Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film

by Alix Beeston (Editor), Stefan Solomon (Editor)

Overview

This field-defining collection establishes unfinished film projects—abandoned, interrupted, lost, or open-ended—as rich and underappreciated resources for feminist film and media studies. In deeply researched and creatively conceived chapters, scholars join with film practitioners in approaching the unfinished film as an ideal site for revealing the lived experiences, practical conditions, and institutional realities of women's film production across historical periods and national borders. Incomplete recovers projects and practices marginalized in film industries and scholarship alike, while also showing how feminist filmmakers have cultivated incompletion as an aesthetic strategy. Objects of loss and of possibility, incomplete films raise profound historiographical and ethical questions about the always unfinished project of film history, film spectatorship, and film studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520381476
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	06/06/2023
Series:	Feminist Media Histories , #5
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	374
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Alix Beeston is Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff University and author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen.

Stefan Solomon is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University and author of William Faulkner in Hollywood: Screenwriting for the Studios.

Table of Contents

Contents

Editors’ Acknowledgments 

Pathways to the Feminist Incomplete: An Introduction, a Theory, a Manifesto
Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon 

PART ONE. UNFOUND OBJECTS 
1. Never
Jane M. Gaines 
2. Catastrophic Optimism in the Name of Léontine
Maggie Hennefeld 
3. Body Parts: Feeling Labor in Early Film Color
Katherine Groo 

PART TWO. REFUSALS AND INTERRUPTIONS 
4. Creating the Archive for Incomplete Feminist Cinematic Narratives: The Andean-Amazonian Case
Isabel Seguí 
5. Women (Not) Making Movies under the Popular Unity in Chile (1970–1973)
Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto 
6. Writing with Jocelyne Saab: Infinite Metamorphoses and Sensitive Variations
Mathilde Rouxel 

PART THREE. IN PROCESS 
7. Ins and Outtakes: An Interview
Peggy Ahwesh and Leo Goldsmith 
8. “They keep moving”: Serialized Incompletion in the Work of Leslie Thornton and Lynn Hershman Leeson
Stefan Solomon 
9. One Long Electrical Cord: Dance, Editing, and the Creative Unfinished
Karen Pearlman 
10. Shirkers and Its Afterlives: Six Epitaphs for an Incomplete Film
Sophia Siddique 

PART FOUR. POSTHUMOUS RETURNS 
11. Kathleen Collins . . . Posthumously
Alix Beeston 
12. The Fierce, Unfinishable, Feminist Legacies of Helen Hill
Karen Redrobe 
13. Girls Who Can’t Say No: Celebrity Resurrections and the Consent of the Dead
Katherine Fusco 

The Ruined Map, Relinked: A Postscript
Giuliana Bruno 

About the Contributors 
Index