Sally Faulkner
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The Admiral and the Alcántaras
Political biopic meets popular soap in ‘Especial Carrero Blanco – El comienzo del fin’, Cuéntame cómo pasó
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With ‘El comienzo del fin’, Bartolomé’s auteurist ‘signature’ remains perfectly legible across both film and television media. The chapter argues that the aesthetic attention to documentary, humour and music in the television episode makes it typical of the director’s work. ‘El comienzo del fin’ thus denounces Francoism and claims feminism, the twin creative commitments of Bartolomé’s career, while also adopting a relatively accessible format, deploying documentary techniques and employing humour, the three formal traits of her signature. Accessibility for audiences is ensured partly by interweaving historical events with a selection of seventeen previously broadcast events in the lives of the Alcántara family. Second, Bartolomé’s belief in documentary, to which she brings her own feminist ‘street’ aesthetic of combining interviews with well-known interlocutors and interviews with anonymous members of the public on the street, is fundamental. Third, Bartolomé’s trademark humour, which we have seen throughout this book, is also evident in her ability to select archive footage and pinpoint the amusing phrase or sequence in longer recordings, and in her ability to make mischievous meaning from choices in mise en scène, camera work, editing and extra-diegetic music.

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The cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé

Feminism and Francoism

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