Women's interest in found footage and compilation has been extraordinarily intense from the very beginning.1 Even the origins of this peculiar mode of film production are tied to a woman's name, that of Esfir Shub, the great director of Soviet cinema who was the first to create an essayistic feature by putting together pieces of archival footage.2 Her seminal film of 1927, Padenie Dinastii Romanovykh (The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty), depicts the collapse of the Tsarist empire from the February Revolution to the October Revolution of 1917 purely by means of a montage of preexisting footage. Followed by a handful of other films she made with the same method in subsequent years, this first experimentation in compilation film was an opportunity for Shub to demonstrate the creative power of montage, showing how even the most resistant, unyielding materials can generate an entirely new meaning from the way...
Editors' Introduction: Found Footage: Women Without a Movie Camera
Monica Dall'Asta is an associate professor at the University of Bologna. She has widely published in Italian, English, and French on feminist film history, the history of European film theories, and early and classic film seriality. In 2008 she edited a new Italian translation of Alice Guy's memoirs (Memorie di una pioniera del cinema) and the first collection on women's filmmaking in Italian silent cinema (Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano). She coedits, with Jane M. Gaines and Radha Vatsal, the Women Film Pioneers Project.
Alessandra Chiarini was recently awarded her PhD in cinema, music, and theater from the University of Bologna, with a dissertation entitled “Still Moving Images: The Dialectical Relationships Between Cinema and Photography in Contemporary Artistic Practices.” Her primary research interests include the interplay between art and cinema, appropriation art, and New German Cinema. She has written essays on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Studio Azzurro, and Cindy Sherman, and on the relationship between cinema and photography in contemporary media culture.
Monica Dall'Asta, Alessandra Chiarini; Editors' Introduction: Found Footage: Women Without a Movie Camera. Feminist Media Histories 1 July 2016; 2 (3): 1–10. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2016.2.3.1
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