Available From UC Press

Archiving the Past uncovers the story of the women in France who, from the 1920s to the 1970s, played critical roles in the production of global cinema's history: 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. Reflecting on how gender politics informs the production of film history, Aurore Spiers recasts the film archive as a site of women's intervention, modeling strategies for inclusivity, recuperation, and liberation within feminist film historiography.

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.

"This terrific book teaches the best kind of history, one that makes us rethink everything we thought we knew. French cinephilia was male and sexist, but that didn't stop these women from creating the first French film archives, well before most of us believed any such archive existed."—Eric Smoodin, author of Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950

"Archiving the Past is not only a work of recovery—piecing together histories of women who have contributed to the preservation of film—but also an extraordinary methodological intervention. Aurore Spiers explodes the categories of historian and archivist, introducing readers to the painstaking, ordinary, and undervalued kinds of labor that both produce and preserve film history."—Katherine Groo, author of Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive

"Bristling with juicy anecdotes and fascinating discoveries, Archiving the Past reveals the history of women's crucial but invisible labor to establish key practices of film archiving indispensable to the production and preservation of film historical knowledge. This brilliant study unearths the 'ghost archives' of Jeanne Moussinac and Laure Albin-Guillot, who invented the field of film archiving in the 1920s, 'recollected' in a treasure trove of post–World War II interviews conducted by Musidora, Marie Epstein, and Eve Francis and then unleashed into the zeitgeist by a surge of French feminist film and activist collectives in the 1970s. Spiers has written a paradigm-exploding book that is an absolute pleasure to read."—Maggie Hennefeld, author of Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema

"Spiers has given us a riveting and powerful chronicle. Her writing is precise, steady, and inviting as she tracks the work of women in France whose labor as indexers, documentarians, researchers, stenographers, typists, cataloguers, activists, organizers, and witnesses across five decades shaped an evolving history of cinema. Along the way, a story emerges about how information travels unofficially (but not necessarily unauthorized), encoded in scraps of paper, scrawled in marginalia, and embedded in material objects. By urging us to consider these often anonymous and uncelebrated women as agents of history, Archiving the Past announces the future of feminist media historiography."—Jennifer M. Bean, editor-in-chief of Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal