Jennie Boddington

Jennie Boddington
Jennie Boddington in 1952 photographed by Erwin Rado (1914-1988).
Born	Jennifer Blackwood 1922 Melbourne, Australia
Died	15th November 2015
Residence	Melbourne, Australia
Occupation	Filmmaker, curator and researcher
Years active	1940s–1990s

Jennie Boddington (1922—2015) was an Australian filmmaker, first curator of photography at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and researcher.

Jennie Boddington (née Blackwood) was born in Melbourne in 1922. She married in the early 1940s, bearing a son, Tim in 1943. Beginning her career amongst Australia’s New Wave of filmmakers in Sydney, she worked as wardrobe assistant with costume designer Dahl Collings on Harry Watt's Ealing feature film The Overlanders (1946), then on eight hundred costumes for Watt's unfinished follow-up, Eureka Stockade (1948).

Boddington entered the Commonwealth Film Unit in 1948 as cutting room assistant and was there for two and a half years making a lifelong friend in Joan Long (scriptwriter and film producer later known for writing Caddie (1976) and producing Puberty Blues (1981)). In 1947/8 the Commonwealth Film Unit, part of the Australian National Film Board, had moved from 66 King Street in Sydney’s CBD to 5 Condor Street in Burwood, a suburb of Sydney, into an 1879 Department of Education building, where facilities consisted of cutting rooms, a theatre, a room housing recording equipment, a camera room and office space and provided training that the private companies didn’t. Boddington trained there with important Australian and Canadian documentary filmmakers including Australian National Film Board Producer-in-Chief, Stanley Hawes,Colin Dean and Ron Maslyn Williams, and her first editing and directorial experience came in working with John Heyer on The Valley Is Ours (1948).

Divorced in 1950, she moved back to Melbourne and for six years scripted, edited and directed training films for the Victorian General Post Office film unit.