The Weirdness of the Archive, the Possibilities of the Present

On the global resurgence of feminist film curating collectives.

By Maggie HennefeldMarch 19, 2026

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

• History

CLUB DES FEMMES, Another Screen, Invisible Women, the Black Aesthetic, FIC-Silente, and feminist elsewheres are leading the charge of a resurgent movement to preserve, restore, and contextualize vital works of feminist filmmaking. These groups, among others, are establishing an archive of radical films whose political promise remains unfulfilled. Forgotten no longer, these movies span Mexican wrestling thrillers, activist social documentaries, cocaine-fueled pre-code satires, and extraterrestrial performance art. What underlies the sprawling counter-canon is a feeling of shared frustration parlayed into curatorial action.

Feminist curating has the power to “combine political protest with the importance of pleasure,” affirms So Mayer of the queer London-based collective Club des Femmes. I spoke with Mayer and their colleague Selina Robertson, who co-founded Club des Femmes with Sarah Wood in 2007. Mayer and Robertson recalled a midnight screening of queer films, Use Ur Fingers, that they dreamed up for the London Short Film Festival in 2023: “The house was full of high twentysomethings who were pregaming before going out to all the local queer clubs.” Spotlighting “queer shorts from DIY punk to digital,” the program provocatively included an experimental mime film, Jeanette Iljon’s Focii (1974), in which “a female dancer performs in front of what appears to be a wall of mirrors until her reflection takes on a life of its own.” Focii is a wordless odyssey of fractured self-images. Although it is a challenging film that initially provoked nervous laughter, the mood broke open after “quite an explicit lesbian sex scene”; by the end of the screening, the house erupted in a standing ovation.

Staging encounters between the weirdness of the archive and the political-erotic possibilities of the present is core to Club des Femmes’ self-described praxis of “radical contextualisation.” How do you provide context for a film made in a different world, especially when that film has long been denied the gravitas afforded by canonization? Club des Femmes commissions new writing for every screening, while their programs are playfully accompanied by unorthodox offerings, such as poetry breakouts, dance parties, and drag shows.

“Radical contextualisation” is all about reframing seemingly distant works by liberating them from their ideological and sociohistorical containers. For example, Club des Femmes has juxtaposed Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics (1974)—stitched together from “110 images of sensual touching montages in A, B, C, D rolls of ‘kinaesthetic’ editing,” per Hammer—with gender nonconforming short films such as Jules Nurrish’s Bend It (2007) and Ursula Mayer’s Medea (2013), expanding the archive of lesbian mischief into the future of genderqueer iconography. A touchstone of Club des Femmes, Dyketactics intermingles in the collective’s repertoire with live poetry tributes (by Joelle Taylor), new artwork inspired by the film, and what Laura Mulvey calls “montage programming” in sessions with evocative titles such as She’s Beautiful, Sexy, Angry and Liberated! and Lesbian Camp: Yes It’s F**cking Political.

Art cinema has long been a hotbed for inscrutable minxes with bodacious physiques—from Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) to Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme (1961). These sacrosanct texts drape flimsy lingerie over what Claire Johnston calls the “invasion” of culture by myth, rendering “the ideology of sexism [all but] invisible.” As a certain British film critic once declared publicly in a national film journal, paraphrased by Mayer, “the only place you can see breasts in England is by going to arthouse cinema.” Feminist curating intervenes against the invasion of repertory programming by desublimated bikini fantasies.

Club des Femmes paired Věra Chytilová’s now-canonical Czech New Wave comedy Daisies (1966)—about two indomitable women, both named Marie, who eat and destroy everything and who certainly appeal to a kind of lecherous art-house male gaze—with Chantal Akerman’s early short film, Saute ma ville (“Blow Up My Town”, 1968). A burlesque precursor to Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Saute ma ville stars Akerman herself as an unruly singleton. She laughs hysterically, chugs a bottle of red wine, and decimates her kitchen. Finally, as promised in the title, she blows herself up. Unlike the two Maries of Daisies, Akerman remains fully clothed for the duration of her short film. Several male cinephiles stormed out before the finale. This killjoy curating is a far cry from reviving the anti-porn backlash of the European art film heyday. Rather, collectives like Club des Femmes ensure their programs are erotically inclusive, aesthetically queer, and mutually galvanizing against the bait and switch of sexual liberation for mere fetishism.

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Combating the blight of archival erasure and critical indifference is a curatorial feedback loop. It takes money to preserve decaying prints, which cannot be raised without institutional backing and critical assurances of cultural value. This is the sweet spot of feminist curating: to rally an audience and get the public excited, stake out a venue, cultivate relationships with programmers, and provide tangible context that drives home why these unjustly discarded films matter.

Women’s film festivals have long been the ground zero for feminist curating. From the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival—founded in 1978, the longest running women’s film festival in the world—to Shashat Woman Cinema in Palestine, whose annual festival has been on hiatus since their ninth edition, in Gaza and Ramallah in 2013, these events are dedicated to showcasing and catalyzing the creative work of women filmmakers across the globe.

The Internationales Frauen Film Fest in Germany alternates every year between Dortmund and Cologne. Past themes have run the gamut from “the subversive power of laughter” (1993) and “rage & horror” (2024) to “films about getting out of here” (2011) and “decolonising cinema” (2025–26). Their upcoming edition will feature approximately 40 screenings, spanning contemporary and archival works, organized by 20 curators around the timely watchword of “Common Land.” The focus is loosely inspired by Silvia Federici’s argument in Caliban and the Witch (2004) that medieval witch hunts fueled the brutal economic transition from feudalism to early capitalism amid the violent enclosure of common lands for private profit. In the name of the commons, screenings will encompass works of Indigenous activism, Black radicalism, queer mutual aid, anti-corporate climate justice, and other utopian visions of unoppressive ways of belonging.

Like Club des Femmes, the Frauen Film Fest experiments with different formats and presentation styles to bring the dead letter of the archive back to life for curious audiences today. Collaboration is the name of the game. Inspired by the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival, Frauen Fest co-director Betty Schiel and horror film curator Sara Neidorf invited Susie Kahlich to lead a session in feminist tactics against the patriarchal apocalypse for the “user-focused” martial arts course Pretty Deadly Self-Defense. Specifically, participants were shown excerpts from sexist slasher exploitation films such as Black Christmas (1974), Happy Death Day (2017), and Truth or Dare (2018), in which horny teenagers confront the homicidal terrors of their sex drive. When called upon to reenact these violent assault scenes, spectator-combatants defied their assigned roles as victims and learned how to disarm their assailants and fight back. Such interactive sessions give rise to a parallel cinema that can defang sexist clichés of the otherwise toothless mainstream. Following their martial arts training, participants feasted their eyes on snippets of feminist horror cinema—from the cannibalistic trick comedy The Doll’s Revenge (1907) to counter-canonical staples, such as Jennifer Reeder’s Perpetrator (2023), Věra Chytilová’s Wolf’s Hole (1987), and the Adams family’s Hellbender (2021), a micro-budget witches’ brew about a matriarchal clan of metalhead succubi.

Feminist filmmaking collectives had their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s—not primarily as curators of the archive but as activists who deployed cinema as a tool for political emancipation. Les Insoumuses (“the Defiant Muses”) produced furiously satirical documentaries, such as Maso and Miso Go Boating (1975), SCUM Manifesto (1976), and the ironically titled Be Pretty and Shut Up! (1976), which featured 23 candid interviews with the likes of Jane Fonda and Maria Schneider, who testify to sexist double standards in the film industry. Formative to the Bechdel Test, Be Pretty had been virtually inaccessible until 2023, when it was restored by the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir.

“Researching feminist [film] collectives is challenging,” comments Rachel Pronger in MUBI Notebook, as “many of the films [they] produced […] remain uncatalogued, undigitized, and inaccessible.” Pronger highlights the archives of “Golden Age” collectives in Latin America such as Cine Mujer (the name of two separate groups in Mexico and Colombia), Grupo Feminista Miércoles (Venezuela), and WARMI Cine y Video (Peru). Les Insoumuses founded their own distribution unit in 1982 to safeguard the legacy of their filmmaking for the future of the struggle, but the question remains of who will maintain these archives in the future.

Curatorial collectives pick up where activist filmmakers left off, “breaking the historiographical silence” of cultural amnesia, as Aurore Spiers illustrates in her revelatory new book Archiving the Past: Women’s Film History in France, 1927–1978. The burden of archival preservation too often rests on the filmmaker herself, which is why collaborative models of production and distribution can make the difference between survival and obliteration. Take Yugantar, the first Indian feminist film collective, whose 1980s projects tackled labor strikes and unionization, grueling factory conditions, forest conservation, and domestic violence. From 2011 to 2022, Deepa Dhanraj (an original co-founder) and Nicole Wolf collected, restored, and digitized Yugantar’s archive while theorizing its “nowness.” Feminist film history is a living archive with no future absent the intervention of curatorial activism.

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The history of cinema is largely a chronicle of destruction, loss, fragmentation, and decay. Printed on wildly flammable nitrocellulose stock, 80 to 90 percent of all silent era films are now irretrievably gone. Poof! Even relatively recent touchstones of minoritized film art barely survive by the skin of their teeth, or the coating of their enamel, from the Austrian sapphic sci-fi thriller Flaming Ears, directed by Ursula Pürrer, Ashley Hans Scheirl, and Dietmar Schipek in 1991, to the Sri Lankan lyrical drama Gehenu Lamai, directed by Sumitra Peries in 1978—both newly restored and now sweeping the repertory circuit. The feminist film preservation movement is epitomized by the energizing embrace of speculative approaches in recent media scholarship by Allyson Nadia Field, Barbara Zecchi, Bliss Cua Lim, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Alix Beeston. Dissident historians imaginatively adopt Saidiya Hartman’s vital polemic of “critical fabulation” to “speculat[e] about what might have been” in “moments when the visions and dreams of the wayward seemed possible.”

The ethos of feminist curating stems from a kindred imperative to make visible the unseen by projecting unrealized worlds. “To understand where we are now, we need to understand where we come from and what was happening before,” Camilla Baier told me, paraphrasing the mission statement of the Invisible Women Collective (IWC). “To curate is a privilege,” the organization’s manifesto states, but “films alone are not enough; we need invention to replace what has been lost. […] Blow away the dust—make it real, tangible, now!” In particular, the IWC concentrates on the archives of popular Latin American cinema, long denigrated by critics and ignored by cultural gatekeepers. The IWC’s project of “bringing woman filmmakers from archives to screens” involves partnering with a range of venues to infiltrate the repertory scene with ¡Too Much Mexican Melodrama!; Brazilian video documentaries by Eunice Gutman; or the scandalous, late-career features of Argentine activist María Luisa Bemberg.

Audiences are invited to take leaps of faith on unknown films with uncanny themes. For example, an evil scientist hatches his revenge against a Mexican Batwoman (Maura Monti) who threatens to subvert a rogue army of interspecies Gill Men, harvested from the spinal fluid of professional wrestlers. La mujer murciélago (“The Batwoman,” 1968) is one of a legion of luchadora pulp films that Viviana García Besné has helped restore from the scrap heap through her crucial organization Permanencia Voluntaria. “From demons, ghosts and vampires to Martians, mad scientists and spurned lovers, the […] heroines of 20th-century Mexican popular cinema faced” no more nefarious foe than “the combined adversaries of time, critical snottiness and oblivion,” as Sam Jones put it aptly in The Guardian.

“Conjuring, wishing, imagining, and being a friend,” Enri Ceballos (founder of FIC-Silente) told me, “were the greatest factors in starting our silent film festival [in Puebla] way back in 2016.” Mexico’s first annual silent film festival solicits new international productions that draw on the visual language of silent cinema, juxtaposed with archival touchstones long overdue for urgent preservation. Adapted from a scandalous Mexican novel, Luis Peredo’s Santa (1918) stars Elena Sánchez Valenzuela (herself a filmmaker, though all her films are lost) as a jilted, unwed mother who becomes a famous courtesan to support her family. An allegory about the cruelty of patriarchal hypocrisy, Santa was finally restored by the UNAM Film Archive in Mexico in 2024 and then screened at Le Giornate del cinema muto in Pordenone, Italy, the largest silent film festival in the world.

FIC-Silente first launched to recuperate the origins of Mexican cinema, but it quickly pivoted to highlight the exhibition history of feminist film screenings in Mexico. Women thrived during the silent era as directors, producers, writers, editors, and camera operators but found drastically reduced opportunities amid the corporate consolidation of Hollywood in the 1920s. A self-identified ghost whisperer of the absent archive, Ceballos further emphasizes the vital convergence between film curating and political activism. “Even though we don’t define ourselves as activists, we’re close to activism,” she affirms. “I will never not say this: we have between 11 to 12 murders of women every day in Mexico. That alone is just reason to do what we do.”

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We are living in an age when homophobia, misogyny, anti-trans bigotry, and bald-faced racist vitriol no longer even hide in plain sight. Archives teach us that we’ve been here before. They reveal explosive images of contested counter-histories that give us fuel to keep fighting, but archival images require explication. Radically contextualized by Club des Femmes, Pratibha Parmar’s A Place of Rage (1991) features incendiary interviews with Black activists including Angela Davis, June Jordan, and Alice Walker. “[R]evolution as a force for change feels like the fourth protagonist” in this film, writes Irenosen Okojie in an essay on A Place of Rage.

Gathering in semipublic spaces like the cinema is a lifeline for many community members, but “online spaces can function like this as well,” reflects Mayer. Unpaywalled sites “connect to other spaces,” where people “might go looking for one thing and find something else.” For example, I had encountered two shorts by Fronza Woods on the Criterion Channel (1979’s Killing Time and 1981’s Fannie’s Film, the only two films Woods ever directed), which led me to Another Screen’s transcript of Woods’s interview with the French Afro-revolutionary collective Cases Rebelles. Woods spoke to her love of the work of Camille Billops along with Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, and Kathleen Collins. Cruising the virtual heterotopia generously assembled by feminist archival curators can evoke the same feeling as attending a live event, wresting meaning from the fragments of the internet’s nonsensical overspill. (Marya E. Gates’s Directed by Women Viewing Guide, for example, covers contemporary premieres and new restorations, pointing readers to other nodes of online access and community.) Archival rabbit holes are gateways to finding your people.

Another Screen is the “irregular” streaming platform of the feminist journal Another Gaze, spearheaded by co-editor Daniella Shreir. As of December 2025, it hosts four short films by the Lebanese war journalist Jocelyne Saab, and eight more directed by women working under the shadow of Brazilian dictatorship (1964–85) that document the spread of feminism “across political and educational spaces.” Distributed, scanned, subtitled, and translated by worker-curators without institutional funding, the accessible programming of online archival spaces like Another Screen morphs and transmogrifies into a new feminist text. Although their streaming licenses are necessarily temporary, their meta-archival afterlives long outlast their online availability. The website crucially saves its viewing notes from programs spanning For a Free Palestine: Films by Palestinian Women, The Practice of Disobedience, and West German discourses on “familial and economic violence.” Even if you cannot watch them, you can get a taste of these flickering works before their next vanishing act.

“We have so many memories and stories to tell—I wish we had documented more of it,” teases Selina Robertson, “but we always say, ‘You just had to be there.’” Robertson emphasizes the sensations of community that take hold after the event itself: meeting at the bar, debriefing about the films, and scheming for what’s next. “It’s a refuge for people to come” because “the live encounter has this kind of frisson.” In contrast, online spaces leave behind traces that arouse curiosity and provoke a desire for permanence that refuses the ephemerality of feminist archival experience. Part of a living archive, these ludic experiments curated by feminist collectives become lightning rods for hope, lifelines against the dystopian onslaught of the neofascist war machine and the apocalypse of AI slop.

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Featured image: Still from Flaming Ears (dir. Ursula Pürrer, Ashley Hans Scheirl, and Dietmar Schipek, 1992).