Entr’acte 2024:

Esha Niyogi De is the author of a new monograph on women’s filmmaking, stardom, and creative labor in the industries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India titled Women’s Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia(University of Illinois Press, December 2024). Building on the monograph, her talk will shine light on a previously neglected history from the early sound era, that of a rush of female stars becoming “authors” of film fictions and feminine forms (producers, directors, song composers, shot and set designers). The point is to demonstrate that these female “star-authors” intervened in paradoxical ways in the contestations over womanliness and modernity immanent to sound fiction films in postcolonial South Asia. Two examples will be discussed of female star- director/producers from the late 1940s-50s who created dissident feminine forms and fictions, respectively, in Calcutta, India, and in Lahore, Pakistan.

Esha Niyogi De’s research interests lie in film history, gender, and South Asian Studies. She is the author of a new monograph on women’s filmmaking, stardom, and creative labor in the industries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India titled Women’s Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia (University of Illinois Press, December 2024), and the co-editor of the scholarly volume South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters (University of Washington Press, 2020). Other publications include the monograph Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought (Oxford University Press, 2011), another co-edited volume from Duke University Press, articles in such journals as Third Text, Screen,Feminist Media Studies, and diacritics, and many peer-reviewed book chapters. She is a Senior Lecturer in Writing Programs at UCLA, specializing in courses on sexual politics and visual media, and a Faculty Affiliate of the UCLA Center for India and South Asia.

Learn more about Esha’s new book here (includes a special 30% off discount).

On its own a capacious, even empty sign, “woman” as the category engine of feminist film studies, and feminisms more broadly, is motored by diverse situated, embodied and mediated forms of theorising, modes of critique and reparative methodologies. Where am I situated today in relation to the early cinema archive? And how can I creatively engage with that archive to investigate both its history and potentials for the present?

Susan Potter is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. Her work investigates the intertwined histories of sexuality and media, in particular cinema and television. She is the author of Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema (University of Illinois Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 John Leo and Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-authored or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association. Her forthcoming essay in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies considers Riot (Australia, 2018), a telemovie that memorialises the 1970s gay liberation movement, and the relation of its televisual transmutations of the film archive to its mode of address to queer communities across generations. Susan is otherwise engaged in a series of test workshops investigating the potential of collaborative video-based methods of inquiry for investigating histories of queer and trans self-representation in film and television.

Early Hollywood conjures images of star glamor and wealth. Seeking for alternative feminist histories, my work turns to the ordinary young women who loved the movies when Hollywood first emerged. Focused on the mundane, the messy, and the marginal, I wed biographic data with unpublished medical reports, patient files, published reports, and personal film ephemera to document how women of immigrant, working, rural, and nonwhite backgrounds used a new star-powered film industry to negotiate lived experiences of difference, transgression, pleasure, and resistance. 

Diana W. Anselmo is a feminist film historian. She is the author of A Queer Way of Feeling. Girl Fans & Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (University of California Press 2023), and myriad articles on gender, sexuality, silent cinema, and media reception. Her current work explores the intersections of medicine, race, and moviegoing women in early Hollywood.

Missing Scenes unravels the 20th-century Dutch plantocracy in Sumatra and its subjection of Asian women. It is prompted by an examination of the unexplained removal of a female character played by an  Indo-European actress in the 1936 fiction film “Rubber,” set on a colonial rubber plantation.

Sabine Groenewegen is an award-winning filmmaker and artist. Her debut film Odyssey (2018) won the Doc Alliance Selection Award - a joint award from seven leading documentary festivals for best newcomer. A sci-fi found footage, the film unpacks constructions of whiteness and racial hierarchy in the Dutch national imaginary. Her work has been screened at festivals including FIDMarseille and DocLisboa and shown at venues including BOZAR Brussels and ICA: institute of Contemporary Art London. Her short film Remanence (2024) which premiered at Cinéma du Reél entwines never before seen archive footage with rare testimonies to uncover a forgotten 1930’s women’s anti-war movement. In her current project Missing Scenes, she traces omitted histories of Asian women under indentured labor in North East Sumatra under Dutch colonial rule. Sabine is a lecturer in the MA Lens-Based Media at the Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy.

In conversation with Mark Garrett Cooper, interdisciplinary artist Amy Ruhl will discuss her creative engagement with archival and scholarly texts, from the silent era and beyond.

Amy Ruhl is an interdisciplinary artist working across fields of performance, film, video, installation, new media, and experimental theater. She has exhibited her visual art and films at galleries and venues such as Participant Inc, Lubov, Essex Flowers, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Anthology Film Archives (New York), Kansas City Art Institute Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice (KC, Missouri) Vitrine Gallery (London), Public Fiction (Los Angeles), and Pleasure Dome (Toronto, Ontario). Ruhl has performed at NYU Skirball Center, Roulette Intermedium and Irondale Theater (Brooklyn, NY), The Broad Museum and REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA) and the Live Arts Biennial at Bard Fisher Center (Red Hook, NY).

Mark Cooper is the author of Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (2010), a contributor to the Women Film Pioneers Project, and was a founding co-executive secretary of Women in Film History International. He taught at Florida State University and the University of South Carolina and currently serves as Director of Academic Operations at the University of Texas at Arlington. 

The members of Ensamble Sonus Lux Cinema are Lorena Ruiz Trejo (percussion) and María Fernanda García Solar (piano), two women instrumentalists and composers interested in the musicalization of silent films. They aim to make visible the work of women in music and film. Additionally, they are invested in collaborating with archivists and researchers to help disseminate the preservation and exhibition efforts for silent films. In this conference, they present 1) the creative process sustaining the ensemble and 2) the various collaborative networks they have fostered with feminist projects and other international projects to musicalize films. Follow Ensamble Sonus Lux Cinema on Facebook and Instagram.

Lorena Ruiz Trejo is a Mexican percussionist and composer interested in archives and curation. She has accompanied silent films with her improvisation ensembles: Sonus Lux Cinema and Dúo Pantomima. She has participated in the FIC - Silente Mexico since 2018 with the guidance of José María Serralde and collaborating with the curation of the program “La Risa Feminista: Mujeres Comediantes del Cine Mudo” by Maggie Hennefeld and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi. Also, she was a composer and percussionist for the Cinema ́s First Nasty Women Project. She was a student on the Masterclass of Music at the Festival Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy in 2019. Currently, she develops musical composition for films and concert Music. Follow Lorena on Facebook and Instagram.

María Fernanda García Solar is a Mexican pianist and composer. She has accompanied silent films in the FIC-Silente México since 2016 improvising and composing many films under the guidance of José María Serralde. She is co-founder of the Ensamble Sonus Lux Cinema, which had its debut in 2019 with the program “La Risa Feminista: Mujeres Comediantes del Cine Mudo”, under the curation of Maggie Hennefeld and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi. Also, she was a composer and pianist for the Cinema’s First Nasty Women Project. She has participated in several chamber music ensembles and was selected as a pianist to be part of the Golden Young Artist Program 2023. She is currently participating in various festivals and courses to improve her piano skills, both in chamber music and as a soloist to study for her master’s ́degree. Follow María on Facebook and Instagram.