Our archives, ourselves : remembering through creative practice the cultural archives of feminist film programming and curating in 1980s London

Robertson, Selina Helen Manwaring (2024) Our archives, ourselves : remembering through creative practice the cultural archives of feminist film programming and curating in 1980s London. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

The intersection between feminist film historiography, cultural memory, queer theory and the archive are primary concerns for this thesis, which explores ways of remembering through creative practice in the cultural archives of feminist film programming and curating in 1980s London. My practice-based research has been conducted in the archive of the Rio Cinema in East London. Since 2012, Club des Femmes, the queer feminist curation collective I co-founded, has had a programming relationship with the Rio. In 2015, this eventuated a discovery of ephemera at the Rio that detailed feminist screenings from the 1980s: an archive that holds a historical memory of British feminist moving image culture, creating a genealogy from the germinal Women’s Event at Edinburgh Film Festival 1972 to CDF’s curatorial work today. Through the archival material documenting feminist programming in practice, I argue that programming and curation form a third, missing element in relation to understanding the formation of feminist film theory and practice. Drawing on feminist film scholars Giuliana Bruno, Ann Cvetkovich, Annette Kuhn and B. Ruby Rich, this thesis sets out to map the spatial and affective contours of this archive’s absence through feminist, queer cultural memory as a practice-based research methodology. By developing practice-based research for film history, I have initiated a new hybrid methodological approach wherein I argue that programming practice itself generates theory and historiography; that is, in the doing and thinking through practice, an elided history of feminist film programming and curating reflexively materialises. I argue there is value in documenting collective experiences of feminist film screenings because of the programming and cultural knowledge held in those encounters. I conclude that feminist programming and curating as a set of critical and affective practices continues to challenge film history and the epistemological questions and methods we use to do this work.

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