10.54103/2036-461X/16678




This paper examines the work of artist Sabrina Gschwandtner, whose recent series of 16mm and 35mm film quilts reproduce sequences from early women directors’ films and from orphaned textile-production documentaries and re-edits their narratives through spatial montage by sewing celluloid strips into traditional quilt patterns. Appropriated from film archives, each strip of film holds embedded within it a history of women’s labor, and through her sewing techniques, which call attention to the connection between film’s intermittent motion mechanism and the sewing machine, Gschwandtner patches women’s film histories back together. By considering the techniques of colorists and editors in early cinema as originating within handcrafting and ‘feminine’ labor, the traces of their hands at work form new histories through Gschwandtner’s quilts. In her artwork, the invisible contributions of these forgotten women become visible, foregrounding their tactile, intensive, and time-consuming labor. Gschwandtner’s film quilts also suggest that, rather than digital technology marking the death of cinema, it has just liberated the celluloid strip to be used and encountered in endless new ways.




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Hugo Ljungbäck
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
‘Hands at Work’: Patching Women’s Film Histories through Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Film Quilts
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Beyond Cinema
2023-01-24
2021-10-30
2023-01-24
2023-01-24
127-145
Cinéma & Cie
Hugo Ljungbäck
2022
10.54103/2036-461X/16678
127
University of Chicago
2036-461X
39
en
145
‘Hands at Work’: Patching Women’s Film Histories through Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Film Quilts
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16678/17545
22
                                                                                       Hands at Work:
                                                                                       Patching Women’s Film Histories
                                                                                       through Sabrina Gschwandtner’s
                                                                                       Film Quilts
                                                                                       Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago




                                                                                       This paper examines the work of artist Sabrina Gschwandtner, whose recent series                       Keywords
                                                                                       of 16mm and 35mm film quilts reproduce sequences from early women directors’ fil-                   Women & film
                                                                                       ms and from orphaned textile-production documentaries and re-edits their narratives
                                                                                                                                                                                            Handcrafting
                                                                                       through spatial montage by sewing celluloid strips into traditional quilt patterns. Appro-
                                                                                       priated from film archives, each strip of film holds embedded within it a history of wo-        Film preservation
                                                                                       men’s labor, and through her sewing techniques, which call attention to the connection              Found footage
                                                                                       between film’s intermittent motion mechanism and the sewing machine, Gschwandtner               Expanded cinema
                                                                                       patches women’s film histories back together. By considering the techniques of colori-                       DOI
                                                                                       sts and editors in early cinema as originating within handcrafting and ‘feminine’ labor,             https://doi.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       the traces of their hands at work form new histories through Gschwandtner’s quilts.          org/10.54103/2036-
                                                                                       In her artwork, the invisible contributions of these forgotten women become visible,                 461X/16678
                                                                                       foregrounding their tactile, intensive, and time-consuming labor. Gschwandtner’s film
                                                                                       quilts also suggest that, rather than digital technology marking the death of cinema, it
                                                                                       has just liberated the celluloid strip to be used and encountered in endless new ways.




                                                                                       INTRODUCTION
                                                                                          In 2017, in a dimly lit gallery, Sabrina Gschwandtner exhibited Hands at Work,
                                                                                       a solo show comprised of eleven quilts sewed from 16mm films which showed
                                                                                       women’s hands at work — ‘weaving, knitting, sewing, dyeing cloth, tying string,
                                                                                       spinning yarn, and feeding fabric into machines.’1 The vibrant quilts were softly
                                                                                       illuminated from behind, exhibited in lightboxes mounted on walls like recessed
                                                                                       television screens — though, from afar, the colorful compositions looked more
                                                                                       like ornate stained glass windows, varying in shape and size [Fig. 1]. Only upon
                                                                                       closer examination did the films’ materiality become evident and the images
                                                                                       legible, repeated in intricate patterns through the quilts’ graphic forms.
                                                                                          The show served as a sort of culmination of almost a decade’s work,
                                                                                       having made several dozen quilts meticulously sewed together from strips of
                                                                                       forgotten 16mm films — from orphaned industrial films and textile-production
                                                                                       documentaries to student theses — which would have otherwise been discarded.
                                                                                       Her recent series of 35mm film quilts continues to highlight forgotten films, this


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                        127
Fig. 1                   time reproducing sequences by early women directors. Through both bodies of
Sabrina Gschwandtner,
                         work, Gschwandtner revaluates films that have traditionally been overlooked
Hands at Work, solo
exhibition at Shoshana   and underappreciated by film historians, giving them new life through her
Wayne Gallery in Los     expanded cinema collages. As I hope to show in this article, each strip of film
Angeles, 3 June 2017
                         in Gschwandtner’s quilts holds embedded within it a history of women’s labor
to 26 August 2017.
Courtesy of the Artist   which is activated as she patches women’s film histories back together, creating
and Shoshana Wayne       an archive of women’s labor across textile crafts, fine arts, and film history.
Gallery, Los Angeles.
                            Gschwandtner’s work is part of a larger movement to revise film historical
                         accounts of women’s participation in the film industry. Maggie Hennefeld has
                         summarized the project of feminist film history as ‘the ongoing rewriting of the
                         past through the lens of gender/sexual difference and from the perspective
                         of women, whose work is too often erased or sidelined in dominant narratives
                         of the history of cinema’.2 This project has been undertaken on various fronts
                         internationally over the past few decades: conferences like ‘Women and the
                         Silent Screen’ and ‘Doing Women’s Film and TV History’ host biannual meetings
                         for scholars to share current research and keep up with the field; book series
                         like Women and Film History International (University of Illinois Press) and
                         journals like Feminist Media Histories (University of California Press) provide
                         outlets for scholarly publication; online platforms like the Women Film Pioneers
                         Project and Edited By: Women Film Editors, hosted by Columbia and Princeton
                         Universities, respectively, provide biographies of hundreds of women directors,
                         editors, screenwriters, actresses, designers, curators, and every other
                         occupation imaginable; and distributors like Kino Lorber help bring the restored
                         films themselves back to audiences through boxsets like Pioneers: First Women
                         Filmmakers (2018) and Cinema’s First Nasty Women (2022). Filmmakers


128                                                                             Ljungbäck, Hands at Work
and artists are also part of the conversation, making documentaries, writing
historical fiction, and creating art installations showcasing the work of early and
contemporary women filmmakers.
   Aside from women’s film history, Gschwandtner’s work is also deeply engaged
with the histories and traditions of textile crafts and needlework — crocheting,
knitting, sewing, and quilting in particular — the objects of which have similarly
been neglected and ignored as women’s pastimes rather than taken seriously
as art. While neither textile crafts nor film have truly been embraced by the art
world, it is precisely in art galleries and museums that Gschwandtner’s film
quilts are exhibited, in a sense infiltrating and critiquing the very institutions
that had tried to keep them both out from within. Her work proceeds as a two-
pronged investigation of women filmmakers, women crafters, and the absence
of these women artists in both film and art historical accounts, foregrounding
questions of value and acts of valuation through her recuperative process,
which rewrites both histories at once.
   Gschwandtner’s interests in revising film history and revaluating textile crafts,
however, meet most directly through the figure of the film ‘cutter’ who, leaned
over a flatbed editor, labored with her hands as she carefully cut and spliced
film strips together with tape or cement. As Jane Gaines, Su Friedrich, Erin Hill,
and others remind us, women worked predominantly as editors or ‘cutters’ in
the early film industry.3 Joshua Yumibe, Gregory Zinman, and others have also
shown that the work of coloring films in early cinema was performed by an
almost entirely female labor force — by women who painted each frame and
every release print by hand.4 As these authors maintain, editing and coloring
were among the first jobs available to women in the film industry, both because
this kind of work was tedious, demanding, and time-consuming and women
could be hired and exploited at lower wages than men, but also because women
were believed to be innately suited to this type of detail-oriented, hands-on work
thanks to their handcrafting skills and ‘nimble fingers’.5
   If we start from the conception that cinema, at its inception, was materially
related to the field of textile crafts and handiwork — not only through the work
of the cutter and colorist, but also through the relation of the sewing machine
and the intermittent motion mechanism that advances film through cameras
and projectors, as well as the use of cellulose nitrate in both film and fabric6 —
we can then read Gschwandtner’s dual engagement with film history and the
history of craft as one and the same. By considering the techniques of editors
and colorists as originating within handcrafting and ‘feminine’ labor, the traces
of their hands at work form new histories through Gschwandtner’s quilts, which
not only directly appropriate these handcrafting techniques to produce new
and revisionist histories but make the invisible contributions of these forgotten
women visible, foregrounding their tactile, intensive, and time-consuming labor.
This article provides a more-or-less chronological account of the artist’s work,
detailing how these ideas and connections between medium and material,
content and form, pattern and technique are identified, referenced, developed,
and refined throughout her bodies of work.


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                      129
      EARLY WORKS
        Sabrina Gschwandtner is an American artist based in Los Angeles, and over the
      past two decades, her work has been centered around the relationship between
      handcrafting, women’s undervalued labor, material culture, and cinema. She
      studied art and semiotics with Leslie Thornton at Brown University, from whom
      she learned to think about ‘cinema as a mode of shared thinking’,7 and spent a
      summer in Salzburg, Austria studying video with VALIE EXPORT. Gschwandtner
      is part of the generation that learned to edit film on Steenbecks and video on
      Media 100 simultaneously, and her film editing experience — working directly
      with the 16mm film in her hands, splicing strips of film and threading projectors
      — has deeply influenced the way she thinks about editing her film quilts today.
      She taught herself about textiles and crafts outside of school, including through
      her work as founder of the zine KnitKnit, which ran for seven issues between
      2002 and 2007 and culminated in the book KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from
      Knitting’s New Wave.8 Central to her thinking was that the materials she was
      working with were embedded with histories of women’s labor and creativity,
      and that because of this the materials — whether thread, fabric, or film — were
      already infused with meaning. She embraced this understanding of the materials
      from the get-go and worked to reinforce these meanings rather than circumvent
      them.
        In one of her earliest works, Sewn Film Performance (2001), Gschwandtner
      sewed thread and bits of fabric onto short strips of Super8 film, cutting some of
      the strips in half and sewing mismatched pieces together. With a video camera
      trained on her hands, she fed the film strips, piled around her, into a projector
      with its side opened, pushing and pulling at the thick strips of film, thread, and
      fabric to make them go through the projector, projecting the analog, handcrafted
      images and the live-feed of her hands at work next to each other. Performed as
      part of Xander Marro’s Movies with Live Soundtracks series, the noise of the
      projector — which sounds like a sewing machine — served as the soundtrack
      to the performance. Two years later, in the spirit of the ‘mending and recycling’
      handcrafting ethos, Gschwandtner sewed the remains of the Super8 strips
      together as a ‘relic’ of her performance, measuring eight by sixteen inches. This
      became her first film quilt, although it would take several years before she made
      another one.
        Sewn Film Performance may sound a lot like Annabel Nicolson’s Reel Time
      (1973), in which Nicolson ‘ran a loop of film from the ceiling, through the
      threadless, hand-operated sewing machine where she sat, and back into the
      projector’,9 continuously taping and splicing the film as she went along until it
      was too damaged to be projected. The film image showed a recording of Nicolson
      sitting by a sewing machine, while another projector positioned behind her
      beamed her live shadow onto a separate screen, projecting herself caught in
      two acts of sewing at once to foreground her labor as the real visual spectacle
      of the performance, while two audience members equipped with operating



130                                                           Ljungbäck, Hands at Work
manuals for a film projector and a sewing machine read the instructions aloud.10
While documentation of Nicolson’s performance is scant, five decades later it
remains a seminal work in avant-garde film and expanded cinema practices.11
Gschwandtner has retrospectively compared their pieces, but acknowledges
that at the time of her performance she was unaware of Nicolson’s earlier work,
highlighting how the relationship between sewing and cinema continues to be a
generative site of experimentation for artists working between textile arts and
the moving image.12
  Following Sewn Film Performance and the Sewn Film Performance Relic
(2003), Gschwandtner pursued several other projects, including Crochet Film
(2004), a site-specific installation created for the 40-foot long lower-level
gallery at SculptureCenter in Long Island City, New York. For this installation,
Gschwandtner shot an 80-foot long 16mm loop of herself crocheting an 80-foot
yarn ‘replica’ of the 16mm film, continuing the motif of projecting images of herself
and her hands at work. The same-sized objects were exhibited facing each other
on opposite walls in the gallery — one object moving and one still — with their
durations listed: two minutes and fourteen seconds for the film, marking the
time it took for the looping images to transport through the 40-foot gallery and
back again, and 575 minutes for the yarn object, marking the almost ten hours
it took to crochet it by hand. The juxtaposition of the two objects highlighted and
invited reflection on their differences — the widely divergent materialities and
temporalities of the two objects — and similarities — like the film strip, which
consists of an accretion of discrete images, the crocheted yarn object was an
accumulation of individual stitches.
   Crochet Film was followed that same year by Phototactic Behavior in Sewn
Slides, in which Gschwandtner sewed threads onto 35mm slides with a sewing
machine. The slides, which had been produced as documentation of a Super8
loop but came back blurry from the lab, were reused by the artist in the same
handcrafting ethos of ‘mending and recycling’, a strategy that has been central to
Gschwandtner’s work throughout the past two decades. Phototaxis refers to the
ability of organisms to move in response to light sources, and, when projected
through a slide carousel, the projector fan blew on the thread, creating minute
motions that, like Crochet Film, continue to play with the binary of movement
and stillness, as the automatic slide projector struggles to keep the fluttering
thread in focus.
   Gschwandtner’s early works showcase a sustained and sharp exploration of
the dualisms of still and moving image/object, analog and digital, handcraft and
fine art, amateur and professional, utilitarian and decorative, preservation and
appropriation, which continue to inform her work to this day. These dualisms
become even more pronounced in the film quilts, which are sewed together
from strips of found films using traditional quilting techniques and exhibited in
museums and art galleries, breaking down and traversing the triple barriers
between the fine arts, handcrafting, and cinema.


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                       131
                            16MM FILM QUILTS
                               In 2009, the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York deaccessioned its
                            16mm teaching film collections and donated them to Anthology Film Archive.
                            Archivist Andrew Lampert selected a few films to keep for Anthology’s
                            permanent collections and gave away the rest of the material — the stuff that
                            was not deemed worth preserving and archiving — to found footage filmmakers,
                            including Gschwandtner. This collection became the core of Gschwandtner’s
                            working materials throughout the next decade, as she embarked on her first
                            series of film quilts, although she has occasionally also acquired footage
                            through eBay and other sources. Over time, she developed a spreadsheet
                            where she kept track of all the information she could find about the films —
                            titles, directors, production companies, copyright years, film stock, and edge
                            codes — and pursued further research depending on her interests.
                               The films — which date from the 1950s to the 1980s, and range from sponsored
                            industrial films and documentaries to student thesis projects — are all centered
                            around textile production, crafts, and fashion.13 The collection also traces the
                            shifting representation and appreciation of textile crafts and women’s labor as
                            the form and content of the films grow progressively feminist by each decade.
                            One of Gschwandtner’s earliest quilts, Fibers and Civilization (1959) (2009),
                            features footage from Lewis Jacobs’ Fibers and Civilization (alternately dated
                            1958/1959). Sponsored by Chemstrand Corp., a synthetic textiles manufacturer,
                            the film surveys the historical use of natural fibers from ancient China and
                            India — visualized through exotic song and dance numbers featuring women
                            ‘working’ ‘primitive’ looms — through the late fifties, when scientists developed
                            synthetic alternatives that ‘could be produced in limitless supply and forever
                            free the textile from the whims of nature’ to meet the demands of modern
                            society — visualized by men in lab coats with scientific instruments and industrial
                            machinery. As Gschwandtner explains:

                                     In the films from the ’50s there’s usually an omniscient male
                                     narrator talking about, say, how dresses are important for women
                                     to wear, and by the 1981 film Quilts in Women’s Lives, we are
                                     presented with women describing where they live and how they
                                     work in their own words. The film breaks from a controlling
                                     narrative about what things mean and opens itself up to embody
                                     the care, the improvisation, and the craft the women put into their
                                     quilts.14

Fig. 2 (next page)            The colorful, oversaturated images of synthetic fibers being dipped in dyes,
Sabrina Gschwandtner,       pulled and pressed through a series of machines, and wound and spun onto spools
Fibers and Civilization
(1959) (2009). 16mm film    are sewed by Gschwandtner into six even square blocks, each made up of eight
with polyamide thread.      even triangles and featuring roughly twenty-eight rows of 16mm film across.
60 1/2 x 43 in. Courtesy    The six blocks are surrounded by twelve rows of darker, black-and-white 16mm
of the Artist and Renwick
Gallery, Smithsonian        strips, creating a stark contrast between her vivid composition and the almost-
American Art Museum.        black frame [Fig. 2 and Fig. 3]. While Jacobs’ film places contemporary fibers



132                                                                                  Ljungbäck, Hands at Work
Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X   133
Fig. 3                     squarely in the context of science, automation, and commodity, Gschwandtner
Sabrina Gschwandtner,
                           brings them back into the realm of craft, labor, and art.
Fibers and Civilization
(1959) (2009). Detail.      Gschwandtner has likened her quilting process to editing in three dimensions,
Photo by Helen Betts,      using shots, scenes, and sequences as building blocks. After viewing and
courtesy of Helen Betts.
                           selecting specific clips, depending on what the source material is, she’ll either
                           work directly with her original prints or have clips reprinted through a film
                           lab. Using quilting tools — a rotary cutter, quilting ruler, cutting mat, and
                           Bernina sewing machine — she cuts the film strips into rectangles, squares, or
                           triangles depending on the pattern she’s following, and tapes the strips onto a
                           light table, moving pieces around until she’s satisfied with the composition. She
                           arranges the strips according to the logic of a spatial rather than time-based
                           cinematic montage, playing with the length of sequences and the similarity of
                           image content to shape the material into graphic form, balancing color, light,
                           and darkness, and rearranging the composition if the ‘edit’ is too dense and
                           needs more breathing room. Before she sews the pieces together, she takes a
                           photo of the quilt assemblage (the ‘rough cut’, so to speak) so that she can look
                           at it on different screens and at different scales, before committing to the final
                           composition.
                            The 16mm film quilts, measuring typically between fourteen by fourteen and
                           twenty-eight by twenty-eight inches — but at their largest up to forty-eight by
                           seventy-two inches — are composed of a range of types of footage in compositions



134                                                                                Ljungbäck, Hands at Work
where the sequential film strips are primarily perceived as abstract color
swatches and individual frames and images are only recognized and made
legible upon close examination. These images include the aforementioned
industrial textile production scenes in Fibers and Civilization and other films
like it juxtaposed with images of women’s hands at work — at sewing machines
and looms or with needles in hand — as well as title sequences, countdowns,
and black and clear (and tinted) leader — in other words, film scraps. These
disparate materials are skillfully fashioned into arrangements that follow
traditional American quilting patterns and motifs, entwining the history of the
American crafts movement with film history. As Joan Mulholland argues, quilting
has for the past few centuries been an important place for women’s discourse to
develop: at a time when women’s freedoms were limited and voices restricted,
quilting became a form of speech through which the materials one worked with,
the patterns one created, and the care and skill with which one stitched all
inscribed values and meanings into the quilts, which were displayed in homes
and at fairs, exchanged with friends and family, or made to commemorate
important life events.15 These forms of signification were certainly not lost on
a former student of semiotics, and Gschwandtner’s quilts likewise speak to us
through her choices of material, content, pattern, and technique. Each strip of
film she works with holds embedded within it a history of women’s labor, which
through Gschwandtner’s quilts are rescued from their decaying reels and put
on display, front and center, to ‘record and preserve the motions of [women]
sewing, dyeing, [and] spinning’.16
   Two of the films Gschwandtner returns to most frequently for her source
material are Pat Ferrero’s Hearts and Hands (1988), a documentary surveying
the role quilting played for women in the nineteenth century, and Quilts in
Women’s Lives (1981), a documentary featuring a series of portraits of seven
contemporary quilters from widely different backgrounds. Footage from the
films is used in pieces like Hearts and Hands Octagonal Star (2015 and 2017),
Hearts and Hands Black Block (2014), Quilts in Women’s Lives III (2012), Quilts
in Women’s Lives IV (2013), and Quilts in Women’s Lives V (2014), all employing
short strips of 16mm film — typically anywhere between half a frame and
forty frames, or roughly one foot of film — sewed in alternating patterns that
contrast repetition and variation, symmetry and asymmetry, light and dark,
opacity and transparency, image content and clear leader, and so on. In each
instance, Gschwandtner invites viewers to read the quilts closely to reflect on
the photographic image content, which is often repeated due to the repetitive
nature of the cinematic medium (a five-second shot generates 120 individual
frames with only slight variations); on the medium and technique, which are
foregrounded through the visible film frame, edge, and sprocket holes, as well
as the seams and threads that hold them together; and on the quilting patterns
themselves, which invoke the traditions and histories of American quilting.
   Mulholland notes that the block, for example, is a distinguishing mark of
American quilting, as American women settlers created lap-sized blocks —
which could be completed independently, set aside, and sewn together once


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                  135
                          all were finished — as an alternative to working from the middle outwards or
                          from one end to another on a piece that would grow increasingly heavy and
                          difficult to maneuver.17 The block is also a signature feature of Gschwandtner’s
                          film quilts, which are often composed of one, four, six, sixteen, or even twenty-
                          four squares — upwards of a hundred, depending on how you count them in
                          works like Quilts in Women’s Lives V [Fig. 4]. Spindle Log Cabin Square (2014),
                          Hearts and Hands Log Cabin Squares (for Susan) (2014), Arts and Crafts (2012),
                          and several others also use variations on the log cabin pattern, which begins
                          with a center square and feature strips that grow larger in size around the
                          sides of the square, typically alternating between light and dark. Hands at Work
                          Crazy Quilt (for Teresa Li) (2017) and Hands at Work Crazy Quilt (for Roderick
                          Kiracofe) (2017), on the other hand, use the random ‘crazy quilt’ technique,
                          which thwarts any perceptible patterns or motifs — a technique, as Mulholland
                          explains, that historically foregrounded the ‘stitchery between the pieces
                          rather than the patterning of pieces’, which deemphasized the quilts’ utility and
                          instead showcased a woman’s skill and artistry.18 Gschwandtner’s choices of
                          form are thus not random, but serve as active referents to these histories and
                          the meanings and values conveyed through these women’s work.
                            While Gschwandtner’s work in many ways is about remembering and
                          preserving the histories of women’s labor in crafts, art, and film, her use of
                          material — photochemical film — and technique — cutting and stitching —




Fig. 4
Sabrina Gschwandtner,
Quilts in Women’s Lives
V (2014). 16mm film
with polyester thread
and lithography ink.
23 5/16 x 23 7/16 in.
Courtesy of the Artist
and Shoshana Wayne
Gallery, Los Angeles.



136                                                                              Ljungbäck, Hands at Work
challenges and complicates any sense of permanence or preservation. As
these materials face the very real threat of decomposition and obsolescence,
as the films and their contents disappear and are forgotten, Gschwandtner’s
project can on the one hand be read as archival as she rescues and reuses
footage from orphaned films otherwise unlikely to ever see the light of day
or a projector again. On the other hand, some critics have expressed concern
about her process being destructive, destroying and dismembering the original
prints she acquired, though she feels confident that the prints she’s working
with are not unique, but that other copies exist in other archives and collections,
whether on 16mm or video. Some of the films, like Ferrero’s Hearts and Hands
and Quilts in Women’s Lives, are still available for rental or purchase through
the original distributor,19 while Fibers and Civilization is preserved by, and
accessible through, the National Film Preservation Foundation and Library of
Congress. For some of the rarer materials she uses most frequently, she has
even made her own video copies and created new negatives so that she can
strike new prints if necessary. Ultimately, she thinks of her own role not as to
preserve these materials as they originally existed, but to ‘bring into material
existence what exists as possibility’ in the archive.
   For Gschwandtner’s first film quilt exhibition, Watch & See at Gustavsbergs
Konsthall in Sweden in 2009, the quilts were installed hung against the gallery’s
windows, leaving the rest of the space empty as viewers had to view the content
of the transparent film frames against the world outside the gallery, while the
light from the sun shifted the legibility of the images throughout the day.20 The
direct sunlight also accelerated the films’ decomposition, and since then the film
quilts have more typically been exhibited in custom-built lightboxes mounted
on walls, providing softer but more consistent illumination from behind. The
lightboxes help protect the sensitive acetate material from decaying too quickly,
as the photochemical material inevitably deteriorates, fades, and changes
colors, while also situating her work in a particularly archival dispositif. This
archival quality comes through most strongly in her most recent work.



35MM FILM QUILTS AND THE
CINEMA SANCTUARY
  In 2019, after a decade committed to her 16mm film quilts, Gschwandtner
embarked on a new series of 35mm film quilts, exploring the legacies of early
women filmmakers from the silent cinema period. The four 35mm film quilts
she has completed so far use footage from Marion E. Wong’s The Curse of Quon
Gwon: When the Far East Mingles with the West (1917), Alice Guy-Blaché’s
Serpentine Dance by Mrs Bob Walter (1897), Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell
and the Clergyman (1927), and Lotte Reiniger’s Cinderella (1922). For this
series, rather than using found footage from her own collection, Gschwandtner
worked with film archives to access and license high-resolution video footage


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                     137
      of restored silent films, which she brought to a lab to create her own 35mm
      prints: Wong’s Curse came from the Academy Film Library and Kino Lorber,
      Guy-Blaché’s Serpentine Dance from the Gaumont-Pathé Archives in Paris, and
      Dulac’s Seashell from EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. This has in some ways
      limited which films she can work with, as she needs high-resolution footage,
      which is not available of films that have not been preserved, restored, and
      digitized yet, while some archives are also hesitant to provide a license for her
      unusual requests.21
         All four filmmakers featured in Gschwandtner’s 35mm film quilts — Wong,
      Guy-Blaché, Dulac, and Reiniger — are renowned for being film history ‘firsts’:
      Wong is often called the first Asian-American filmmaker, founder of the first
      Asian-American film studio (the Mandarin Film Company), and the director of
      the first film to feature an all-Asian-American cast22 (1917 papers called her
      ‘the first Chinese girl to write and stage a movie’23); Guy-Blaché is regularly
      claimed to be the first woman director and the first narrative filmmaker;24 Dulac
      is alternately referred to as the first feminist and the first surrealist filmmaker;25
      and Reiniger is the director of what is believed to be the first feature-length
      animated film.26 It is then fitting that their films should also be the first to be
      turned into quilts by Gschwandtner as she embarks on this new series of work.
         The Curse of Quon Gwon tells the story of a culture clash between a young,
      westernized immigrant couple and their more traditional Chinese family. The
      film was never picked up for distribution during Wong’s life, and it wasn’t until
      after her death in 1969 that Violet Wong, Marion’s sister-in-law, who starred
      alongside her in the film, tasked her grandson with preserving the two surviving
      reels — reels four and seven out of eight or nine. The extant material, a little
      over half an hour of footage, was restored by the Academy Film Archive in 2005,
      and added to the National Film Registry the following year.27 Gschwandtner’s
      quilt focuses on a scene where the villainess, played by Marion, tries to give
      the heroine, played by Violet, a more traditional Chinese hairdo in advance of
      her wedding, but the bride resists and ends up doing her own hair. The quilt,
      arranged as a diagonal log cabin, features black leader and technical printing
      images in the smaller, middle squares — including an image of a Kodak ‘LAD’
      Lady, a white woman accompanied by a color or, in this case, grayscale bar used
      as a reference to ensure consistent tonal density and color balance across film
      prints, also commonly known as a ‘China Girl’28 — and alternates between clear
      leader and images of Violet brushing her hair, with black leader occasionally
      interrupting the pattern for dynamic effect. It is a striking and expansive
      composition, whose diagonal squares push like arrows against the edge of the
      frame, while the emptiness of the clear leader poignantly echoes the loss of the
      majority of the film [Fig. 5]. The image of the ‘China Girl’ — a minor detail that can
      easily be overlooked — further emphasizes how the photochemical film medium
      was originally calibrated for white skin tones and makes the reproduced frames
      of Violet looking at herself in the mirror while brushing her hair and fashioning
      her own image all the more remarkable. While the film was only screened twice
      during Wong’s life, Gschwandtner grants Marion’s film and image new life as



138                                                              Ljungbäck, Hands at Work
they are exhibited anew in museums and galleries as part of her quilt.             Fig. 5
  Based on a script by Antonin Artaud, The Seashell and the Clergyman portrays     Sabrina Gschwandtner,
                                                                                   Cinema Sanctuary Study
the erotic hallucinations of a priest. When Artaud had to step away from the       1: Marion E. Wong’s
project (he was originally scheduled to play the priest), Dulac subverted his      1917 The Curse of Quon
vision and infused it with a feminist critique of male sexuality and patriarchal   Gwon: When the Far East
                                                                                   Mingles With the West
institutions.29 Even though it was the first surrealist film made, The Seashell    (2019). 35mm film with
and the Clergyman was overshadowed by Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dalí’s            polyester thread. 45 x 67
An Andalusian Dog (1929), released the following year, which continues             in. Courtesy of the Artist
                                                                                   and Shoshana Wayne
to be referred to as the ‘quintessential’ surrealist film into the present.        Gallery, Los Angeles.
Gschwandtner’s quilt, also following a log cabin pattern, centers on a sequence
from early in the film where the clergyman repeatedly pours wine from a shell
into round bottom flasks and drops them on the floor, over and over, as if in a
trance or dream state. The quilt’s patterns, produced by alternating between
dark imagery and clear leader, preserve the dizzying and disorienting effect
of Dulac’s film through their geometric composition. The alternations produce
stair-like structures that turn upside down and bend into each other — the
composition seems almost completely random, except that black (image) and
white (leader) are mirrored along the vertical middle, like a surreal, inverse
Rorschach inkblot. Reiniger’s film is similarly turned into an abstract pattern
that emphasizes the alternation between black and white, even more so as
Reiniger’s hand cut silhouette animation was made with black puppets against
a white background, creating a higher contrast through the original imagery as
well as through the geometric shapes Gschwandtner constructs. In her quilt,



Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                    139
      Gschwandtner focuses on Reiniger’s refusal of the square or rectangular frame,
      instead carefully cutting unique shapes with jagged lines around her animated
      tableau, and the result is a composition full of dots, triangles, squares, and
      diamonds. The Reiniger quilt’s strong graphic form echoes the film’s highly
      stylized animation, while the Dulac quilt’s seeming refusal of symmetrical form
      — the patterns point in several directions at once — emphasize Dulac’s refusal
      of conventional narrative and film language.
         Finally, the Guy-Blaché quilt features footage of a serpentine dance performed
      by a Mrs. Bob Walter and filmed in 1897, based on the popular dance by Loïe
      Fuller that spawned dozens of imitators and became one of the most popular
      filmed attractions in the early years of cinema. The quilt is stitched together
      to mimic and replicate the circular movement of the serpentine dance and
      transforms the seductive spectacle into abstract square shapes and patterns.
      More recently, Gschwandtner has also created a series of smaller-scale, limited
      edition Serpentine Dance Square photo prints from the original quilt (the large
      quilt consists of six squares, each featuring eighteen rows of 35mm film across,
      while the prints feature one square with only eight rows across). The prints
      are hand painted with watercolor and photo dye to mimic the coloring that
      would have been used both in the lighting of the original dance performance
      and in its reproduction on film [Fig. 6]. Gregory Zinman reminds us that ‘[h]
      and coloring, tinting, toning, and stenciling are all labor-intensive and time-
      consuming processes, but they have been employed since the start of movie-
      making’30 and were extensively used from the early 1900s until the advent of
      sound and later photochemical color filmmaking in the late 1920s and 1930s.
      Hand painted images could be used for magical tricks and illusions, to highlight
      important objects or create otherworldly landscapes, or, as in this case, to
      turn the performer’s gendered body into a visual spectacle. As Zinman relays,
      ‘[t]hese films were colored by scores of young women and girls who worked
      slowly, frame by frame, with small brushes, aided by magnifying glasses’.31 Not
      only each frame, but every release print of a film had to be colored by hand.
      Joshua Yumibe, in his work on early coloring techniques, describes the labor
      division in these coloring labs, looking specifically at Berthe Thuillier’s Paris
      studio, where she managed two hundred women who colored Pathé Frères and
      Georges Méliès films: Thuillier would sample and test the colors at night, and
      during the day instructed and oversaw her workers, each of whom applied a
      single color to a strip of film through a highly systematized division of labor.32
      Gschwandtner directly evokes and appropriates this handcrafting labor through
      her Serpentine Dance prints, each being individually and uniquely colored by
      applying the dye to the gelatin silver prints directly, rather than reproducing
      them photographically, thus working in solidarity with the women colorists and
      editors whose work film history has overlooked and forgotten.
         Instead of being installed in lightboxes on the walls, the four quilts of Wong’s,
      Dulac’s, Reiniger’s, and Guy-Blaché’s films are intended to hang in a circle
      throughout the gallery. The ‘Cinema Sanctuary’, as Gschwandtner calls it, is
      imagined as a safe space for women in film, designed to honor the creativity



140                                                            Ljungbäck, Hands at Work
                                                                                      Fig. 6
                                                                                      Sabrina Gschwandtner,
                                                                                      Serpentine Dance
                                                                                      Square 1 (2021).
                                                                                      Gelatin silver print with
                                                                                      watercolor and photo
                                                                                      dye. 16 15/16 x 15 7/8
                                                                                      in. Courtesy of the Artist
                                                                                      and Shoshana Wayne
                                                                                      Gallery, Los Angeles.




and legacy of women filmmakers, both historical and contemporary, in the
face of blatant abuse and misogyny in the film industry. The Cinema Sanctuary
was designed in collaboration with architects Catherine Clark and Tughela
Gino, and features mobile and modular seating, which makes it possible to
reconfigure the space to allow for different types of programming to happen
in the sanctuary — including screenings of films by the women whose work
appears in the quilts as well as that of contemporary women filmmakers. The
design of the Cinema Sanctuary is not only based on a quilt pattern but also
references a quilting circle, in a way harkening back to Gschwandtner’s 2007
participatory installation Wartime Knitting Circle, in which museumgoers were
provided with a table and knitting tools and invited to work on their own or
collective wartime projects. In the same ethos of participation and interaction
as her earlier installation, perhaps it would not be farfetched to suggest that the
Cinema Sanctuary also serve as a filmmaking circle, replete with 16mm scraps,
thread, and splicing tape?



CONCLUSION
   In 2017, Gschwandtner translated the quilting strategies she deployed in the
film quilts into video form. Hands at Work Video (2017), a three-minute loop



Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                        141
      made up of 35 small triangular shapes, is a collage of clips of close-ups of hands
      threading needles, sewing, weaving, and crocheting, juxtaposed with 16mm film
      leader and the credits from Pat Ferrero’s films. Another video quilt, Screen
      Credit (2020), featuring some of the same footage and more, was commissioned
      by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and exhibited throughout 2020 and
      into 2021. Most recently, Three Overlooked Women Filmmakers (2022), three
      short videos displayed on an advertising billboard on Sunset Boulevard in Los
      Angeles from October 2022 to January 2023, further revises and reimagines
      Gschwandtner’s video quilt concept, this time featuring footage from Wong’s,
      Guy-Blaché’s, and Reiniger’s films. It is perhaps these videos that make the
      politics of Gschwandtner’s work most explicit, as Screen Credit features clips
      and credits from Ferrero’s films, including the entire three-minute credit roll
      from Hearts and Hands, alongside credits and clips from Lotte Reiniger’s
      Cinderella (1922). In Gschwandtner’s words: ‘Too many women artisans have
      gone uncredited. Too many women working in film have gone uncredited’.33
      In these videos, for once, women’s work is finally recorded, recognized, and
      credited on screen.
         Gschwandtner, through her film quilts, installations, and videos, traces the lost
      and ruptured lineages of women filmmakers and women crafters and, through
      her patchwork, recuperates and reconnects their work to film and art history.
      Rectifying the historical blackout that has rendered women’s contributions
      to filmmaking in its first few decades invisible is crucial as contemporary
      women filmmakers look for historical influences and role models. Through
      her inventive, appropriative, and appreciative arts practice, and as a curator
      and community activist, Gschwandtner participates actively in the feminist film
      history movement, not only paying tribute to women filmmakers through her
      artwork, but also raising pressing questions about both the materiality and
      politics of film preservation and historiography. Ultimately, Gschwandtner
      honors the unrecognized material labor women performed and the marginal
      role they were attributed in history, and her film quilts stake a claim for women
      as cultural producers by finally providing credit where credit is due.
         As digital cinema technology continues to render photochemical film obsolete,
      Gschwandtner’s work also raises compelling questions about the afterlife of
      the cinematic medium — points to which I have only cursorily alluded due to
      space constraints, but which are worth pursuing further. What are educational
      institutions and libraries to do with their film collections that are no longer in use
      after having been displaced by newer technologies, from VHS tapes and DVDs
      to online streaming services? Is offering these collections and materials up
      for creative destruction and artistic appropriation better than sending them to
      landfills? What responsibility, if any, do found footage filmmakers have toward
      ensuring that they don’t destroy the only extant copy of a film? And what other
      possibilities besides film projection could allow audiences to experience these
      films anew? Gschwandtner’s film quilts are only one example to suggest that,
      rather than digital technology marking the death of cinema, it has just liberated
      the film strip to be used and encountered in endless new ways.



142                                                              Ljungbäck, Hands at Work
  Acknowledgments: Early drafts of this article were presented at the Shifting
Ecologies of Photochemical Film in the Digital Era Conference, hosted by
Aberystwyth University in June 2021, and the Doing Women’s Film and
Television History Conference, hosted by Maynooth University in July 2021. The
author thanks the organizers and conference participants for their thoughtful
feedback and suggestions. This research developed out of an interview with
Sabrina Gschwandtner in her studio in September 2019. The author thanks
the artist for her generosity and hospitality during the visit, and acknowledges
the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Honors College, and especially David
Southward, Laura Blaska, and the Herman and Bertha Weil Senior Thesis
Award, for making the visit possible.




Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                  143
Notes
 1
      See the gallery’s press release: ‘Sabrina Gschwandtner – Hands at Work – Shoshana Wayne Gallery’,
<http://shoshanawayne.com/sabrina-gschwandtner-hands-at-work> [accessed 10 October 2022].
   2
     Maggie Hennefeld, ‘Film History’, Feminist Media Histories, 4.2 (2018), 77–83 (77).
   3
     Jane Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2018); Erin Hill, Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2016). See also Women Film Pioneers Project, ed. by Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal,
and Monica Dall’Asta (New York: Columbia University Libraries), <https://wfpp.columbia.edu/>, and Edited
By, ed. by Su Friedrich (Princeton: Princeton University), <https://womenfilmeditors.princeton.edu/>.
   4
     Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2012); Gregory Zinman, ‘Handmade: The Moving Image in the Artisanal Mode’ (PhD diss., New York
University, 2012); Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, ed. by Tom Gunning and others (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2015).
   5
      See Joshua Yumibe, ‘French Film Colorists’ and Kristen Hatch, ‘Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and
Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors’, in Women Film Pioneers Project, <https://wfpp.columbia.
edu/essay/french-film-colorists/> and <https://wfpp.columbia.edu/essay/cutting-women/> [accessed 30
October 2021].
   6
     See Wanda Strauven, ‘Sewing Machines and Weaving Looms: A Media Archaeological Encounter between
Fashion and Film’, Journal of Visual Culture, 19.3 (2020), 362–77.
   7
      Unless otherwise noted, Gschwandtner’s quotes are from an interview with the author, conducted on
25 September 2019 in her Los Angeles studio. The author is grateful for Gschwandtner’s hospitality and
generosity.
   8
      KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting’s New Wave, ed. by Sabrina Gschwandtner (New York:
Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2007); information about the zines, including tables of contents and lists of
contributors, is archived at http://www.knitknit.net/.
   9
     Gregory Zinman, Making Images Movie: Handcrafted Cinema and the Other Arts (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2020), 139.
   10
       As Wanda Strauven aptly remarks, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Singer Corporation — the
same brand of sewing machine Nicolson used in her performance — also manufactured film projectors. See
Strauven, 368.
   11
       Kayla Parker, ‘Jamming the Machine: The Personal-Political in Annabel Nicolson’s Reel Time’, in The
Arts and Popular Culture in History: Proceedings of the Role of the Arts in History Cross-Disciplinary
Conference, ed. by Rebecca J. Emmett (Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press, 2013), 217–33.
   12
       See Mary Stark, ‘Film as Fabric: Connecting Textile Practice and Experimental Filmmaking through
Expanded Cinema Performance’ (PhD diss., Manchester Metropolitan University, 2020).
   13
      While the films in Gschwandtner’s collection were primarily from the 1950s through the 1980s, Marketa
Uhlirova and others have shown that fashion films have been made since the inception of early cinema. See,
for example, Marketa Uhlirova, ‘100 Years of the Fashion Film: Frameworks and Histories’, Fashion Theory,
17.2 (2013), 137–58.
   14
      Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘Tactility and Transparency: An Interview with Sabrina Gschwandtner’, in Sunshine
and Shadow: Film Quilts by Sabrina Gschwandtner, ed. Priya Bhatnagar (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Art
Alliance, 2013), 39–45 (42–43).
   15
       Joan Mulholland, ‘Patchwork: The Evolution of a Women’s Genre’, Journal of American Culture, 19.4
(1996), 57–69.
   16
      Leah Ollman, ‘Her quilts are made of 16-mm film. Here’s what they reveal, frame by frame’, Los Angeles
Times, 30 June 2017, <https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-sabrina-gschwandtner-
review-20170630-htmlstory.html> [accessed 30 October 2021].
   17
      Mulholland, 64.
   18
      Ibidem, 62.
   19
       Four of Ferrero’s films are currently available through New Day Films as of 10 October 2022. See
https://www.newday.com/filmmaker/162.
   20
      Julia Bryan-Wilson, 43.



144                                                                                Ljungbäck, Hands at Work
 21
     Gschwandtner recounts that she had intended to work with a Lois Weber film but was unable to get
access to the requested footage.
  22
     Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, ‘Marion E. Wong’, in Women Film Pioneers Project, <https://wfpp.columbia.edu/
pioneer/ccp-marion-e-wong/> [accessed 30 October 2021]; Cy Musiker, ‘Made in Oakland in 1916, First
Asian American Film Still Inspires’, KQED, 7 August 2015, <https://www.kqed.org/arts/10881796/made-in-
oakland-in-1916-first-asian-american-film-still-inspires> [accessed 30 October 2021].
  23
     The syndicated news piece ‘Chinese Girl is Author of Real Oriental Movie’ appeared in Bay City Times
(Michigan) on 29 May 1917, The Day Book (Chicago) on 31 May 1917, The New York Call on 6 June 1917,
and Tacoma Times (Washington) on 6 July 1917, among others. See Alex Jay, ‘Marion Wong, 1917’, Chinese
American Eyes (blog), 31 July 2015, <http://chimericaneyes.blogspot.com/2015/07/marion-wong-1917.
html> [accessed 30 October 2021].
  24
      The Editors of Encyclopaedia Brittanica, ‘Alice Guy-Blaché’, Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 June 2021,
<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Guy-Blache> [accessed 30 October 2021].
  25
     Tami Williams, Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).
  26
      Frances Guerin and Anke Mebold, ‘Lotte Reiniger’, in Women Film Pioneers Project, <https://wfpp.
columbia.edu/pioneer/lotte-reiniger/> [accessed 10 October 2022].
  27
     Cy Musiker, ‘Made in Oakland.’
  28
      As Sarah Laskow explains, the China Girls ‘were meant to show the person developing a film that
everything had gone right technically; if it hadn’t, the China girl’s skin tone would look unnatural’. See Sarah
Laskow, ‘The Forgotten “China Girls” Hidden at the Beginning of Old Films’, Atlas Obscura, 30 January 2017
<https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-forgotten-china-girls-hidden-at-the-beginning-of-old-films>
[accessed 10 October 2022].
  29
     Williams, Germaine Dulac.
  30
     Zinman, ‘Handmade’, 54.
  31
     Ibidem, 55.
  32
     Joshua Yumibe, ’French Film Colorists.’ These same gendered labor divisions, rather than shifting when
natural photochemical coloring techniques developed, were maintained twenty years later, in the emerging
cel animation studios, like Disney, where women were relegated to the Painting and Inking Department.
As Elizabeth Bell explains, ‘[t]he hands of women, painting and transcribing the creative efforts of men,
performed the tedious, repetitive, labor-intensive housework of the Disney enterprise.’ See Elizabeth Bell,
‘Somatexts at the Disney Shop: Constructing the Pentimentos of Women’s Animated Bodies’, in From Mouse
to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. by Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 107–24 (107).
  33
      Bobbye Tigerman, ‘Screen Credit: Artist Sabrina Gschwandtner on Filmmaking, Quilting, and the
Forgotten Labor of Women’, LACMA Unframed, 8 March 2022, <https://unframed.lacma.org/2022/03/08/
screen-credit-artist-sabrina-gschwandtner-filmmaking-quilting-and-forgotten-labor-women> [accessed 10
October 2022].




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