The Development of the Women Film Pioneers Project and its Role in Shaping Feminist Film Historiography. Interview with Jane Gaines

In this interview, Jane Gaines, professor of film studies and co-founder of the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), revisits the development of the WFPP in the early 1990s. Drawing on the term “unhistoricized women film pioneers”, she dives into the invisible aspects of film historiography and how the WFPP addresses these gaps by drawing attention to the diverse careers of women in early cinema. She outlines the organizational structure of the WFPP, including the importance of technical support from Columbia University and the international collaborations with students and scholars. Gaines reflects on the impact of the WFPP on her own research at the intersection of empirical approaches and speculative historiography. Furthermore, she emphasizes the WFPP’s role in shaping feminist film historiography by focusing on outreach and recognition of marginalized filmmakers. The interview is part of an interview series on data practices, provenance, and categorizations in film history initiated by the research group „Aesthetics of Access. Visualizing Research Data on Women in Film History“ (DAVIF) (2021–2025), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR). The goal of the research group is to explore data visualizations in order to tell different stories differently. The WFPP is one of the film historiographical project partners, in addition to the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (DFF), both of whom have provided their research data for data visualizations. The interview series: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17233942 The project website: https://uni-marburg.de/Q85oo