Film, Media and Music
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.
This article explores the history of Baldwin Studies in the USSR and post-Soviet countries (Azerbajian, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine), which is illustrative of literary approaches and interpretations characteristic of Soviet scholarship. First translations of his short stories, essays, and the play Blues for Mr. Charlie appeared in the early 1960s, followed by commentaries in leading Soviet literary and popular journals. For ideological reasons, in the 1960–70s the focus was on the writer’s public stance and involvement in the civil rights movement. It was only in the years of perestroika—“openness”—and the 1990s that his oeuvre in its entirety began to be discussed without taboos, omissions, or ideological bias. In the 2000s, the focus shifted to discussions of aspects of Baldwin’s method and peculiarities of his style. At present, James Baldwin is regarded as a key personality in contemporary US literature, though interest in his literary heritage has somewhat subsided.
Cornel West was interviewed by Christopher Lydon for Radio Open Source; the interview was originally broadcast in September of 2017. They discuss the works of Baldwin, the condition of America, and Baldwin’s relevance to that condition today. The interview is reprinted here by permission of the interviewee.