Women in Iberian Filmic Culture

A Feminist Approach to the Cinemas of Portugal and Spain

Elena Cordero-Hoyo, Begoña Soto-Vázquez, Elena Cordero-Hoyo, Begoña Soto-Vázquez

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789381719, 9781789381528
• eBook ISBN: 9781789381726
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: History

Though cinema arrived in Spain and Portugal at the end of the nineteenth century, national and industrial problems as well as the dictatorships of Salazar and Caetano (in Portugal) and Franco (in Spain) meant Iberian cinemas were isolated from European cultural trends. Strict censorship in both countries limited the themes and artistic practices adopted, while a specific cinematographic language, in many cases full of metaphors and symbolism, sought alternatives to the imposed official discourse and preconceived definitions of supposed national identities. By contrast, the arrival of democracy from the 1970s onwards widened not just the panorama of film production and criticism, but also opened the film industry to women's participation in areas historically assigned to men.

Focusing on Portuguese and Spanish cinema, this collection brings together research about women and their status in relation to Iberian filmic culture. The volume contributes to ongoing debates about the position of women in the cinemas of Portugal and Spain from interdisciplinary and feminist perspectives as well as new accounts of film history. It also aims to promote comparisons between Iberian cinemas and visual culture, a topic that is almost unexplored in academia, despite the similar histories of the two countries, particularly throughout the twentieth century.

PART I

The presence of women in Iberian cinemas

Fiction as a place of power: The presence of female directors throughout the history of Portuguese cinema

Ana Catarina Pereira

To reflect upon the evolution of the women who have directed fiction films in Portugal is to carry out a study of women who have reversed a dominant tendency throughout the twentieth century: that of occupying other jobs in cinema, far from the possibility of effectively assuming the direction of a film. In this way, the reflection that we initiate here intends to analyse a certain abandonment of the place of the other (turning to the feminist and existentialist terminology proposed by Simone de Beauvoir¹), as well as the process of constructing a device in which the woman is elected, observed or understood by herself.

Any historical and/or sociological study concerning Portugal, or specific moments in its history, cannot, of course, ignore the fact that the conditions for ensuring equal opportunities between the genders would be different before and after the establishment of democracy. The dictatorial period (designated as the Estado Novo or New State), beginning with the 1926 military coup and ending on 25 April 1974, led to innumerable legal, moral, educational and social consequences for the feminine condition. The possibility of more women being able to dedicate themselves to a profession such as filmmaking should also, therefore, be read in light of these dates.

In relation to methodology, we should highlight the continuity of this study, which began as part of a Ph.D. thesis² that also advanced a sociological and quantitative approach, comprising a panoramic examination of more than a century of history. The collected data allows us to carry out different readings, in the sense of expected evolutions that did not actually come about. We will therefore focus on identifying women who have directed full-length feature films in Portugal. The impossibility of covering all Portuguese film production from the end of the nineteenth century until the present day is a combination of several factors, which include: (a) the difficulty of cataloguing all the short and long films directed and produced to date in Portugal, as a result of the sheer number of records on short films held by Portuguese Cinematheque and the National Archive for Moving Images (ANIM);³ (b) the space-time dimension of our research; (c) the required financial investment, which is substantially higher in relation to full-length films⁴ than for short films, and for fiction films rather than for documentaries.⁵ For the reasons outlined above, a case study of full-length feature films is relevant from the perspective of gender studies: being the most expensive genre, it is also the most inaccessible to a gender that may be discriminated against in terms of equal opportunities.

In historical terms, we now know that during the Estado Novo there was only one full-length feature film directed by a woman in Portugal (Castro 2000; Matos-Cruz 1999; Pereira 2016). Released on 30 August 1945 at the Cine Ginásio in Lisbon, Três dias sem Deus by Bárbara Virgínia is an adaptation of the book Mundo perdido by Gentil Marques.⁶ The film focuses on a young schoolteacher who goes to a small village in the mountains to teach. A few days after her arrival in the lost and secluded place, Lídia is informed by the doctor that he and the priest will be absent from the village to go to the city: there will as a result be ‘three days without God’, according to popular wisdom. In the meantime, the teacher becomes acquainted with Paulo Belforte, whom the villagers accuse of having a ‘pact with the devil’ for the alleged murder of his wife and attempting to set the local church on fire. Três dias sem Deus (Virgínia, 1945) therefore represents the debut of Portuguese women in directing fiction films, and also provides the first example of the gothic cinematographic genre in Portugal; the work of light and shadow that can be perceived in the remaining images from the film suggest this aesthetic choice.

On 20 September 1946 Cannes hosted the first International Film Festival. This first instance of the festival presented in competition films such as Roma, città aperta (Rossellini, 1945), Brief Encounter (Lean, 1945), Gilda (Vidor, 1946) and also two Portuguese films – Camões by José Leitão de Barros and Três dias sem Deus by Bárbara Virgínia. Of the latter, only about 25 minutes of film, which have never been restored, remain at the National Archive for Moving Images. Therefore, the film is significant in terms of cinema history less for its narrative and visual construction than for the director’s pioneer spirit. As it is not possible to perform a cinematographic analysis of the film from a contemporary point of view, this case study is restricted to the director’s testimonies, collected at the time and in the following years, without the possibility of accessing the images that could retell the story and the vision that she intended to transmit.

From the invisibility to which the history of Portuguese cinema has consigned the director, Bárbara Virgínia has, in recent years, come to receive sporadic but valuable tributes. In 2015, from 5 to 7 June, a documentary exhibition (consisting essentially of video testimonies and some photographs of the director) was shown during the second Olhares do Mediterrâneo Film Festival at the São Jorge Cinema in Lisbon.⁷ In October 2017 Luísa Sequeira premiered Quem é Bárbara Virgínia? (2017) at the Doclisboa Film Festival. The synopsis reads: ‘[t]his is a work of human and emotional archeology that brings to light the life and work of a woman who did much for lusophone culture and who was forgotten’. The film won the Best Documentary award in that year’s Caminhos do Cinema Português and at the first Porto Femme Film Festival in June 2018. It continues to be regularly screened at festivals, mainly in Portugal and Brazil, contributing, in this way, to the efforts to ascribe Bárbara Virgínia her rightful place in cinema history and to the reconstruction of her biography.

The work of Bárbara Virgínia has not been the subject of much analysis and reflection in the literature; Marisa Vieira (2009) dedicated her final degree thesis to the subject, as did Ricardo Vieira Lisboa (2017) with his master’s dissertation. The last interview given by Bárbara Virgínia⁸ during her lifetime was published by Ana Catarina Pereira and Wiliam Pianco in the second issue of the International Journal of Cinema (2017). From among nostalgic recollections and, on occasion, instances of unsound reasoning – caused by a degenerative neurological disease that was already in an advanced stage – some outbursts of protest made by the pioneer who broke into an exclusively masculine universe stand out: ‘Women never sought cinema like this [as film directors]. You see that even today, in the world, we have very few women directing cinema. Women, I believe, have never taken themselves seriously in this respect. I don’t know’ (Virgínia 2017: 23).⁹ From the discourse briefly quoted here, what comes to the fore is the fact that Bárbara Virgínia occupied a pioneering and solipsistic position, with the resulting absence of colleagues with whom she could exchange experiences, and also accompanied by a low female self-confidence, enhanced by the patriarchal structures of society which would not allow women to occupy positions previously exclusive to the male sphere.

The lack of awareness of Bárbara Virgínia’s story, even among film studies researchers, dialogues with the ‘archive fever’¹⁰ that Jacques Derrida (2001) associates with the institutionalization of certain authors and the power relations assigned to the same process. His essay of the same name, it is worth mentioning, critically links the concepts of ‘history’, ‘truth’ and ‘power’ with that of the archive. In this sense, the author questions the relevance of that support, which, besides registering statements, hierarchically orders them in their various discursive series, motivating more critical and detailed analysis of the historical knowledge passed to future generations both for tradition as well as for institutions of knowledge. From the same perspective, Michel Foucault matches the archive to the ‘law of what can be said; the system that governs the emergence of statements as singular events’¹¹ (Foucault 1987: 149). In this brief study, which intends to systematically analyse the number of women who have had the opportunity to direct fiction films in Portugal, it is not for us to question the neglect of and recent tributes to Bárbara Virgínia in the history of Portuguese cinema; we do, although, highlight the phenomenon as a possible encouragement to future researchers.

The historical importance of other female representatives in the restricted cinematographic market should not, however, remain hidden – a fact which demands their rescue. In support of this, the book Cineastas portuguesas: 1874–1956 by Ilda Castro (2000) assumes a fundamental importance, being essentially a biographical and encyclopaedic register as far as the filmmakers of the first half of the twentieth century are concerned. The information collected in it can also be cross-referenced with other encyclopaedic works, as we did with O cais do olhar – O cinema português de longa-metragem e a ficção muda compiled by José de Matos-Cruz and edited by the Portuguese Cinematheque (1999).

When reading both of these works, it becomes clear that Virgínia de Castro e Almeida is the first woman to play a significant role in the history of cinema in Portugal. She was also a writer (of numerous children’s literature books), translator and founder of the production company Fortuna Filmes, established in 1922. Her first production was A sereia de pedra¹² (Lion, 1923), which was followed by Os olhos da alma (Lion, 1923), both French–Portuguese co-productions (Castro 2000; Matos-Cruz 1999). She never assumed the role of director. Maria Emília Castelo Branco, on the other hand, was an actress, producer and director. In 1930 she produced O Castelo das Berlengas (Leitão, 1930) and in 1957 she directed the documentary Roteiros líricos do Douro. In Cineastas portuguesas she is presented as ‘the beautiful girl of Portuguese Cinema during the silent cinema period’ (Castro 2000: 24) due to her participation in the two films produced by Virgínia de Castro e Almeida, as well as in O diabo em Lisboa (Lupo, 1926), Táxi 9297 (Ferreira, 1927) and Zé do Telhado (Lupo, 1929).

Maria Helena Matos is the first woman to whom reference is made in terms of co-writing a screenplay. She was also an actress and assistant in the film Campinos do Ribatejo (Lopes, 1932) (Matos-Cruz 1999). Two decades later, the film A luz vem do alto (Campos, 1959), a drama in which two friends confront their deep religiosity and atheism, was produced by Maria Dulce, while Maria Teresa Ramos was the director’s assistant. This film received the Grand Prize of the SNI (Secretariado Nacional de Informação/National Information Secretariat), the Best Actor award (Mário Pereira) and the Best Cinematographic Adaptation award (Fernando Fragoso) (Matos-Cruz 1999).

Another impressive accomplishment was achieved by the writer and director Maria Luísa Bivar who, between ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Women in Iberian filmic culture: A tour of Spain and Portugal
• Part I: The Presence of Women in Iberian Cinemas
• Part II: Killing the Muse: Women as Creator
• Part III: Beyond the Author: Recognizing Other Cinematographic Professions
• Part IV: Historical Memory and the Gendered Archive
• Notes on Contributors