Producing Cinematic Happiness: Domestic Labour in Spanish and Mexican Early Home Movies (1920s–1930s)

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This article rethinks authorship and affect in early home movies through an intersectional feminist perspective. Through formal analysis of the margin of Jean Signoret and Madronita Andreu Klein’s home movies, I argue that in Spanish and Mexican amateur film from the 1920s and 1930s, domestic workers were an integral labour force for producing the familial happiness represented in home movies, even if their figures were usually kept at the frame’s margin. These findings, based on archival research in Spain and Mexico, question traditional notions of authorship and include the labour of marginalized and anonymous women domestic workers in film scholarship.