Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema

Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema provides the first detailed consideration of women directors working before the Civil War and during Franco's dictatorship, and is the first to explore the impact of feminism on filmmaking in Spain. Part I focuses on three directors, Rosario Pi, Ana Mariscal, and Pilar Miró, whose careers span the history of sound cinema in Spain. The book highlights their struggle to achieve agency within the male-dominated film industry, and draws upon extensive archival research as well as in-depth textual analysis to reveal their negotiation with questions of authorship, female subjectivity and national cinema. Part II explores six films by women and men directors–three each from the Francoist and post-Franco periods–that foreground a number of issues of fundamental importance to feminism, from the indoctrination and 'performance' of gender, to the fraught effort to reconcile power with sexual pleasure. The Afterword treats the remarkable recent boom in women directors and traces the shift in their work towards the exploration of multiple forms of difference.