Beyond the publicity: Spanish actresses struggled within the Transition to think about new methods of being a lady | Cinema: premieres and critiques | EUROtoday

The Spanish cinema of the Transition was way more than the publicity. And its protagonists, actresses who made up an rising technology, understood that even with their bare our bodies they might break stereotypes, think about new methods of being a lady. As the collective e book highlights initially When actresses dreamed of democracy (Cátedra publishing home), coordinated by Gonzalo de Lucas and Annalisa Mirizio, these performers achieved a terrific “impact on society by prefiguring new active forms of desire and causing moral and sexual imbalances and ruptures.”

The battle was not simple. And sure, clearly unequal. Because those that wrote, directed and produced had been males. Only Josefina Molina, Cecilia Bartolomé, Pilar Miró and, on one event, Ana Belén had been behind the cameras. So they took benefit of the loopholes—and the inventive alliances with some administrators who did perceive the change—that the interpretation supplied: “The reflective face of the actress sustains the long shots not from opacity or ambiguity, but from the dynamism of inner thought about a time to come: the agitation of a decision-making, which perhaps entails the awareness of the price that will have to be paid to integrate—or jump—into the consumer society. […] “This book is about those images in which an actress holds, in/with her gaze, the promises of transition.”

In actuality, the amount continues the evaluation of two earlier books: The erotic physique of the actress throughout fascism (1939-1945) and the monumental and interesting Female want in Spanish cinema (1939-1975). And from the start he confesses that the performers might not have been in a position to assemble another historical past of Spanish cinema, however they did stand out of their work of making the which means of the photographs “in the face of the politics of authors” and that they managed to configure “a star system “feminine inseparable from both democratic promises and feminist struggles.”

The book covers this aspiration in three main sections: first, to analyze its contribution to the emergence of “new female subjectivities, dreamers, eccentric or dissidents, always driven by the desire to experience freedoms that are more intuitive than real”, as in clear cases such as that of the character of Berta Socuéllamos in Hurry, hurry (1981) and although some films do not pass the Bechdel test (a test to evaluate the feminine weight in works of fiction that requires that there be at least two women with their own names who talk to each other about something other than a man). Then she reveals the radical nature of female dissidence through the gaps left by the roles of girls, housewives, artists, and workers (like those who star in the masterpiece of the documentary Numax presents… (1980), by Joaquim Jordà) and quinquilleras.

And it ends with the individualized review of the careers between 1975 and 1992 of the leaders of that movement: to find their voices they have resorted to interviews from the time, where some clearly verbalize their intentions, to the surprise of the journalists. Of course, those who raised their voices or wanted to add nuances to their characters were immediately accused of being problematic: that wall against which they were colliding had already been portrayed in France in 1976 by Delphine Seyrig (director and actress of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Brussels) in Shut up, you’re prettier. “While women’s capacity for seduction is overemphasized, as if this were their only quality, it is demanded that their sexual potential does not go beyond the demands of men and motherhood,” Mirizio writes. That is why Assumpta Serna and Amparo Muñoz are good examples of filmmakers “who are not comfortable or accommodating figures.”

These cracks are seen in small gestures. The book analyzes how, for example, Ana Belén, in the middle of The love of Captain Brando, She speaks, playing a teacher, about the rape with an old political exile (Fernando Fernán Gómez), and she does so using her gaze and standing above him, to then play and flirt in a confrontation/seduction. And how he listens to music on the radio in Ho, dad! (both are films by Jaime de Armiñán) “while we see his gaze go into the depths.” These gestures of resistance point to the fact that, in that cinema, liberated femininity “does not coincide with the imitation of the masculine.” Ana Belén did manage to raise her voice when she directed How to be a woman and not die trying.

When censorship disappeared in December 1977 and the S rating was born on January 2, 1978, most actresses were invited or forced to undress in front of the camera. Which does not mean that on several occasions her work rose above gratuitous exposure: the book reviews that era from María Luisa San José “personifying a transcendental transformation” to the new batch of Ángela Molina, Ana Belén, Geraldine Chaplin, Carmen Maura, Amparo Muñoz and Patricia Adriani, who “builds a body that is clearly obscene towards the outside but indifferent to itself.”

There is naturalness in the face of one’s own sex, and it is a weapon with which to write one’s story. At the same time, female objectification increases with the shamelessness that underlines the inquisitorial gazes “that had survived Francoism.” What moved Spanish cinema in those years? “The predominance of desire over reality.” And for this reason, the body-image triumphs, with characters-women “who are not thinking, but pure shadows” of flesh.

So these bursts of freedom “do not need a programmatic or unitary proposal”, but rather the actresses do what they can, “launched into an unprecedented expertise of freedom” that puts into crisis the “false certainties of femininity assumed by earlier generations.”

It will only be a temporary trend that will end up appeased at the end of the eighties: the Miró law of 1983 diverts the majority film production towards a very constricted authorial creation focused on prestigious literary adaptations, killing those singular films that are freer from the transition, with examples as glorious and as vindictive as I feel strange (1977), where in the portrait of a lesbian love, two leaders of almost antagonistic movements collide: Rocío Durcal, a former teenage prodigy of pop musical comedies during Franco’s era, and Bárbara Rey, a prolific representative of uncovered cinema.

The book reviews these figures of dissidence from their roles: the housewives, the portrait of the working woman, the artists of the scene such as the folklorists and the folklorists. drags, or the trans body breaking in and asking for its space in the story; the curious girls exemplified in the children of Víctor Erice’s films, and the quinquilleras, gang members who survive on the social margins and who become foundations for the quinqui film genre. And it also does so from its protagonists, many of them mentioned above, such as Carmen Maura, called the new woman from the first transition, Ángela Molina, Assumpta Serna, Amparo Muñoz, the proverbial Charo López (who throws herself into melodramatic excess to leave behind her beauty or the old contained femininity), Verónica Forqué, Ana Torrent, Ana Belén, Victoria Abril (an earthquake in the post-Transition) or even Rafaela Aparicio, different from the others because of her non-normative body (she was also asked to undress “attributable to imperatives of the script”, and always refused). and her roles as a maid: “Her characters, with their particular eccentricity, expressed a sexuality different from that promoted by the erotic nudes of the actresses.” They all fought bravely to leave behind roles of muses, girlfriends or mothers, of fresh beauties who broke away from their men, of materializing their own dreams and reaching a level that is still sometimes discussed: showing themselves and for themselves.