A Diffractive Approach to Archive Film Performativity

This article explores the performativity of archival footage and reframes the archival feminist cinema in Romania through a diffractive methodology inspired by Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Judith Butler. Focusing on Vlad Petri’s Between Revolutions and Maryam Tafakory’s poetic cinematic works, it examines how archival footage, voiceovers, and subtitles disrupt linear narratives and reconfigure history. Rather than comparing the films thematically, the analysis reads them through one another to trace how meaning emerges from material-discursive entanglements. The study foregrounds the political agency of filmic elements such as sound, image, and text while also considering how translation, censorship, and female voice shape feminist ways of seeing. Through layered montage and citation, these films are positioned not as representations of the past but as performative acts that imagine new temporalities and relationships. A diffractive reading reveals how history and memory are not fixed but continuously reshaped in the space between revolutions.