Film, Media and Music
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.
Eulogy delivered at James Baldwin’s funeral. Published in The New York Times, December 20, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 29, Column 2; Book Review Desk.
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.
Volume 10’s From the Field section consists of provocations and talking points from roundtable discussions on the Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley film I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982) hosted by James Baldwin Review at three different conferences—the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Denver in 2023; the Modern Language Association’s 2024 conference in Philadelphia; and the American Literature Association’s 2024 conference in Chicago. These roundtables provided stimulating public conversation, bringing together scholars to provide new takes on this extraordinary but little-known film. The panelists—Simon Abramowitsch (Chabot College), Douglas Field (University of Manchester), Monika Gehlawat (University of Southern Mississippi), Melanie Hill (Rutgers University), Josslyn J. Luckett (NYU), D. Quentin Miller (Suffolk University), Jared O’Connor (University of Illinois at Chicago), Hayley O’Malley (Rice University), Robert Reid-Pharr (NYU), Karen Thorsen (independent filmmaker), Kenneth Stuckey (Bentley University)—have each agreed to share here their opening remarks from these conferences in hopes of furthering discussion on this vital film.
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.
James Baldwin Review is delighted to present a special section dedicated to chronicling and demonstrating Baldwin’s direct involvement in the civil rights movement. On tours for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1962–63, Baldwin spoke at dozens of forums. We have transcribed three of his major appearances on May 7, 1963: a speech before a packed gathering of thousands of students at the University of California at Berkeley; a radio interview with John Leonard and Elsa Knight Thompson; and an evening speech before the sold-out San Francisco Masonic Temple. Ed Pavlić provides an introduction tracing some of Baldwin’s work for CORE in new detail. These details suggest that Baldwin’s activism enriched his life and work in contrast to the prevailing idea that these engagements threatened and diminished his art.