This paper discusses the practice of contemporary artist Cauleen Smith as an ongoing exploration of the aesthetic and political possibilities of cinematic space, place, and movement. Drawing upon a range of critical frameworks from cultural geography and Black feminism, it locates in Smith’s work an aesthetics and politics of errantry that favors radically nonnormative forms of relation and mobility. Borrowing the term from Martinican novelist and critic Édouard Glissant, and drawing more broadly from his thoroughgoing elucidations of the spatial dynamics of colonialism, the plantation system, and their afterlives, the text frames Smith’s cinematic errantry both as a formal and technological operation and as a political one grounded in a Black feminist praxis of place.

This article brings together the history of US independent animation production in the 1970s and 1980s and feminist social reproduction theory in these same decades in order to understand independent animation in the context of an increasingly precarious and feminized post-Fordist creative economy. The article builds a composite portrait of independent animation at that time, anchored by films by six artists who navigated this economy at its nascency. It proposes the “homeworker” as an alternative figure to the common categories of “freelancer” or “independent artist” as part of a feminist analysis of living and working conditions that sustain independent artistic practice. By framing independent women’s animation as a site of speculation about creative possibilities of social reproduction, the article contributes to expanding scholarship on gendered labor in creative and cultural production.

Though often named as such in publicity materials, Filipa César is credited not as the director of Spell Reel (2017), but as having undertaken “assemblage.” Part of the collaborative project Luta ca caba inda, films including Spell Reel and Conakry (2013) are built around archival fragments stored in the Instituto Nacional de Cinema e Audiovisual in Guinea-Bissau. They were exposed to adverse conditions before being retrieved and digitized. These images, which remain unrestored, are traces of a militant cinema praxis forged during the anti-colonial resistance to Portuguese rule. This essay situates Spell Reel and Conakry (2013) as mobile homes for these images, enabling an audience of Guineans and others to come into contact with them in a context that situates their precarity as not a matter of loss but a method of inquiry. César foregrounds the laborious processes of assembly in place of authorship, thus revealing the potential of the cinematic medium to function as an infrastructural formation.

This article uses AT&T’s 1910s–30s “Weavers of Speech” campaign to read on-screen telegraph and telephone operators as vernacular translators of cinematic syntax and hypervisible avatars for the invisible cutter girls who “knitted the pieces of film together” on studio lots. While operators largely played peripheral roles in classical films, two transitional periods saw them rise to the surface of story en masse, as if temporarily hired to sew over a rupture. A comparative analysis of telephone girls’ enlistment as temp techno-pedagogues during US film’s introduction of crosscutting and European film’s polyglot transition to sound suggests women’s film-weaving labor as an alternative to the surgical rhetoric (suture) and auteur models that dominate theories of film editing. More broadly, the article suggests that the culturally conspicuous feminization of low-level information labor offers feminist film historians a crucial “mediatrix” for uncovering woman workers hidden in the cut of film.

This article traces feminist affinities across images of shoes as signifiers of women’s precarious mobilities on the screen. Inspired by Catherine Russell’s methodology of parallax historiography, it investigates compelling images of shoes in women’s activist filmmaking from two different time periods and national cinemas. The footwear of Eva from Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916) and Mona from Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi ( Vagabond , 1985) lends itself to reflection on practices of feminist historiography and a figurative reconfiguration of the flâneuse as a feminist historian who critically revisits knowledge of the past and of the present to set both in motion.

Though sometimes rightly hailed as one of Latin America’s most important women directors, Valeria Sarmiento is more frequently referred to as the wife (now widow) and closest collaborator of Raúl Ruiz. Since Ruiz’s death in 2011, she has been completing his unfinished films. At the same time, she continues directing her own projects. This essay unpacks her unique creative partnership—working as an editor for her husband while simultaneously striving to direct her own work—as a “double day,” a concept that serves to interrogate the multiple (often unrecognized) tasks demanded of female filmmakers in relation to modes of production developed outside the boundaries of the nation-state, at the interstices of European and Latin American film and television industries. The article examines the interconnections between the gendered division of labor in filmmaking and the precarious mobilities that result from exile.