Archival Film Curatorship is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, and the National Fairground and Circus Archive in Sheffield, UK serve as exemplary sites of historical mediation between early and silent cinema and the digital age. A range of elements, from preservation protocols to technologies of display and from museum architectures to curatorial discourses in blogs, catalogs, and interviews, shape what the author innovatively theorizes as the archive’s hermeneutic dispositif. Archival Film Curatorship offers film and preservation scholars a unique take on the shifting definitions, histories, and uses of the medium of film by those tasked with preserving and presenting it to new digital-age audiences.

Grazia Ingravalle is Assistant Professor in Film at Queen Mary University of London. She has published extensively on film archives, early cinema, digitization, and decolonisation in edited collections and journals including The Moving Image, Screen, and the JCMS. Archival Film Curatorship is her first monograph.

Introduction Theorizing Archival Film Curatorship
Chapter 1 The Eye Filmmuseum: Beyond the Canon, the Fragment and Remix
Chapter 2 The George Eastman Museum: From Trivia to Popular and Fine Art
Chapter 3 The National Fairground and Circus Archive: Early Fairground Cinema and Cine-Variety Pastiche
Conclusion Moving-Image Curatorship Beyond Film Heritage
Notes
Index
Bibliography
Filmography