'The Melbourne-born Jennie Blackwood (Boddington) began her filmmaking career in the immediate post-war period, along with many others of Australia's first New Wave of film intellectuals. They were inspired by the achievement of Harry Watt's The Overlanders (1946) and the local presence of the renowned documentarian Joris Ivens, there to set up the abortive Dutch East Indies film unit. Blackwood joined the newly established film unit of the Department of Information's Australian National Film Board (the future Film Australia).
She subsequently
met Joan Long and trained with many of the big names of the "Golden Age"
of Griersonite documentary filmmaking in Australia: John Heyer, Colin Dean
and Ron Maslyn Williams.
Returning to Melbourne in the early 1950's she worked as a film director with the GPO's small Melbourne film unit, turning out training films. In the late 1950's, she married Cinematographer Adrian Boddington and together they established the Zanthus Films partnership, crafting a series of sponsored documentaries that frequently expressed both Blackwood's humanist voice and Boddington's skills in colour Cinematography. After the BP-commissioned Three in a Million (1959), their respective tradecraft is best on show in Port of Melbourne (1961) and You Are Not Alone (1961). In these films the then barely-discussed issue of breast cancer treatment and survivability is given a soap-opera air which, perhaps, is even more effective today, with contemporary audiences raised on Douglas Sirk and the cultural theory of melodrama as an instrument of social rupture. All these titles were early Australian Film Institute Award winners, as was the Cyril Pearl-scripted Mourning film Anzac (1959), which pioneered the use of historical stills and rostrum camera effects.
After Adrian Boddington's death in 1970, Jennie Boddington retired from active film production, becoming the first curator of photography for the National Gallery of Victoria. She returned to Sydney in 1994 and became an active free-lance researcher, cataloguing the files and photographic archives of Australian Walkabout magazine in the Mitchell Library.' (Senses of Cinema: 8 2000 )
