Reflections on a “Missing” Archive

This reflection is based on our experience leading the Italian strand of the European Research Council–funded project Studiotec. Film Studios: Infrastructure, Culture, Innovation in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, 1930–60. One of our lines of inquiry has been the presence of women below the line in the Italian studios. In the absence of archival sources, well-documented production histories, and primary source interviews with women movie workers, we have had to take a more lateral approach. We tried therefore to “locate alternative sources of historiography and ask new kinds of questions” and have drawn on a range of more tangential sources, both quantitative and qualitative. Our contribution reflects on this tension between a doomed “recuperative hermeneutics” and the speculative approach that has emerged more recently. We discuss how, when facing the silences of Italian film historiography, we tried to to find sources that “talked.”