Sun and Shadow: Musidora’s Self-Curated Stardom in Periodicals and the Archive

Musidora is one of pre-sound cinema’s most globally acclaimed stars, whose career encompassed acting, film direction, creative writing, and poetry. Her work as archival curator is generally overlooked, however, and this article explores how this latter phase of her work actually consolidated her cultural identity as a pioneering woman star-filmmaker. To do this, the article focuses on the Musidora Collection at the Bibliothèque du Film in Paris, exploring how Musidora, star-turned-periodicals-compiler, distilled her professional emergence in the 1910s and 1920s. Historically revisionist, this article finds in Musidora’s multi-modal work a woman using early cinema publications to engineer an archival time capsule.