'Re-animating the vanishing woman' is a speculative video essay, a documentary of hopes, feelings, fears, and possibilities that are all real, but which have no archival records or explicitly stated form. As such, it is an exemplary construction of knowledge through moving image. Employing speculative techniques of creative animation and juxtaposition, 'Re-animating the vanishing woman' gives breath, space, and material form to relationships and connections of women across time - women who have had significant impact on each other through their work, and significant impacts on the world through their otherwise vanished gestures. 

The theme of time, of past and present interwoven, and the animator’s uncounted hours of meticulous labour, is introduced first through sound. Then archival images amplifiy the sense that this video essay will make something palpable that is otherwise unsensed – the connection of ideas across time. 

Images of early 20^th century filmmakers meet images of (and by) Liu Jiamin, 21^st century animator. Gazing up over her drawing desk from right to left Liu Jiamin is juxtaposed with images of filmmakers who look back from left to right. The editor’s tools meet those of the animator here, as gazes and possibilities connect. The juxtaposition provokes the thought that the past is living in Liu Jiamin’s imagination. Liu Jiamin (who is the 'the symbolic embodiment' of the video essay creator Paola Voci’s 'own critical voice') animates and shapes these desires for connection, so that I begin to desire them, to value them, to understand them, too. 

Paola Voci connects us first to Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981), virtuoso animator and creator of the first animated feature film. Then Alice Guy, leading innovator in the development of narrative film form follows, fading in, and out, as Paola Voci dissolves to a Méliès magician (1896) and his trick of making a woman disappear. Where is she? Did history help Méliès to disappear her to make space for him? Why is this ever-recurring magic trick positioned in the annals of film form as ‘just’ benign entertainment?  

A woman’s hand reaches for the vanished woman in the frame grasping at the black void. This reaching woman’s hand recurs throughout the video essay, searching by feel, rather than by sight for women, their labour, their thoughts, their ideas. Through animation, juxtaposition, sounding and reframing, Paola Voci’s video essay responds to Karen Redrobe Beckman’s (2003) call for more than reassurance of presence. It affirms 'not only that the hand was present, but also individual subjectivity' (Hosea, 2019, as qtd in Voci, 2023). 

Travelling through the possible spaces and times of multiple individual subjectivities 'Re-animating the vanishing woman' resolves in an image that both unites them and asserts their distinctiveness. The imaginings of the present are visualised as a repetitive slicing apart into layers and coming back together. The searching woman’s hand returns to probe this sliced and fractured image as it re-assembles itself into a single woman’s head. In doing so Voci’s searching hand provokes and re-animates the possibilities of women filmmakers’ embodied thinking, and thinking together, across time. 

Works cited

Beckman, Karen Redrobe. 2003. Vanishing Women. Durham, Duke University Press.

Hosea, B. 2019. 'Made by hand'. In Ruddell C, Ward P (eds) The Crafty Animator: Handmade, Craft-Based Animation and Cultural Values. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 17–43.

Voci, P. 2023. 'Para-animation, in Practice and Theory: The Animateur, the Embodied Gesture, and Enchantment', Animation Volume 18(1), pp. 23-41. ​https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477231155543