Cécile Fontaine's films do not tell stories in the traditional sense. Rather, they form spiraling involutions around an idea or a theme. Hers is a cinema of layers, encrustations, and material and plastic experimentation. It is a colorful and aquatic cinema that investigates—through stripping down and subsequent reconstruction—the material from which the images are made: the film strip itself. This essay investigates the poetics and the practice of Fontaine's found footage cinema, a cinema rigorously made without a movie camera, beginning with her first experiments with dry and wet techniques in the 1980s up to her more complex operations at the end of the 1990s. It is a cinema that, by fishing in the stream of abandoned images, reflects on the nature of the image, of memory and history, all rolled onto the vertical axis of the film.

A concentric intertwining of female perspectives is the subject of this essay, which describes the discovery, preservation, and reuse of the amateur film and video collection belonging to the Togni circus family. The article chronicles a decadelong adventure that led from the discovery of this amateur film collection to the making of Circle (2016), a found footage film recently completed by Valentina Monti. The film is the result of complicated research that involved a composite group of archivists and filmmakers, including many women. Most of the materials reused in the film were originally shot by three women, Christiane Bottinelli, Liliana Casartelli, and Fiorenza Colombo (wives of the Togni brothers), from the 1940s on. Their filmed memories are extraordinary micro-historical documents that grant access to the experiences of women in the highly patriarchal world of the traditional circus.