UC Press Blog

By Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon, co-editors of Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film

The introduction to our 2023 co-edited volume, Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, begins three times, tracing three possible “pathways to the feminist incomplete”: pathways to an understanding of women’s unfinished films as an essential resource for feminist film and media scholars. In the first of these openings, we travel to Soviet Russia in the early 1930s, where the filmmaker and editor Ėsfir’ Shub conceived a film called “Women.” “I want to make a film about women,” Shub declared in a 1933 article, “to demonstrate that only the proletarian revolution, the new conditions of labour, the new social practice completely closes the account of the history of ‘the women’s question.’”[1] 

Shub was never able to secure funding to make this film, which would have been innovative both in its subject matter and in its combination of documentary and fictive elements. Unmade, Shub’s scenario is a site of loss and failure. Yet it is also, as we argue in Incomplete, a site of possibility and promise. For us, Shub’s unrealized project looks different when it’s considered alongside the filmmaker’s decades-long efforts to restore and archive historical footage for the sake of future filmmakers and audiences. Shub was working, as she said in 1927, to create a “historical document for the future.”[2] She was documenting the past in pursuit of a new, revolutionary world. This aspect of her film practice—an application of her steadfast commitment to Bolshevik collectivism, which, as it happened, contributed to her historical neglect in the West as compared to her more avowedly individualistic peer and sometimes-collaborator Sergei Eisenstein—recasts her incomplete project as a gift for others in the future.[3] The incomplete “Women” emerges as a resource, a vital prospect, for future film practitioners, historians, and, perhaps, spectators. 

Indeed, even as “Women” remains marked by its unfinishedness, it has served as inspiration for new films by contemporary filmmakers such as Cynthia Madansky and Karen Pearlman. And it opens up our sense of women’s incomplete film and media projects as, in the terms we use in the book, “an archive of possibilities for the future.” One of the pleasures of the ongoing (after)life of Incomplete has been discovering new scholarly and artistic works that likewise approach the incomplete as a site of possibility—works that multiply the pathways we tracked into our book, as well as the many pathways trodden within its chapters. So, on the joyous occasion of the book’s receipt of this year’s Society of Cinema and Media Studies award for Best Edited Collection, we want to take the opportunity to map out some of these new resonances and routes. Here are five projects—among many—we see as essential to the expanding horizons of the feminist incomplete.

1. Film Undone: Elements of a Latent Cinema

A month after the publication of Incomplete, in July 2023, the scholar and curator Philip Widmann brought together artists, filmmakers, curators, researchers, and archivists around the concept of a “latent” cinema: projects left unfinished, unseen, or materializing in non-filmic forms. Alix attended the event in person in Berlin, and all those who missed it can access its traces through a book Widmann edited and published last year. An exercise in and theorization of latency—the metaphor Widmann uses to describe the unfinished in its occluded presence and manifest potential—the book’s gorgeous design foregrounds the material properties of incomplete archives, while also gesturing toward the “collaborative and conversational” liveness of the original event as it coalesced around the social “actualization” of unfinished works.[4]

We learned a lot, especially, from Katie Kirkland’s essay on White Dust from Mongolia, an unfinished feature (partially) made by the Korean American artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Cha conceptualized the project in writing and undertook test shooting in Seoul in May 1980, but the film’s progress was interrupted first by political unrest in South Korea and then by Cha’s violent death, at the age of 31, in November 1982. Amid her vast multimedia archive of finished and unfinished work, Cha’s films remain understudied, but, as Kirkland brilliantly observes, cinema was for Cha “a structure of thinking, a way of subverting chronology to summon forth the co-presence of times that once were and have not yet come to be”—and, in turn, to “channel…transformative communal experience.”[5]

2. Laura Conway, Lass that Has Gone

Stefan met Laura Conway at the Flaherty Seminar in Bangkok last year, and discovered their shared interest in the unfinished. In August 2023, Conway had debuted Lass That Has Gone, a performance-cum-desktop lecture about her projects that never made it, those she calls her “failures of failures.” As she says in the performance, while hallowed “failed” films might be finished (as with David Lynch’s Dune) or unfinished (as with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune), by comparison her own incomplete offerings had also failed at being failures. 

We don’t know that this is a fair self-assessment of Conway’s films—especially given that the benchmark for “spectacular” failure in each case is a fabled male auteur—but in any case, what results is a profound work of disarming humor and pathos. Conway takes her title from the title song of the long-running (unfinished) Starz series, Outlander; she sings this song, with the backing of Denver group Fragrant Blossom, at moments throughout the performance when she needs to “reground” herself and her audience. Conway’s care for her viewers is a major part of her practice, which also involves different forms of collaboration. In showing some of her abandoned fragments, for instance, she demonstrates how films gone awry can be the cause for both fights and forgiveness among friends. Later, Conway discusses one of her finished films, The Length of Day, and shares unused footage of the subjects of that film—her grandparents—that strikes a surprising balance between tenderness and silliness. Although framed self-deprecatingly as “failures of failures,” the outtakes and false starts on display, when filtered through the labors of Conway, her friends and her family, mean more to us than David and Alejandro’s failed trips to the planet Arrakis.

3. Zia Anger, My First Film

Another artist’s “failed” film that Conway mentions as being particularly “well-presented” emerged during the pandemic: Zia Anger’s My First Film. Anger’s film was originally staged as a theatrical show in 2019, but it, like Conway’s lecture, also found itself at the confessional intersection of embodied performance and desktop space, allowing for a controlled revelation of the artist and her subject. 

An experience offered to fellow travelers in the difficult early days of pandemic lockdowns, Anger’s film performance recounted her attempts between 2010–2012 to make a feature-length work called Always All Ways, Anne Marie that never quite came to fruition. At least, not until 2024, when Anger was finally able to “complete” the film—or rather a metafictional reflection on the film—as the theatrically released feature My First Film. 

Alix has written of Anger’s film, which is and isn’t her first film, as a work that sets out to “realize the incomplete film’s potential without denying its failures.” While we can revisit the completed version of the film today, the earlier pandemic performances—open, ephemeral, fraught, inviting—live on only in the minds of those who saw them: a fitting place for the desperate (but now, hopefully, finished) moment of history in which they were created. The two of us feel lucky to have attended one of these initial performances—and we’re sure we’ll never forget this “first” viewing.

4. Maryam Tafakory, Razeh-del

The incomplete often shares space with first projects, which may take draft or fragmentary forms, and which may emerge at a moment not conducive to their finalization, for lack of funding or time or a shared understanding of the project taking shape. In his entry for Sight & Sound’s “Best Video Essays of 2024,” Jiří Anger mentions Incomplete as a useful complement to Maryam Tafakory’s brilliant new essay film, Razeh-del, which like Anger’s performance and feature returns to the origins of the artist’s practice.

Like other works of hers we’ve seen, such as Nazarbazi (2022) and Irani Bag (2021), here Tafakory again weaves together a vast array of (largely unfamiliar) clips from Iranian cinema to get at the heart of censorship and repression in the country, especially where women are concerned. This work tells the tale of the filmmaker’s early efforts to set to rights the invisibilization of women on Iranian screens, as she underlines the dearth of film characters from her youth with whom she was able to identify. As Tafakory points out, given its subject matter, even Two Women (1999), a film directed by a woman (Tahimeh Milani), might have just as easily been called Two Men![6]

Rather than making a film that would correct this imbalance, Tafakory and a friend decided on a more radical action: to write a synopsis for a film they knew the censor would never allow to be made. This scenario for an “impossible film” was published in Zan (Woman), a weekly Persian-language newspaper focused on women’s rights that was founded in July 1998 but was banned less than a year later. The stakes of Tafakory’s essay film are clear, and though it offers glimpses of a project that was (and remains) impossible, the project’s traces are elevated as they are embedded in a resonant story of outlawed feminist print media and a still-repressed film history.

5. Constanze Ruhm, È a questo punto che nasce il bisogno di fare storia (It is at This Point That the Need to Write History Arises)

Tafakory’s work forges connections between Iranian film history, the short life of Zan, and her past and contemporary practice. In her film It is at This Point That the Need to Write History Arises (2024), the Austrian artist Constanze Ruhm sews an even longer thread, casting back first to the Italian feminist group, Rivolta Femminile, and then to the activism of one of its co-founders, Carla Lonzi, in the 1970s and 1980s. In turn, Ruhm picks up on Lonzi’s own historical research—a project on Les Précieuses, a group of French feminists avant la lettre—that remained unfinished at the time of her death in 1982. 

Drawing on Lonzi’s notes and ideas for the project, Ruhm stages a complex, layered dialogue between feminist figures centuries apart, pointing toward a diachronic project that is “incomplete” in a deeper sense than Lonzi’s particular unfinished work. The sense of an enduring and shared commitment to feminist practice is also suggested by the title of Ruhm’s exhibition at Vienna’s Charim Galerie in 2024, which included this film: “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done ­– The Culture of Women for the Preservation of Humanity.” 

The fragmented histories of women’s work are reflected literally in Ruhm’s film by a mirror in sun-blinding shards. The recurring motif of the broken mirror is reinforced by another of the artist’s key interests: the rehearsal. Ruhm incorporates the casting process into her finished work through several scenes in which actresses audition for roles as feminist activists. These scenes remind us that the repetitive form of the rehearsal documents a work-in-progress that holds the promise of perfection, but which also produces, in the words of Ruhm and Sabeth Buchmann, “unusable time,” including “setbacks, empty rituals, and routines that fizzle out.”[7] As with the feminist project, the rehearsal may never be complete.

1] Ėsfir’ Shub, Zhizn’ moia—kinematograf [My Life—Cinema], ed. A. I. Konopleva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972), 286, cited in Graham Roberts, “Esfir Shub: A Suitable Case for Treatment,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 11.2 (1991): 149–59, 155.

[2] Ėsfir’ Shub, “From My Experience,” in “Esfir Shub: Selected Writings,” trans. Anastasia Kostina, intro. Liubov Dyshlyuk, Feminist Media Histories 2.3 (2016): 11–28, 18.

[3] On the gendered discourses of individualistic authorship that venerated Eisenstein and eclipsed Shub, see Martin Stollery, “Eisenstein, Shub, and the Gender of the Author as Producer,” Film History 14 (2002): 87–99.

[4] Philip Widmann, “Melting the Iceberg,” in Film Undone: Elements of a Latent Cinema, ed. Widmann (Berlin: Archive Books, 2024), 14–23, 17.

[5] Katie Kirkland, “Re Dis Appearances: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s White Dust From Magnolia,” in Film Undone, ed. Widmann, 173–85, 175.

[6] On the near-complete absence of pre-revolutionary Iranian women artists in the 1960s and 1970s, see Tara Najd Anmadi, “Archive of Incomplete,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 41.1 (2020).

[7] Sabeth Buchmann and Constanze Ruhm, “Subject Put to the Test,” trans. Karl Hoffmann, Texte Zur Kunst 90 (June 2013). See also Ruhm, “Castingagentur: Casting as Agency,” in Putting Rehearsals to the Test: Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics, ed. Sabeth Buchmann, Ilse Lafer, and Constanze Ruhm (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 224–33.