Archiving Community Practices in and around Queer and Feminist Filmmaking in London in the 1990s

This paper focused on exploring communities of practice in queer feminist film in London in the 1990s through three case study films drawn from the feminist collection of Cinenova: Noski Deville, Loss of Heat (UK, 1994, 20mins); Pratibha Parmar, Khush (UK, 1991, 21mins); Tanya Syed, Delilah, (UK, 1995, 12mins). I am currently developing a methodological approach to what an archive of these communities of practice could be, working between screen archives, oral histories and close analysis of the aesthetic and sensorial qualities of the films. Within this I am particularly interested in how communities of feminist filmmaking practice supported the challenging of preconceptions of white, ableist heteronormativity and centred queer experience and its intersections with ethnicity, migration and disability.

Propagated by ongoing legacies of Thatcherite ideologies driving censorship, division and erasure of marginalised identities, wide access to such complex portrayals of queer life remains limited. I aim to situate these films in the wake of the late-1980s and the necessity of their production in spaces in the margins of mainstream media through legislation such as Section 28. I ask what possible futures these films spoke to in 1991–95, exploring boundaries and intersections — emotional, physical, visible, invisible, care, dependence — through these films’ portrayals of blurred temporalities and intimate relations? With recent digitisation, new interpretation and addition of access features such as captioning, I am interested in how a multifaceted approach to archiving the communities around these films can add to understandings of their resonances and continuities with the present.