Feminist film history involves the ongoing rewriting of the past through the lens of gender/sexual difference and from the perspective of women, whose work is too often erased or sidelined in dominant narratives of the history of cinema. Feminist film history is often seen as having emerged as an academic subfield in the mid- to late 1970s, alongside a general “historical turn” by which film scholars came to emphasize archival research and historical contextualization over high theory and semiotic analysis.1 However, this founding myth conceals the profound degree of imbrication between feminist film history and feminist film theory, which has been vital to the field since the inception of feminist film studies.
In her canonical essay “Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema” (1973), Claire Johnston articulates an idea of feminist film history that springs from the critical analysis and close reading of film images. Noting that early film audiences often had...
University of California Press