Boundary Crossings Geography, film and exploration: women and amateur filmmaking in the Himalayas Katherine Brickell and Bradley L Garrett Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX Email: katherine.brickell@rhul.ac.uk Revised manuscript received 18 December 2011 Film has become a cutting-edge research area and pedagogical tool for geographers (Cresswell and Dixon 2002), a trend that is morphing into a renewed interest in how we might make use of new video tech- nologies (Garrett 2011; Laurier et al. 2008; Simpson 2011). 1 The literature suggests, following arguments made in visual anthropology (Pink 2007) and visual sociology (Brown et al. 2008; Iedema et al. 2006), that increasingly user-friendly digital technology can be deployed in the field as a recording device with signif- icant implications for the production, analysis and dissemination of research. This novel methodological zeal is tempered, however, by questions that are being asked about the direction of the gaze and framing of the camera (Crang 1997), who is wielding it (Kindon 2003), what we consider to be a ‘professional’ film worthy of analysis, and to what degree we should ‘trust’ footage as a record of events ‘in the field’ (Clancy 2001). Such discussions on the politics of geographic prac- tice and filmmaking are brought to life through the life and work of Eileen Healey, a visionary British female mountaineer and amateur filmmaker (Plate 1). Healey died at the age of 89 on 8 September 2010. Over 50 years earlier, in 1959, Healey joined 10 women with the objective of reaching the 26 906-foot summit of Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth highest peak, to undertake what the women and media branded as its first ‘all-female’ ascent, despite the presence of male Sherpas on the expedition. The Cho Oyu expedition was organised by French climber and celebrated Co ˆte D’Azur swimwear designer Claude Kogan, with the official team including members of the British Ladies Alpine Club, the Pinnacle Club and three Nepali women. The expedition ended in tragedy with the loss of four climbers, including Kogan, and two Sherpas. Although the media at the time sensationalised the events that took place, another record of the expedi- tion existed – reels of 16 mm film brought home by Healey and stored in an attic – until Healey’s son, near the end of her life, offered to edit the footage with his mother providing the narration. The resulting film was first screened at the Kendal Mountain Festi- val in 2009. We argue that Healey’s resultant film traverses three important boundaries. First, while it has been quite common since the beginning of the 20th century to film these types of expeditions as a ‘formal’ record of male accomplishments (often for sponsoring organ- isations such as the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) 2 or the Alpine Club), we argue that amateur recordings such as Healey’s remain an underutilised archival research and teaching resource for uncover- ing the ‘unofficial’ endeavours and voices of those often neglected in the history of exploration. Second, we contend from an intra- and interdisciplinary per- spective that Healey’s film urges geographers to read- dress its relative neglect of historical film in particular as a research and pedagogic tool. Geographical engagement with the medium sits in stark comparison to anthropology’s long and committed engagement with documentary and ethnographic film (see Garrett 2011). And third, on a final connected point, we con- tend that Healey’s film shows the potential for ‘inex- perienced’ geographers with limited film experience to cross over from film analysis and criticism into production, building on those burgeoning interests outlined above. Geographic filmmaking . . . moving images have become the primary media through which we make sense of the world and the bound- aries between images and that which they imagine are increasingly blurred. (Lorimer 2010, 240) Ongoing work by scholars including Driver and Jones (2009) reveals a considerable interest amongst British geographers in utilising and analysing film, stretching back as far as the filming of the Severn Bore in 1901 Citation: 2012 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00505.x ISSN 0020-2754 Ó 2012 The Author. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Ó 2012 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)