist approach based on theories of radical empathy, where archivists are seen as ‘caregivers bound to the record-keeper by mutual affective responsibilities’, via key literature by Caswell and Cifor (2016). This approach, as opposed to a standard legalistic ‘social justice’ model, is inclusive of the record-maker (Harvey and I) and Hollywood history. Since this research is about a marginalized female community, my inclusive approach and affective responsibilities are important in facilitating new dialogues. Ideas of radical empathy also develop Verne Harris’s Derridean notion that the ‘other’ (in this case Hollywood) should be let into the archives, where hospitality (and care) guides archival interventions.
Through making my documentary draft, new findings of systematic 1930s Hollywood objectification and disempowerment are established. In both the archival casting reel and Search for Beauty (1934) film, objectification is methodical, as the camera in each film repeats identically brutal pans up and down the actress’ semi-clothed body, humiliatingly exposing legs, knickers, and, in Harvey’s case, a specially made casting bikini. Both the archival Hollywood casting reel (that demonstrates the panning up and down the body approach on Harvey) and the pre-code film Search for Beauty, which Harvey was contracted into by Paramount, document and align unharnessed objectification as an approach. However, it is only when Harvey’s archival casting reel (that importantly was not intended for an audience outside of the Hollywood studio system), is compared with the ‘fictional’ casting in Harvey’s pre-code Hollywood film, that similarities in objectification and measuring can be drawn, that convey 1930’s Hollywood cultural attitudes and working conditions for women, and perhaps new evidence.
The final outputs will be a 40-minute documentary film submitted to international film festivals, performance photographs, 16mm performance film reels, 16mm performance film stills, a monograph photography book of my archival practice approach and selected archival ephemera, and an international touring exhibition. I am aiming to publish my final thesis as an academic book.
My 13-minute draft documentary is a framework sketch only, and as such is not an output.
Impact
Impact
Through my research, I am developing a new model for archival studies and proposing innovative ways of engaging with archives, grounded in the practices of remaking archival objects, embodiment and empathy.
Future research plans supporting further impact through change (the collection of data) include a study trip to the Paramount archive at the UCLA Library in Berkley, USA. Accessing original films and documents will provide exclusive insight into Paramount Studio materials that are otherwise inaccessible, enabling cross-referencing with Harvey's archive and her perspective as an actress within the Hollywood system. This will contribute to new understandings of the 1930s studio systems, production approaches and values. In addition to the film archive, the UCLA library holds paper materials essential to my research, including fashion and costume, photographs, scripts, posters, personal papers, studio records and various media recorded on film, radio and television. The music library also houses the original score from the pre-Code film, Search for Beauty (1934), in which Harvey was contracted to appear.
The UCLA collections also include an oral history research centre focused on the history of social movements, particularly the Screen Actors Guild (workers union), SAG-AFTRA, founded in 1933, the same year that Harvey was active there. The SAG-AFTRA collection contains vital evidence on actors' rights, labour disputes and working conditions within the Paramount studio system. These findings will provide new cultural and historical context to Harvey's experience, including her clash with Paramount studios and eventual decision to ‘walk out’ of her contract, an event documented in her family's archival letters and contrasted by conflicting press releases in the U.S (sanctioned through Paramount) and U.K. newspapers.
Harvey’s refusal to submit to studio working conditions is well documented in her archive and preserved through oral tradition. She often recounted in family conversations, "I didn’t make it in Hollywood because I refused to go on the casting couch." Her archive also includes documentation of her salary as a Paramount "property", along with records of her hotel, food, transport and other living expenses. Harvey asserted that she was not being paid fairly, especially considering her intensive film and theatre acting experience in Britain, including two films in Elstree Studios and her collaboration with Ida Lupino, who later became her mentor in Hollywood.
By comparing Paramount’s institutional archive and historical narrative with Harvey’s private archive and hidden history, this research aims to generate new evidence, or at the very least, new questions and new leads. Mapping Harvey’s oral tradition (‘I didn’t make it in Hollywood because I refused to go on the casting couch’), Harvey’s archival collecting practices, and her lived experience and agency within the studio system help to foreground a marginalised feminine history and the cultural context of 1930s Hollywood, which still resonates today. How much has or hasn't changed in a similar context, almost one hundred years later?
References
References
Azoulay, A. (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography. Cambridge: Zone Books.
Bennett, J. (2005) Emphatic Vision. Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Best, S. (2016) Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography. London: Bloomsbury.
Caswell, M. and Cifor, M (2016). 'From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives'. Archivaria 81 (May), 23-43. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13557.
Cifor, M. and Wood, S. (2017). 'Critical Feminism in the Archives, in Critical Archival Studies.' In Michelle Caswell, Ricardo Punzalan, and T-Kay Sangwand. (eds) Special issue, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no.2 https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.27
Cvetkovich, A. (2014). 'Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice' in eds. Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu, Feeling Photography. Durham: Duke University Press.
Derrida, J. (1998) Archive Fever. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Edenheim, S. (2013) 'Lost and Never Found: The Queer Archive of Feelings and Its Historical Propriety.' Differences 1 December 2013; 24 (3): 36–62. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2391950
Gledhill, C. Knight, J. et al. (2015) Doing Women's Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future (Women’s Media History Now!) University of Illinois Press.
Gurudev, S. (2021) Performance as Methodology: Embodied Archives and Fabulation. Feminist Anthropology, volume 2, issue 2. Online ISSN: 2643-7961
Hemmings, C. (2023). ‘We thought she was a witch’: Gender, class and whiteness in the familial ‘memory archive’. Memory Studies, 16(2), 185-197. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980211066578
Kuhn, A. and Emiko McAllister, K. (ed.) (2006) Locating Memory: Photographic Acts Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Langford, M. (2001) Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums. Canada: McGill- Queen’s University Press.
Maltby, R. (2003) Hollywood Cinema. Blackwell Publishing.
Nolan, E. (2024) The Nita Harvey Archive: Hidden History, Experience and Objectification in the 1930s Hollywood Star System. (PhD thesis, University of Westminster).
Osthoff, S. (2009). Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the archive in contemporary art from repository of documents to art medium. Atropos.
Laurence, P. and Pozorski, A. (2018) Photography and Trauma: An Introduction. https://doi.org/10.4000/polysemes.3366.
Pollock, G. (2013) After-affects/After-images, Trauma and aesthetics in the virtual feminist museum, Univ. Manchester.
Sprio, M. (2014) Migrant Memories: Cultural History, Cinema and the Italian Post War Diaspora in Britain. Peter Lang A&G.
Thompson, P. (2017) The Voice of the Past: Oral History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, fourth edition. Ullrich, W. (2019) Selfies: The return of public life. Wagenbach Klaus.
Peer Reviews
Peer Reviews
All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows
Review 1: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement
The filmmaker uses her extraordinary access to her great aunt’s archive and rich seam of archival materials to take us on a fascinating journey with Nita Harvey from her garden in London to Paramount Studios in Hollywood. The nitrate negatives of Nita in her garden are a real find but some photographs at the beginning could hold for longer to allow time to read the captions and absorb them.
The visual storytelling of the piece is well-structured, novel in its approach and original in illuminating Nita’s hidden history, with the potential for impact in the field. While the depth of research is impressive, the lack of sound in the piece is disconcerting at times. While this was the silent era, we never hear Nita’s voice. Is there a recording of it? The supporting statement refers to Harvey’s “oral tradition” but doesn’t specify further.
Apart from some period music at the beginning and sync sound during the Search for Beauty excerpts, there is silence, where I feel more creative use of sound design would strengthen the film. The casting reel is fascinating and disturbing but the lack of a sound element to counterpoint it feels like a missed opportunity and the sync to the long dialogue scene excerpted from Search for Beauty seems slightly off.
The commissioning of the outfits and performative re-enactments are very well done, and the embodied insights drawn from inhabiting the archive are interesting but more insight into Nita’s life after the Search for Beauty contest in Los Angeles would strengthen this section as well as parallel cutting with photographs of her from this era. There is a reference to a Hollywood diary which is not really used in the piece.
The supporting statement provides a clear overview of the theoretical and artistic context but, at times, seems to relate to a longer work-in-progress and the PhD rather than the film submitted here. The statement refers to Harvey walking out on her contract, as documented in archival family letters which are not used in the film. The only brief mention of this in the film is Nita’s later statement that she didn’t make it in Hollywood because she refused to submit to the casting couch. Harvey’s objectification is clear in the film but the traumatic chain of events which led her to abandon her Hollywood dream less so.
The supporting statement could be improved by making clear the relationship between this film and the full 40-minute documentary which will follow. Is this a 13-minute work-in-progress towards a longer film (as suggested in the Outcomes section), an edited version of the longer film or a completely separate work? If this forms part of a longer film, the future study trip to the Paramount archive, music library and oral research centre promises to address some of the gaps outlined above. Some typos (“decendant”, for example, at 0.47) and punctuation could also be tidied up in both film and statement.
Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement
This is a stunning work offering unique access to a personal archive through which he creative researcher is able to challenge a linear history of Hollywood through a gender perspective. The researcher suggests that her great aunt, Nita Harvey, protagonist of this film, was arguably making an archive, since the photos and various materials (carefully listed at the beginning of the film) had annotations of dates and places. The researcher then becomes that first audience member, and offers her own interpretation and selection of an archive that otherwise could have rotted in the garage where it had been stored, in 1987, following Nita Harvey’s passing.
Through the film, Nita Harvey is somewhat given life again, as a key and pioneering actress of the early Hollywood period. The statement shows clear awareness of this process and adequately acknowledges the positionality informing it. There is a statement that clearly illustrates this: “The archive is only animated and alive when I am working with it, both in my theoretical research and in my practice, and my research trajectory aligns to this very personal relationship.” The researcher suggests being a former fashion photographer. I wonder if the discussion on embodiment more could be said on the relevance of applying performance photography as a research method, since this seems particularly innovative in its intervention, recreation and reinvention of the existing archive. In fact, the whole film feels like a gallery exhibition.
The silent dimension of the film enhances the feeling of being in front of precious and exclusive work, and the call to engage with it in a feminist way, with care, with criticality, with attention to detail, with empathy, as a form of sensuous knowledge where the body plays a key role in the process of knowledge creation and dissemination.
In the discussion of the outputs, explicit reference could be made to this film as an output or how it is situated within the other kinds of outputs that the researcher is aiming to produce and disseminate.
It uses a unique archive as the basis for powerful and innovative storytelling. Given the theme of the special dossier on ‘Filmmaking and Copyright Law’, the connection with copyright should be made more explicit. The line ‘The industry material that Harvey collected is required to contextualize her more personal material and using the concept of provenance, I argue for Harvey’s authorship and reasons for keeping’ opens the door to interesting arguments on the use of copyright protected materials under the exception for criticism and review, and even more interesting arguments and claims on authorship and ownership of rights in those materials. These should be explored in the written statement.
All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response
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