Film, Media and Music
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.
This conversation was first broadcast on KPFA (Berkeley, CA) on June 6, 1963. Original transcription available online: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-28-8s4jm23q52. The transcription below has been lightly edited for clarity and prepared by Ed Pavlić and Justin A. Joyce. Vocal emphasis has been captured with italics. Significant pauses, interruptions, or non-word interjections have been captured in editorial brackets.
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.