ILUMINACE Volume 34, 2022, No. 2 (126) THEMED ARTICLES 29 Abstract is 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. Keywords social history, film history, archive, girlhood, feminist history ——— What do we know about the people who went to the movies in the 1910s and the 1920s? What can we learn about the pleasures and constrictions they faced, in their specific mi- lieus, now they are removed from us by over a century? Many film historians would an- swer by saying that we already know a lot about silent moviegoers. We have already made a sketch with compelling, clearly defined outlines. We have a very tangible sense of the spaces in which people of the 1920s encountered movies globally: from town halls, which doubled as screening venues, through small scale, local theatres, to large, urban picture palaces. Yet, some parts of this sketch remain rough, missing a more nuanced understand- ing of what “a night at the movies” could mean to specific individuals at the time. Analy- sis of film programming and demographic data can only ever tell us so much when it Agata Frymus (Monash University) Ordinary People, Ordinary Lives: The Prospects of New Cinema History