Gathering Despite Scattering

Abstract

Much of the material related to the first female cine-workers in Iran and Egypt is not centrally curated in an archive but scattered across a variety of platforms, personal collections, books, databases, and other locations. The scattered nature of these sources reflects current practices of official state film archives in Egypt and Iran, and also connects to the lived realities of female cine-workers in the way that their unruly bodies often dissonated with the national film narratives with which they were expected to align and to represent, and experienced stigma as a result. I take this scattering seriously to propose “gathering despite scattering,” a decolonial and feminist method of constructing the archives that form the basis of our historical analysis. Gathering despite scattering embraces the corporeal, learns from provenance, and challenges the national and Eurocentric frameworks that have often strictured the histories of cinema in places like Egypt and Iran.