ÌÇÐÄTV

Laura MacMahon (Cambridge), 'Restless traces: family archives in recent French documentary'

This paper explores the repurposing of family archives in two recent French documentary films, Une histoire à soi (Amandine Gay, 2021) and Les années super-8 (Annie Ernaux and David Ernaux-Briot, 2022). Drawing on studies of archival remediation in cinema, and of home movies as particularly restless sites of familial memory, I consider how both films engage with latent histories of subjectivity and dispossession. Gay, Ernaux and Ernaux-Briot explore the politics of gender, race and class, in France and beyond, during the periods addressed by their films. While these films trace different conflicts of identity (around motherhood in Les années super-8, and adoptive childhood in Une histoire à soi) and different kinds of archival gaps, my paper seeks out points of contact between them.

Laura McMahon is an Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Animal Worlds: Film, Philosophy and Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis (Legenda, 2012). She is currently working on a project on feminist historiography and archival engagements in recent moving image practice in a global context.

This seminar will take place in the ÌÇÐÄTV Faculty of Arts Building, room FAB2.48, 4.30pm-6pm.