Found footage cinema made by women: writing history and memory

• Grant number: 21/11177-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: September 01, 2022
• Status: Discontinued
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Cinema
• Principal Investigator: Cecilia Antakly de Mello
• Grantee: Clara Bastos Marcondes Machado
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 24/03386-1 - Found footage cinema made by women: writing history and memory, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

This research intends to focus on cinema made by women through the reassembling of footage from various sources (cinema, internet, newsreels, television, pornography, home movies, etc.), a practice known as found footage. The films selected for analysis are: History Lessons (Barbara Hammer, 2000), Un'ora sola ti vorrei (Alina Marazzi, 2002), The Future is Behind You (Abigail Child, 2004) and Cuatreros (Albertina Carri, 2016). We perceive found footage as a self-reflexive practice capable of resignifying reappropriated audiovisual fragments, creating new narratives, and uncovering previously hidden meanings within the found images. We argue that in its wide use by women filmmakers, this practice has often proved to be significant in the production of feminist discourses and narratives, and that its characteristic of double temporality can act in the recovery of a women's history. Considering found footage as a form of meta-history which refers to cultural discourses and narrative patterns of particular periods, we aim to analyze how the production of found footage by women and the resignification performed on the material contribute to the writing of women's histories.