Born: 16 April 1908, United Kingdom
Died: 19 August 1995
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from a 2025 interview with Dr. Zoë Burgess, Senior Research Fellow at the University of West London’s London School of Film, Media and Design, and Film Curator at Wessex Film and Sound Archive.
Eda Moore was active from the late 1940s and into the ‘50s and ‘60s. The level of work that she produced is significant within the collection that we hold. She lived in the Salisbury area and she was very much more inclined to what we think of as high production values. So she edited nearly all of her works. She also was a very keen sound recordist as well, so a lot of her work has been digitized as part of the British Library’s initiative to digitize a lot of sound material. So she also would send audio letters to her family in South Africa and I think that’s a really interesting aspect of her practice. So she produced a number of different films in the Salisbury area which were recording local goings on and she’d also in many cases record a soundtrack to go over those. So one of the things you find with amateurs is that although amateurism was very much ahead when it came to use of color film stock for example, so they were using color film stock more routinely than the professional industry, sound came much later to amateurs because the technology really wasn’t there to support the synchronous recording of sound. So what you find is people tended to experiment with different methods of recording sound alongside their cine film and Eda Moore was one of those people. She was a very keen editor but she was also a very keen advocate for her own work and she did have a strong voice about it. So she never married. She had a strong authorial presence in how she spoke about her work and actually she took measures to ensure that her work would end up in an archive. So she made connections with the BBC to ensure that her films would be recognized for the labor that she put into them. So she is a really interesting example as a result of the fact that we were able to archive her work as a result of the fact that she wanted them to be archived which is quite interesting amongst the amateurs that we looked at.