This week, Anna Smith welcomes Nicole Newnham back to Girls On Film to discuss her documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite. The film sheds light on the groundbreaking sexologist and former Playboy model Shere Hite, who in 1976 published The Hite Report, dubbed ‘a sexual revolution in 600 pages’. Taking the intimate experiences of thousands of women across the world as its basis, Hite and a small team of grassroots feminists exposed some of the harmful ideas around female sexuality that were prevalent at the time.
In this episode, Nicole describes how she first got involved in the project, about the contemporary relevance of Shere Hite, and how Dakota Johnson became the voice of Shere Hite. With Anna, Nicole discusses some of the tragedy as well as triumph in the story of Shere Hite and the desire to explore what she calls the ‘the architecture of silence’ that attempted to remove Hite from the history books.
Other films mentioned in this episode:
Crip Camp, Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht, 2020
You can watch The Disappearance of Shere Hite from the 12th January in UK cinemas.