In pursuing such lines of inquiry, Gaines (Professor of Film at Columbia University and Professor Emerita of Literature and English at Duke University) has questioned scholarly orthodoxies and led a staggering array of field-changing developments. Diverging from apparatus theory, she shifted attention to cultural and legal understandings of technicity, copyright, and authorship. Where psychoanalytic feminist film theory had critiqued gendered looking relations, Gaines integrated race and Black filmmaking into accounts of film form and spectatorship. Host of the inaugural Visible Evidence conference, Gaines helped correct the longstanding marginalisation of documentary and nonfiction media. No less significantly, her Women Film Pioneers Project has dispelled the myth of a lack of female filmmakers, highlighting women’s involvement in the emergence of film industries around the globe. Discontent with the disciplinary divide between history and theory, Gaines has been equally invested in theories of history and histories of theory through her writings on the ‘historical turn’ as well as the Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories.
In the following interview, Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever speak with Gaines about her intellectual formation, key interventions and initiatives, and ongoing research projects. Reflexive and bristling with ideas, Gaines foregrounds the difficulties of chronicling the discipline’s history and also shares her thoughts on topics such as videographic criticism, the legacy of Fredric Jameson, and current attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the US.”
Read the full interview here.