Film, Media and Music
The GPO Film Unit was not immune from the deteriorating international situation and its impact upon the British public. Following the Munich Agreement in September 1938 the potential value of film was acknowledged, and the GPO Film Unit became effectively the government’s ‘official’ film production facility. At the start of hostilities its control would be transferred to the new Ministry of Information (MoI). Until then it still produced public relations films for its original sponsor, but these increasingly showed a nation preparing for war. However, by the summer of 1939, the films began to reflect the government’s policies and requirements – in particular advising the public what to do in the event of the widely anticipated mass air attacks, probably exacerbated by the use of gas. When war was eventually declared in September 1939 the static Western Front of the Phoney War left film production in limbo. Despite the endeavours of Kenneth Clark, who was in charge of the Ministry’s Films Division, many of the films produced in the early months of the war lacked critical and commercial success. The latter had become influential as the ministry’s films were now part of the daily programme in commercial cinemas. Such was the criticism mounted at the film unit, which included an excoriating report on its dire administrative and financial affairs, that its closure was actually mooted. In one sense it was saved by the rapid worsening of the military situation in the spring of 1940 as the government quickly realized that it needed a production facility to provide the information which the public were now demanding.
One of the impacts of the Boer War was the slow realization that film could be used in support of the war effort. Initially the limitations of contemporary technology both in production and exhibition terms meant that the films were usually small-scale and designed for local audiences. However, the generally positive audience reaction meant that, by the beginning of the First World War, the British government had realized that the concentration of the public as cinema audiences provided opportunities for both publicity and raising revenue. Early propaganda films such as Britain Prepared (1915) were over-long and tedious. It was not until apparently more authentic productions, such as Battle of the Somme (1916), with realistic combat footage that the audience became more engaged. Alongside such major productions the government realized that very short information films ‘tagged’ onto the end of a film show could be valuable in presenting a simple message in a visual manner. These early PIFs addressed various morale, economic and social issues.
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.