Dear colleagues,

Apologies for cross-posting. We are still inviting proposals for the Feminist Film Heritage: Expanding the World’s Film Archives Project Second Global Networking Symposium on “Women’s Global Film Movements and Networks”. Deadline 31 October 2022.

Please see below:

Feminist Film Heritage: Expanding the World’s Film Archives

Call for Papers: Second Global Networking Symposium

5-7 Jan 2023

THEME: “Women’s Global Film Movements and Networks”

We warmly invite proposals from international scholars and practitioners with a specialism in the history of global cinema, for a second networking event in the context of the Feminist Film Heritage project, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in Scotland. With the project we aim to map out and rediscover the neglected cultural histories of women’s work in early cinema. For this second event, we wish to focus on the histories, infrastructures and practices of women’s networks and movements around the world, which supported women creatives in multiple ways and contributed to the visibility and sustainability of their work and films. We particularly want to invite those with an interest in transnational women’s networks and movements connected to audiovisual practices, such as but not limited to: suffragette movements, the non-aligned movement, socialist and activist networks, film clubs, worker’s unions, various women’s associations and organisations, and film festival networks, which supported women creatives in film through networking opportunities, mentorship, career programmes, funding, formal and informal film collaborations, etc.

The two-year project, Feminist Film Heritage: Expanding the World’s Film Archives, aims to establish an international network of scholars working on decentring film history, and to do so by countering feminist film history’s continued neglect of filmmakers from outside Europe and the US. Hoping to give shape to fuller configurations of the internationalist feminist film movement, we highlight historically transnational networks and reactivate past alliances. With this project we want to make more visible the role of women and their films in the global film archives, establishing a collective of feminist world cinema historians. Bringing together disparate efforts to safeguard individual corpuses of film cultures and heritage, the researchers in this network envisage increased collaboration across borders. Better awareness of presences, absences, practices and methodologies will enable new collaborations between partners across borders.

This initiative is rooted in a desire to consider the diverse methodologies of decolonizing film history in an activist feminist way. We critique the continued Western European dominance of funding and infrastructure for these efforts (including our own). We address the (neo-)colonial history of archives, museums and festivals; the sense of “service” practiced by these institutions; and the (material and conceptual) ownership of artefacts and restorations. This network emphasises the roles of women filmmakers in history; the contributions of feminist scholars to film historiography; and the women workers shaping the structures on which the archival and preservation institutions are built.

The first event, which took place between 10 and 14 January 2022, organised by QMU in Edinburgh and funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, gathered over a hundred film practitioners, film historians, and archivists from around the world in an effort to map out existing work and seek out productive pathways towards collaboration. During the five-day global networking event, we were able to learn about national, family and personal archives and initiatives, and preservation facilities and professionals (such as the Pan-African Film Archive, the Albanian Film Archive, and family archives of black Latin American women’s films), and neglected films and filmmaker collectives from around the world (such as women’s third world cinema movement, and women’s networks and work within film clubs), and we were able to establish the grounds for collaborative networks with one another for further research.

This second collaborative networking event, organised by the Janovics Centre for Screen and Performing Arts Studies at the Faculty of Theatre and Film at Babeș-Bolyai University and funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, will take place 5-7 January 2023 in an online format to allow participation from scholars and practitioners around the world. Its principal aim is to continue and deepen discussions initiated at the first event, to welcome new research and forge connections among participants as well as to continue ongoing collaborations, in an effort to safeguard global women’s film heritage and make visible different cultural histories of women’s participation in cinema.

Please email the organiser, Dr Ana Grgic, on [log in to unmask], with your proposal for a short, 10-minute presentation, indicating your interest and specialism and a short bio. Please send a 200-word summary of your research interests and 100-word bio, in order that we may organise presentations, focus groups, and networking sessions. Deadline: Monday 31 October 6pm GMT.

We really look forward to hearing from you!

The FFH Team: Dr Lizelle Bisschoff, Dr Ana Grgic and Dr Stefanie Van de Peer

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