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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.
Fusing a distinctive feminist aesthetic with a startling vision of twentieth-century Spain, the work of Cecilia Bartolomé casts a new light on the histories of both Spanish national film and transnational women’s cinema. This book, the first in English on the director and only the second in any language, analyses her shorts, medium- and feature-length films, television work, as well as unfilmed scripts, in order that she may take her place among other key auteurs of Spanish and feminist cinema. It explores Bartolomé’s sustained ideological commitment to defending feminism and opposing Francoism, as well as her dynamic aesthetic invention, especially in the areas of music and comedy, including the esperpento. However, while an auteurist framework allows for an analysis of the aesthetics and vision of her filmed work, the nature of Bartolomé’s career subjects it to severe strain. The Cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé adopts, then, a mindful auteurist approach. Readers will find in these pages close readings of commercially released films, but also sustained analysis of the director’s Film School pieces as finished work, rather than merely developmental. The book also innovatively includes creative exploration of her unfilmed scripts, where we only have the word, and must imagine the image and sound. The nature of Bartolomé’s career forces us critically to adapt, to fill gaps, to read between the lines and to imagine: it aims to show that such a critical approach is thereby stronger for the adaptation. The book also includes a new interview with the director as an appendix.
This conclusion suggests two ways of interpreting Bartolomé’s career. The first is subtitled ‘Feminist Auteur’, as the book argues for the inclusion of her name among those far better-known figures, in both national and international contexts, to whom this label has been attached. In Spain, these would include the generation that came into prominence in the 1990s, like Icíar Bollaín, Isabel Coixet and Chus Gutiérrez; internationally, her contemporaries, Claire Denis, Euzhan Palcy and Agnès Varda. This first conclusion argues furthermore for the ‘rose’ and ‘blue’ demarcations for her career that have previously been applied to canonical Spanish artists. The second defends the urgent inclusion of Bartolomé in histories of Spanish cinema not in spite of the fact her work is incomplete, but, in fact, precisely because of it. Bartolomé’s career may be incomplete, with countless projects stymied by censorship, a fraction of which this volume has attempted to recover in its exploration, in Chapter 3, of 1970s unfilmed scripts. If her career is darkened by the shadows, or haunted by the ghosts, of her unmade work; it also argues that so is the history of Spanish cinema.
This chapter balances a positive account of the originality of Lejos de África / Far from Africa, the first Spanish film since democracy to address the nation’s former imperial territories in what is today Equatorial Guinea, while also assessing its shortcomings. The chapter first considers the lack of engagement with audiences that may have arisen from its presentation and marketing. It then suggests that the film’s main aim, to explore the final decades of Spain’s possession of territories in the Gulf of Guinea before independence as Equatorial Guinea was won in 1968, from the perspective of a young girl, then teenager, then young woman, is brilliant. The exploration of interracial female friendship is also highly original. However, the unevenness of Lejos de África stems from some at best odd, at worst weak, aesthetic choices, especially the deployment of European and African music. Occasionally the film betrays Eurocentrism even as it seeks to question it.
This chapter examines Margarita y el lobo / Margarita and the Wolf (1969), first, as an innovative example of literary adaptation in Spanish cinema, which looks back to the 1960s via its cross-border engagement with the French writer Christiane Rochefort’s original novel Les Stances à Sophie / Céline and Marriage, first published in 1963. The chapter argues, second, that the film also looks forward to cross-cultural developments in international feminism in the 1970s, with which Bartolomé might have directly engaged had she released the film in France, which she was offered the opportunity of doing. For example, by linking Margarita’s character arc shift from innocence to knowledge to the figure of ‘Caperucita’ (Little Red Riding Hood), of the eponymous fairy tale, and by associating ‘el lobo feroz’ (the big, bad wolf) of ‘Los tres cerditos’ (The Three Little Pigs) tale with terrifying masculinity and repressive state patriarchy, Bartolomé not only condemns Francoism – as suggested by the metaphor of ‘the wolf’. Bartolomé’s feminist exploration of terrifying masculinity in the form of the wolf also, the chapter argues, anticipates British writer Angela Carter’s engagement with fairy tales in the collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, first published in 1979. The chapter also extensively examines the deployment of comedy and both diegetic and extra-diegetic music in the film.
This chapter examines, first, the particular nature of Spain’s Film School, which existed for most of the dictatorship, from 1947 to 1976, before homing in on the gendered experience of female students at it, like Bartolomé. It extensively reads extant archive material held at the Filmoteca Española, much of which has barely been touched by scholars, to capture Film School teachers’ and fellow students’ responses to Bartolomé’s work. This affords us some sense of the contemporary reception of the work – limited, of course, to this group of experts. It proceeds to survey Bartolomé’s extant work at the School, before closely reading two shorts: La noche del doctor Valdés / Doctor Valdés’s Night (1964) and Carmen de Carabenchel / Carmen from Carabenchel (1965). In them, the chapter identifies Bartolomé’s early aesthetic investigation of female characterisation, melodrama, the intertextual deployment of television in film, comedy and music. The thematic content of these shorts, the chapter also argues, are critical for the history of feminism in Spain in the 1960s: excessive religiosity and the desire for freedom in La noche; and the particularly important call for legal contraception and abortion among the Spanish working classes is Carmen.
This chapter argues that the originality of the documentary diptych Después de… primera parte: No se os puede dejar solos / Afterwards… Part One: You Can’t Be Left Alone and Después de… segunda parte: Atado y bien atado / Afterwards…: Part Two: All Tied Down (co-directed with José Juan Bartolomé 1983) lies, first, in its focus on the present moment of Spain of Transition, unlike other contemporary Spanish documentaries that focussed on the past. More significantly for wider histories of documentary, it also insists that the originality of Después de… lies in particular in the films’ deployment of documentary form. The chapter groups these innovations into three areas: the shoot in the street; the importance of editing; and, especially, the deployment of humour. While Cecilia’s brother, José Juan’s experience in Chile influenced the former, the chapter argues that, in Cecilia’s hands, the ‘street’ is used to develop her a feminist aesthetic of the quotidian, or everyday, especially evident through decisions in montage, the deployment of music, and an appeal to comedy and the esperpento.
This introduction takes Giuliana Bruno’s metaphor of the ‘ruined map’ of women’s cinema to introduce Cecilia Bartolomé. The ‘map’ of her extant work is comprised of six Film School shorts, to which I devote Chapter One, with a particular focus on La noche del Dr Valdés / Doctor Valdés’s Night (1964) and Carmen de Carabanchel / Carmen from Carabenchel (1965); a Film School medium-length work, Margarita y el lobo / Margarita and the Wolf (1969) (Chapter 2); the features ¡Vámonos, Barbara! / Bárbara, Let’s Go! (1978) and Lejos de África / Far from Africa (1995) (Chapters 4 and 6); the documentary diptych Después de… / Afterwards… (Chapter 5); and the Cuéntame cómo pasó / Tell Me How It Happened television episode ‘El comienzo del fin’ / ‘The Beginning of the End’ (Chapter 7). The Introduction then shows that this map is ‘ruined’ by considering work she was prevented from making. This includes films that censorship under dictatorship prevented her from making; and the censorship under democracy that obstructed the path for finished films to reach audiences. The introduction also considers the neglect of the director’s work in Spanish film historiography; then positively examines the attention paid to the director in recent years. Overall it makes the case for Bartolomé’s urgent inclusion in in national histories of Spanish film; and transnational histories of feminism and women’s cinema.
Acknowledging the importance of work that has focussed on the adult character, Ana, in this film, this chapter argues for the importance of the figure of the Girl to the film’s intervention in the particular historical moment of Spain’s Transition when it was filmed. It first pays close attention to press response, and to distribution and exhibition difficulties occasioned by the producer’s commissioning of an unauthorised Catalan version. Second, it analyses the ways the film lampoons the current trend of ‘destape’ (soft porn) cinema in Spain, through its deployment of comedy. The chapter then considers both the literary tradition of the ‘chica rara’ (unconventional girl) in Spain, and transnational Girlhood Studies approaches. It takes the insights from Girlhood Studies in particular to argue for the Girl’s special, destabilising relationship to ideology, drawing on recent insights into the adolescent and queer Girl. The chapter then uses these to demonstrate the primary importance of the supposedly secondary character of Bárbara in the film’s shrewd cultural response to the in-betweenness and dislocation of the Spanish Transition.
This chapter focusses on unfilmed scripts, and thus analyses the written word only. It defends the inclusion of Bartolomé’s unfilmed scripts as vital to the recovery of the director’s work for Spanish film and transnational feminist film historiographies. To do so, it deploys recent unproduction studies scholarship, especially a methodology of ‘speculation’ (Field 2022) and defence of the ‘incomplete’ (Beeston and Soloman 2023). It therefore analyses the scripts of Qué tal Margarita… pero bien / What’s Up Margarita…? Not Bad (1974) and La linda Casilda / The Beautiful Casilda (1976) to speculate concerning the images of female experience in these films (including what would have been highly original treatments of post-natal depression and suicide). It also considers the evidence for the filming techniques that are hinted at, which suggest a connection to contemporary feminist counter-cinema. Within these techniques, it also pays attention to the sounds that audiences might have heard.