Ordinary people, ordinary lives: The prospects of new cinema history

This article outlines the most recent methodological developments in new cinema history and re-lates them to existing scholarship on girlhood and feminist history. In charting my personal rela-tionship with the field and my specific subjects, it gestures towards broader applications of “critical confabulation,”; the term coined by Saidyia Hartman in relation to the history of Black slavery. In doing so, it articulates some of the opportunities and limitations of re-centring historiographies of moviegoers towards groups that have been marginalised because of the overlapping factors of class, race and gender.