Reclaiming the Archive

Reclaiming the Archive is an ambitious and comprehensive work.

~Diane Waldman, Jump Cut

Reclaiming the Archive succeeds in making visible and valuable many themes, films, and individuals that have been
erased or discounted. This volume should become indispensable for equipping future scholars theoretically and methodologically and for offering them a richer archive integral to a new film history.

~Sue Brower, Journal of Film and Video

Callahan and her contributors have established a strong sense of unity by so thoroughly intertwining the considerations of gender, sexuality, class, race and ethnicity. I am also confident that their attempt at 'presentifying' the field (p. 2) will pay off, and that Reclaiming the Archive will convince a new generation of scholars of the continuing importance of feminist film studies.

~Sofia Bull

Reclaiming the Archive contains essays by some of the major feminist critics of our era, such as Laura Mulvey, Annette Kuhn, Sumiko Higashi, and Shelley Stamp, as well as work by scholars known, in addition, for other types of research, like Janet Staiger."

~Lucy Fischer

Reclaiming the Archive is a landmark book that does a great deal to unify the large and disparate set of investigations in film history and feminist theory. This rich collection of cross-generational scholarship well reflects the diversity of questions and approaches that characterize feminist film studies."

~Diane Negra

Reclaiming the Archive provides a useful snapshot of the myriad topics and methods of feminist film studies today. Demonstrating the importance and the variety of archival research occurring in the field, this unusually inclusive anthology addresses a wide range of agents and eras, from female screenwriters working in the silent era, to discourses of nostalgia in American romantic comedy to contemporary multimedia artists. Callahan's introductions to the sections, which include material on feminist reception history, authorship, early cinema, and the post-feminist future, provide useful summaries of the central issues in feminist film studies."

~Kelley Conway

If you want to understand what feminism and feminist theory mean for film studies today, then Reclaiming the Archive is the book for you. This exciting collection explores how feminist film studies have defined and redefined the basic tenets of both film theory and film history, offering fresh perspectives on the various ways in which the cinema writes history."

~Judith Mayne