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"A groundbreaking volume,
Incomplete establishes the feminist possibilities of the unfinished film, a capacious category encompassing works that are lost or fragmentary; projects that were unrealized, aborted, or thwarted; and films that are deliberately open-ended or ongoing. Surprisingly generative rather than a mark of failure, incompletion is a powerful site of possibility for feminist film scholarship and filmmaking. By creatively expanding the methodologies and theoretical frameworks of feminist attention to filmic incompletion, this volume expertly demonstrates the rich and varied potentialities of incompletion."--Allyson Nadia Field, author of
Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity "Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon's
Incomplete exquisitely resists film studies scholarship's impulse to exalt 'whole' or 'complete' films. Instead, this impressive collection counsels us to recalibrate our understanding of incompleteness and fragmentation, attuning ourselves and the field of cinema and media studies to the radical possibilities of unfinished film projects. A model of feminist film scholarship,
Incomplete's ingenious essays offer compelling accounts, deft theoretical pivots, and innovative approaches to women's film production, consumption, circulation, and authorship. An outstanding work, this collection is required reading for scholars of film history."--Samantha N. Sheppard, author of
Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen "This fascinating book demonstrates the connection between feminism and film history as necessarily incomplete projects. The editors' brilliant concept is beautifully brought to fruition, if not completion, by the book's contributors, whose insights will set up sparks of continuing inquiry in its readers--which deserve to be many."--Patricia White, author of
Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms
List 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
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.
Summary
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.
