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Were it not for authoritarian state censorship, Cecilia Bartolomé’s name would figure alongside those of her contemporaries Agnès Varda and Claire Denis as a pioneering feminist filmmaker of the twentieth century. With this bold claim, this book seeks both to write the history of Bartolomé’s extant filmography, and speculate about censored and un-filmed work, thereby fashioning a new way of writing a feminist creative life in film.
The first volume on this director to be written in English, The Cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé is also the first volume on the director published in any language for over twenty years. By focusing on Spanish-language cinema of the 1960s-90s, the period when feminism, like democracy, was re-born and seemingly consolidated in Spain, the study brings historical depth and transnational reach to current debates in the wake of #MeToo.
This book plays a significant role in widening the scope of knowledge surrounding this key director. Indeed, it is in the meticulous archival work, interviews and her eloquent glossing of these that the book is so valuable to feminist media scholars, film historians and Hispanists alike. More importantly perhaps, it stresses that ‘the encounter with Bartolomé’s work is a joy for audiences’ (200). Faulkner’s sensitivity to cultural and political context and to film form combine in an eloquent examination of this director’s feminist aesthetic. It is an aesthetic that combines a formal acuity with the awareness of the details of the everyday with an astute understanding of the power of humour, music and melodrama even in potentially difficult situations.
Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas
Introduction: feminism and Francoism
1 Film School shorts: La noche del doctor Valdés / Doctor Valdés’s Night (1964) and Carmen de Carabenchel / Carmen from Carabenchel (1965)
2 Feminism and Francoism, Margarita y el lobo / Margarita and the Wolf (1969).
3 The un-filmed scripts: Qué tal Margarita… pero bien / What’s Up Margarita…? Not Bad (1974) and La linda Casilda / The Beautiful Casilda (1976).
4 Putting Bárbara into ¡Vámonos, Bárbara! / Bárbara, Let’s Go! (Bartolomé 1978): Girlhood studies and ‘Spain’s first feminist film’
5 Filming between the jaws of the wolf: documentary and denunciation in the 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).
6 ‘Es que no sabéis mirar’ (It’s that you don’t know how to look): colony and memory in Lejos de África / Far from Africa (1995).
7 The Admiral and the Alcántaras: political biopic meets popular soap in “Especial Carrero Blanco: El comienzo del fin” / “Carrero Blanco Special: The Beginning of the End”, Cuéntame cómo pasó / Tell Me How It Happened (various authors 2005).
Conclusion: Cecilia Bartolomé and the incomplete history of Spanish cinema
Filmography
Bibliography
Appendix: Cecilia Bartolomé interview, Sally Faulkner and Núria Triana Toribio, 2022. Translated by Mar Diestro-Dópido.
Index