This article traces methods and conventions of performing women’s mental distress before the camera circa 1900. It features an analysis of gestural performances in French, US, Italian, and British films, with special attention given to two pre-1916 Gaumont films that include mad scenes. The topos of the white madwoman presents a valuable lens through which to investigate intermedial relations across performance forms and visual media as early cinema emerged, and gestures signifying madness have been particularly resilient even as approaches to film acting have evolved. Drawing on scholarship from Giorgio Agamben and Rae Beth Gordon, this article questions how techniques of performing female madness intersected with ideologies of race, class, and nationality.

This essay integrates feminist scholarship on silent serials with discourses on memory and diaspora to situate historical inquiry, textual interpretation, and construction of subjectivity at the intersection of viewing and writing. It chronicles the author’s experience watching Louis Feuillade’s 1919 serial Tih-Minh , whose half Vietnamese titular character is brought to France and undergoes multiple cycles of kidnapping, amnesia, and memory restoration. This instability of inscription—through Tih-Minh’s memory—is mirrored in the physical degradation of the serial, the unruly distribution of its intertitles and inserts, and subsequent acts of retroactive restoration by historians and conservators. Drawing on historiographic methods that incorporate indeterminacy and lacunae, the instability of inscription is serialized in a process that makes visible, sensible, and poetic the textures of loss and remembrance that connect the serial’s text and preservation with memory in the Vietnamese diaspora, constructing a spectral ecology of suppressed and ephemeral archives.