Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, by Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon

Abstract

It is a truth—mostly unacknowledged—that the majority of film projects are incomplete: thwarted, aborted, lost, paused or ongoing. Often, the material lack which by nature constitutes the incomplete film, begets a reception that construes these absences as an indicator of deficiency. As a result, rather scant attention has been paid to incomplete works in film theory and history. Additionally, the circumstances that impede completion are often intricately bound up with conditions of race, class, and gender—factors in and of themselves that have been overlooked in efforts to assign film a tidy and singular history of film. It is out of these manifold relegations and absences that Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon’s collection Incomplete arises. Spanning thirteen chapters, Beeston and Solomon’s collection adds to a growing scholarly interest in “unproduction studies”—taken up by James Fenwick, Kieran Foster, and David Eldridge’s Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films—that has emerged alongside the recent attention paid to cinematic ambiguity, such as Hoi Lun Law’s Ambiguity and Film Criticism: Reasonable Doubt and Kelli Fuery’s Ambiguous Cinema: From Simone de Beauvoir to Feminist Film-Phenomenology.

Keywords

• film archives
• feminist film
• film history