Ordinary People, Ordinary Lives. The Prospects of New Cinema History

Abstract

This article outlines the most recent methodological developments in new cinema history and relates them to existing scholarship on girlhood and feminist history. In charting my personal relationship with the field and my specific subjects, it gestures towards broader applications of "critical confabulation, "; the term coined by Saidyia Hartman in relation to the history of Black slavery. In doing so, it articulates some of the opportunities and limitations of re-centring historiographies of moviegoers towards groups that have been marginalised because of the overlapping factors of class, race and gender.