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1 This book was inspired by the graduate students in my feminism and film theory seminar at UCLA a few years ago. As we worked through an array of texts from nineteenth-century women’s rights polemics to various 1970s manifestos to contemporary readings on the complexity of film spectatorship and commentaries on postfeminism, it became clear that feminist theory was still a vibrant area of study for young scholars and that its centrality to current cinema studies was self-evident once discussed in relation to its historical trajectory. A synchronous and chronological reading of feminist history and theory exposed distressingly repetitive issues and, most importantly, revealed to us a sense of the generations who have struggled to expand the possibilities for women’s lives and identity. This generational insight and sense of debt to our feminist predecessors enabled the class to reevaluate and appreciate 1970s feminist film theory, which for many of them had been a moldy and isolated artifact of film studies , and to imagine the necessity for claiming and marking out a feminist future. B. Ruby Rich’s Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement, a parallel text read alongside canonical feminist works, emerged from the class, at least for me, as an innovative model for feminist history and theory. While some may take issue with whether Rich’s entire chronicle was precisely reconstructed or even accurate, the ideas crucial for our purposes were an ongoing self-reflective turn and a sense of a dialogue between past and present. Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History is expressly staged, then, as an ongoing intervention in the above two domains: film history and feminist studies (particularly feminist film theory). Moreover, this enIntroduction : Reclaiming the Archive Archaeological Explorations toward a Feminism 3.0 01 Chapters_1_3.indd 1 1/13/10 11:57 AM 2 v I C k I C A L L A h A n deavor takes place during a time when the categories of cinema and feminism are problematized through the proliferation of media technologies and the phenomenon of postfeminism. Thus, implicitly framing the collection are two theoretical questions: what is cinema and what is feminism today? vivian Sobchack argues in a 2006 Camera Obscura essay that we cannot “engage in either the past or the future of feminism in relation to media unless we begin in the present.”1 While Sobchack is referencing a pedagogical context for this intersection of historical moments, her remarks are consistent with the deep-time possibilities emanating from the emergent field of media archaeology.2 here archeology is, as Michel Foucault notes within a separate but related context, not a “search for a beginning” but rather “designates the general theme of the already-said at the level of its existence : of the enunciative function that operates within it, of the discursive formation, and the general archive system to which it belongs.”3 Media archaeology ’s deep-time methodology opens the possibilities for film history and theory by envisioning temporality as a nonlinear, multidirectional flow of information rather than a singular reductive and evolutionary stream of apodictic data. We might even begin to think about deep time as a useful metaphorical and polemical structure for a renewed feminist film activism. While the notion of deep time might at first glance seem antithetical to a historical project given its absence of strict chronology, its multiple vectors through time are more consistent with feminist and cinematic topologies. An explicit goal of this collection is to demonstrate the diversity of approaches possible within feminist film history: archival research, visual culture , ethnohistorical studies, critical race theory, biography, reception studies , historiography, cultural studies, poststructuralism, and textual analysis. Another crucial objective is to open the conversation on feminist film history to an international focus (included are essays by scholars working outside the usual Anglo-American context) across an expansive chronological terrain (from early cinema to postfeminist texts). Jennifer Bean and Diane negra’s A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema provided an exemplary model of historical research focused on the silent era,4 and Reclaiming the Archive continues the debate initiated by their collection. The essays in this collection cross areas from early cinema to cyberspace and postfeminism in order to examine the complex symbiotic relationship between feminist historiographical and theoretical practice within cinema studies and to trace key social, political, and international implications for work within our field. As Jane Gaines notes in Cinema Journal, the turn to history in feminist 01 Chapters_1_3.indd...

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