‘Hands at Work’: Patching Women’s Film Histories through Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Film Quilts

Authors

  • Hugo Ljungbäck University of Chicago

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54103/2036-461X/16678

Abstract

This paper examines the work of artist Sabrina Gschwandtner, whose recent series of 16mm and 35mm film quilts reproduce sequences from early women directors’ films and from orphaned textile-production documentaries and re-edits their narratives through spatial montage by sewing celluloid strips into traditional quilt patterns. Appropriated from film archives, each strip of film holds embedded within it a history of women’s labor, and through her sewing techniques, which call attention to the connection between film’s intermittent motion mechanism and the sewing machine, Gschwandtner patches women’s film histories back together. By considering the techniques of colorists and editors in early cinema as originating within handcrafting and ‘feminine’ labor, the traces of their hands at work form new histories through Gschwandtner’s quilts. In her artwork, the invisible contributions of these forgotten women become visible, foregrounding their tactile, intensive, and time-consuming labor. Gschwandtner’s film quilts also suggest that, rather than digital technology marking the death of cinema, it has just liberated the celluloid strip to be used and encountered in endless new ways.

Author Biography

Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago

Hugo Ljungbäck is a Swedish video artist, film curator, and media scholar. His research focuses on the intersection of video art, media archaeology, and the archive, and examines the materiality of the moving image and its processes of mediation. His videos regularly explore queer subjectivities and tell underrepresented stories about intimacy, coercion, and memory, and have screened at international film festivals and galleries. He is an MFA Candidate in Studio Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a BFA in Film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he previously served as Director and Chief Curator of the Patricia Mellencamp Film and Television Archive.

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Published

2023-01-24

How to Cite

Ljungbäck, H. (2023). ‘Hands at Work’: Patching Women’s Film Histories through Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Film Quilts. Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal, 22(39), 127–145. https://doi.org/10.54103/2036-461X/16678