Light Cone

Screening introduced by Olga Kobryn and Emmanuel Lefrant, as part of the research seminar and screening series "Feminism, Commitment, and Women's Cinema: Practices, Discourses, Theories" (Université Paris Cité)

The materiality of the medium reveals both the imaginaries and the politics it embodies. Preserving the techniques of photochemical cinema also means preserving the works themselves and the material conditions of their visibility. It means reflecting on the need for an ecological turn in these practices, but also on the very politics of the medium: how can we continue to strive for inclusivity, for the visibility of women, for the decentering of dominant perspectives, and for anticolonial, non-anthropocentric approaches, as well as for other non-hierarchical structures?

Cinema cannot be thought of independently of the material conditions of its production, creation, preservation, circulation, and visibility. To continue showing films made on celluloid, despite the pervasive presence of digital technology in our lives, is also to fight to preserve an engaged, handma-de cinema, one that we share collectively, in a space and time devoted fully to an experience of sensation and thought. It is also about preserving the sensible against the frame, the norm, the dominant order. It means keeping other ways of circulating images, of making them sensible, open. In short, it means holding by hand in order to un-order.

This session of the seminar and screening series "Feminism, Commitment, and Women’s Cinema: Practices, Discourses, Theories" entitled Home Movie, a guiding thread, a space of revolt, introspection, imagination, and intimate gestures.

“Small events are events,” Duras reminds us, in order to compose History from “the void, the unsaid, the unsayable,” from “traces that have fallen out of time and are now frozen in their silence.” From a feminist perspective, Duras called for an archaeology of the home – an eloquent female silence – where the broken objects of everyday life begin to speak, in a space where writing, first epistolary and later cinematic, has long been considered a male domain.

The history of women also takes shape in a mass of matter composed of waste. The home, a historically feminized space, is filled to the brim with the perishable feminine: gestures, materials, toys, dishes, food. What endures within this historically silent, unwritten universe, within this disorder as an act of disobedience to every form of hierarchy that stands in opposition to structured patriarchal memory? What is eternal in the accidental, the ephemeral, the organic, the degradable?

A reflection thus emerges on the very possibility of writing women’s history, approached through the distinction between the notions of archive and archaeology. Archival work is a paradoxical concept: at once beginning and commandment, it constitutes a discourse and a gesture that nevertheless make visibility possible, insofar as History is sought and discovered in its gaps, its unsaid, its absences, and its silences: “the domain of things said is what we call the archive; archaeology is intended to analyze it.”

The films in this program span five decades, from the 1980s to the present day, collectively engaging in a reflection on the home, seen as a decentered imaginary (Gunvor), moving through the idea of recycling one’s own waste, following from the landfill as a site of writing (Jennifer), the very first dwelling and the earliest walls (Louise), the subversion of patriarchal practices, both domestic and cinematic (Cécile and Eva), the ecological home (Rose), and the anticolonial home as territory and ground (Azucena), to the laboratory as home (Marie-Odile), and finally to the idea of Ariadne’s thread (Barbara).

HOME MOVIE

Friday October 16, 2026, 19:00

	LIGHT YEARS EXPANDING by Gunvor NELSON 1987 / 16mm / color / sound / 25' 00
	LANDFILL 16 by Jennifer REEVES 2010-2011 / 16mm / color-b&w / sound / 9' 00
	JOURS EN FLEURS by Louise BOURQUE 2003 / 35mm / color / sound / 4' 59
	HOME MOVIE by Cécile FONTAINE 1986 / 16mm / color / silent / 5' 00
	THE DEMANDS OF ORDINARY DEVOTION by Eva GIOLO 2022 / DCP / color / sound / 12' 06
	BOUQUETS 21-24 by Rose LOWDER 2001 / 16mm / color / silent / 5' 57
	PANTANO by Azucena LOSANA 2019 / DCP / color-b&w / sound / 6' 07
	I(N)TER by Marie-Odile SAMBOURG 2011 / 35mm / color / silent / 1' 20
	ARIADNE by Barbara METER 2004 / 35mm / color / sound / 12' 00