Reel Labour: Archival Authorship in The Scene She Made
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Authors
Koroknay, Nicola Isabella Katherine
Date
2025-09-04
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Authorship , Archival Filmmaking , Domestic Labour , Family
Alternative Title
Abstract
This thesis investigates archival filmmaking through the intertwined lenses of authorship and domestic labour, using my family’s home movie collection as both object and method of study. Drawing from 8mm reels filmed by my grandfather—an urban planning professor who rarely placed his family in the frame—I foreground the unseen but vital labour of my grandmother, who preserved these materials for decades. When my grandfather passed away in 2008, my grandmother was left wit reels that she could not screen but instinctively safeguarded, keeping them dust-free and intact until they were eventually passed down to me. In her custodianship, I identify a form of authorship typically unacknowledged: the homemaker as archivist, whose labour of care ensured the material’s survival and shaped its afterlife.
Through the production of my short film The Scene She Made, I reframe archival authorship as a collaborative and gendered process. The project dramatizes how authorship emerges not from a singular voice but from layers of labour distributed across time and space. The film interweaves 1960s footage with new recordings shot in my grandmother’s unchanged apartment, creating a dialogue between past and present that reveals the textures of domestic space as both lived and remembered.
The written component situates this practice within feminist curatorial strategies and theories of archival stewardship, drawing on scholars such as Barthes, Russell, Marks, Mbembe, and Kuhn. It argues that re-authoring the family archive through an editorial and curatorial lens not only exposes the gendered dynamics of preservation but also opens affective modes of engagement with memory, nostalgia, and intergenerational care. Ultimately, the thesis contends that archival filmmaking is not merely about retrieval, but about re-inscribing overlooked forms of labour into cultural memory—transforming home movies from private remnants into shared reflections on authorship, care, and the ethics of inheritance.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International