As audiovisual archives are the source for historians and curators, it matters whose films are collected, preserved, digitized, and made accessible. Since the “archival turn” in the late 20th century, film scholars and archivists have increasingly viewed archives not just as repositories of knowledge but as active spaces where knowledge is shaped and produced (Brunow 2017; Paalman et al. 2021; Carter 2022). Like other heritage organizations, archives are active agents in forming cultural memory, highlighting certain narratives while sidelining or excluding others. Being acts of remembering and forgetting, archival practices include collection policies, cataloguing with its choice of search terms and other metadata, policies for analogue and digital restoration, enabling access to the holdings, and, eventually, their renewed circulation, both online and offline. Crucially, it is not mere storage but access and circulation that define our “audiovisual memory,” a form of situated knowledge I have described as “the sum of images, sounds, and narratives circulating in a specific society at a specific historical moment” (Brunow 2015, 6–7). Renewed circulation, rather than archival storage, becomes an act of remembering and a way of “activating the archive” (Paalman et al. 2021). Film heritage is not “just there” but actively created, involving various stakeholders, such as filmmakers, archivists, policymakers, curators, and researchers. Therefore, examining archives as knowledge producers is part of a critical inquiry into what has been collected, how it has been catalogued, what has been selected for digitization, and, ultimately, what is made visible—or left unseen. Whose lives and works are collected and preserved in the archive is guided by national frameworks and gendered notions of authorship (Brunow 2017). Moreover, these are inextricably linked to film historiography and its focus on national movements, waves, and auteurs, which tend to sideline the contributions of women filmmakers (White 2015).

This chapter examines the gendered dynamics of archives and databases and their impact on film historiography and cultural memory. It uses the case of documentary filmmaker Zsóka Nestler (1944–2016) as a springboard for studying women filmmakers in the context of the long 1970s welfare state. Despite being involved in 24 documentary films and TV productions, Nestler is largely unknown to the public and film scholars alike. Although her name was included in film credits, it has often been lost in cataloguing. Her name has been largely absent in the public sphere and is completely missing from film history and documentary film studies. However, Nestler is not just another woman filmmaker whose participation is uncredited and forgotten by film history. She is not a “one-hit-wonder,” but someone active in documentary filmmaking for over five decades, both as a co-director and a sound engineer. Her position as wife and collaborator of Peter Nestler made Zsóka Nestler both absent and present, both visible and invisible (Stigsdotter 2019; Hanssen 2019). The case of Zsóka Nestler offers an interesting paradox: her films are circulating internationally, but her name is absent from film historiography and scholarly research. The Nestler films have been archived, preserved, and digitally restored for international distribution. They are screened in retrospectives and draw interest from new generations of international curators and film festival audiences (Babos and Petri-Lukács 2023; Lang and Holzapfel 2024). Nevertheless, in the DVD box set dedicated to the films of Peter Nestler, Zsóka Nestler’s name is nearly erased from the booklet (Nestler 2012). Her films are out there, her name is not. Such imbalance, I argue, is connected to the dominant notions of authorship and labor, national frameworks, and bias inherent in data and archival infrastructure. What are the limitations of established film scholarly concepts, and what future directions within film and media studies would a case like hers open?