Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

by Vicki Callahan (Contributor), Victoria Duckett (Contributor), Anna Everett (Contributor)

Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History brings together a diverse group of international feminist scholars to examine the intersections of feminism, history, and feminist theory in film. Editor Vicki Callahan has assembled essays that reflect a range of methodological approaches—including archival work, visual culture, reception studies, biography, ethno-historical studies, historiography, and textual analysis—by a diverse group of film and media studies scholars to prove that feminist theory, film history, and social practice are inevitably and productively intertwined.

Essays in Reclaiming the Archive investigate the different models available in feminist film history and how those feminist strategies might serve as paradigmatic for other sites of feminist intervention. Chapters have an international focus and range chronologically from early cinema to post-feminist texts, organized around the key areas of reception, stars, and authorship. A final section examines the very definitions of feminism (post-feminism), cinema (transmedia), and archives (virtual and online) in place today.

The essays in Reclaiming the Archive prove that a significant heritage of film studies lies in the study of feminism in film and feminist film theory. Scholars of film history and feminist studies will appreciate the breadth of work in this volume.

Genres: Film, Feminism, Womens Studies

663 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 15, 2010

Reviews

[Greta · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of essays, i didn't read them all but mostly enjoyed the ones that i did. These includes Laura Mulvey revisiting Visual pleasure and narrative cinema, a typology of vamp/golddigger films, women viewers in the 30s, an analysis of the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton romance and how it correlated with whatever film they had in release (i found this hilarious), Lois Weber, Sarah Bernhardt's Hamlet, Mercedes de Acosta being an annoying fangirl, Vitagraph stardom (mostly Costello and Turner), women screenwriters, Votes for Women, and the Mexican film Santa.