Interview with Aurore Spiers, Archiving the Past: Women's Film History in France, 1927–1978

Beeston, Alix ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6356-7931 and Spiers, Aurore 2026. Interview with Aurore Spiers, Archiving the Past: Women's Film History in France, 1927–1978. [Podcast]. New Books Network. Available at: https://newbooksnetwork.com/archiving-the-past

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Abstract

What happens when we assume women’s presence in film history instead of their absence? This is the question at the heart of Archiving the Past: Women’s Film History in France, 1927–1978, the newest addition to the Feminist Media Histories book series at the University of California Press. The first book by Aurore Spiers, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Texas A&M University, Archiving the Past is a fascinating account of some of the many women in France whose labor had a decisive role in the formation of cinema history across the twentieth century. Aurore shows that the film-historical archive has always been a site of feminist agency and power, even if women’s work in and around the archive has been diminished, interrupted, erased, or ignored. In this conversation with fellow feminist film scholar Alix Beeston, Aurore shares about the historical, methodological, and political stakes of her work, from the archive to the classroom. She describes her process for discerning the traces of women’s archival labor, however fleeting, contingent, or speculative they may be. She reflects on how gendered ideas and norms have defined—and limited—our sense of what counts as film-historical labor. And she ruminates on what it means for feminist scholars, in and beyond film and media studies, to collect and recollect the past—for the sake of the feminist present and its still-possible futures.

Item Type:	Digital or visual media
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DC France N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR
Publisher:	New Books Network
Last Modified:	22 Apr 2026 08:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/186556

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