Aurore Spiers’ New Book Puts Spotlight On Women’s Contributions To Film In France
“Archiving the Past: Women's Film History in France, 1927–1978” was published by the University of California Press earlier this year.
Aurore Spiers, Ph.D., assistant professor in Performance and Visual Studies, has a new book about women in France who have been key to the production and history of film since the 1890s.
“Archiving the Past: Women’s Film History in France, 1927–1978” is Spiers’ first, and was published by the University of California Press earlier this year.
“I’m very excited that the book is out in the world,” she said. “I hope the book does justice to the women whose work I have tried to reclaim.”
Spiers teaches film and media studies courses in the Performance and Visual Studies program. She received a master’s degree from Columbia University in 2015 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2022.
The book stemmed from her Ph.D. dissertation and master’s research, including her work on the Women Film Pioneers Project, an online journal about women’s film work from behind the scenes.
Spiers said she has always been intrigued by how film history has been documented. Her book is divided into three chapters, highlighting archivists, witnesses and activists of women’s film history in France from the 1920s through the 1970s.
“When historians talk about French film archives and historiography, they mention Henri Langlois, who co-founded the Cinémathèque Française, rarely the many women who worked with him,” she said. “Those women — and more — are at the center of my book.”
Jeanne Moussinac, who collected work for a film library called the Bibliothèque du Cinéma in the 1920s, is among the archivists featured. The library now belongs to the French National Library, where Spiers analyzed books and papers collected by Moussinac.
“It was very early on, when the idea that film history should be cared for was just emerging in the 1920s,” Spiers said. “Jeanne Moussinac was one of the earlier people to say, ‘Well, we’ve got to collect as much as we can.’ So, she started with books about film that had already been published.”
Actress and filmmaker Jeanne Roques, whose stage name was Musidora, is featured among the witnesses to film history. She created the Commission de Recherches Historiques in the 1940s, Spiers said, made up of women who conducted interviews with the creators of some of the first films in France.
The commission’s archives are stored in the Cinémathèque Française, which is the main film archive in France. It was co-founded by Henri Langlois in 1936 as he aimed to save silent films before the transition to sound, Spiers said.
“Musidora was in charge and organized the interviews,” Spiers said. “From her interview transcripts, I could see her handwriting absolutely everywhere. Although she’s remembered as an actress, she directed films and offers that testimony in her own interview.”
Women activists of the Musidora Feminist Film Collective are also featured for gathering reflections of women working in the industry from 1973 to 1977. After discovering that the first woman filmmaker, Alice Guy-Blaché, had been excluded from most published film histories, the collective planned a way to honor her.
“In response, the collective obtained a manuscript of Alice Guy-Blaché’s memoir and published it,” Spiers said.
Spiers also interviewed Dana Sardet, an American filmmaker and one of the founding members of the Musidora Feminist Film Collective.
“Dana recalled going to the Cinémathèque Française to look for names of women in films, and for films directed by women, and found some,” Spiers said. “She then used that research to put on the first women’s film festival in France in 1973.”
To learn more about her research, watch this interview with Spiers and Kathy Rose O’Regan, executive director of the San Francisco Film Preserve. Spiers also appeared on a podcast with Alix Beeston, a professor at Cardiff University in Wales, United Kingdom.
