The idea that film history was worth preserving received wider acceptance in the 1920s, when some of the first archives entirely dedicated to the cinema emerged around the world. This presentation by Aurore Spiers, author of Archiving the Past: Women’s Film History in France, 1927–1978, will discuss how women contributed to the production of global film history by serving as archivists charged with collecting films and other materials, as witnesses tasked with remembering their own film careers, and as activists committed to recovering women’s contributions to film history. It will focus primarily on the many women—including Musidora, Lotte Eisner, Marie Epstein, and Mary Meerson—who collaborated with Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque française yet remained in his shadow.
About the Presenter
Aurore Spiers is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the College of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Texas A&M University. Mainly focused on women’s contributions to film and media, her work interrogates historiographical processes—what history gets written, how, and why—through the lens of gender and intersectional feminism. It asks why women (and other marginalized groups) have so often been forgotten, and what strategies—critical, creative, speculative, etc.—may be employed against historical erasure. Since 2013, she has been an editorial contributor to the Women Film Pioneers Project.
