Clara Auclair is a PhD Candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at University of Rochester (Rochester, NY, USA) and Histoire et sémiologie du texte et de l’image at Université Paris Diderot (Paris, France). Clara is the recipient of the 2020-2022 George Eastman Museum Fellowship. She currently works as a Digitization Specialist at the Digital Scholarship Lab at River Campus Libraries (University of Rochester).
Clara is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman Museum and holds a MA in Film History and Aesthetics from Université Paris Diderot and in Visual and Cultural Studies from University of Rochester. Clara currently serves on the board of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, as a Secretary and Editor of their online publication Snapshots. Within University of Rochester, Clara is also a board member and editor of Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture and a programmer at OnFilm.
You can reach her via email at cauclair[at]ur.rochester.edu or Twitter @clarasilentfilm
Clara’s dissertation research project explores the history of the short lived French film industry settled in Fort Lee, NJ, in the 1910s through the analysis of testimonies left by their contemporaries. Entitled ‘The personal is technical: Collected memories of the French Film Industry in Fort Lee, NJ’ Clara’s dissertation focuses on the presence of the French film community in New Jersey to highlight the influence of immigration and social networking in the early days of the film industry in the United-States. Approaching the subject through collected memories allows to open the historical discourse to a web of individual trajectories, often forgotten from the main accounts of early film history.
In addition to drawing the portrait of the French film industry in New Jersey, Clara’s work is a reflection on the act of self-archiving and historical writing in film and media studies. It questions issues of provenance in archival collections and the tension existing between familial/intimate archives with institutional ones. It also interrogates the place of images within archival collections and historical writing, as images often come muddying the tracks, obscuring and sometimes disrupting the narratives of history.