Finding Voices Through Her Images

Abstract

This piece reflects on the process of researching and producing S. Louisa Wei's documentary Golden Gate Girls (2014) and the significance of Esther Eng in contemporary feminist conceptualizations of women's filmmaking in the 1930s and 1940s. The goal of the documentary and the research is to place Eng back into Chinese and U.S. film histories, from which she has effectively been forgotten. The photo essay uses text and images to describe and reflect on that process, on the challenge of researching Eng through the images that remain, and on the ways in which feminist film history might take account of her.