Ponències i comunicacions del Seminari

Títol

The power of the unknown. Or how to approach the contribution of women in the early years of Spanish cinema

Autor

Soto, Begoña

Abstract

There are several difficulties when investigating the contribution of women in silent films, particularly in Spain. There is the problem of how to approach their biographical reconstruction while avoiding the premise that the interest lies in how atypical or unique a woman was in the Spanish film world. This would mean, in principle, establishing biographies rather than hagiographies. There are other types of problem that lie in the historiographical narrative. Studying female participation in Spanish silent cinema necessarily involves consulting newspaper sources and leaving aside any previously produced work since the classical and cinephilic historiography of women in Spanish cinema simply does not exist. The detailed study of both the specialist and generalist press of the time allows us to qualify this non-existence as being, at the very least, incomplete and relative. Once such difficulties have been overcome, we can establish that women in the silent cinema of Spain did indeed exist. First of all, we shouldn’t forget that they existed as an audience; but there is also their work within the cinematographic world which, in very specific ways, we can map out into a very clear binomial: there are named women and there are anonymous workers. Stated differently, there were women who existed within the cinematographic culture and there were film professionals. For now, we will dedicate ourselves to the former.

Edició

11th Seminar (2017) Presences ans representations of women in the early years of cinema. 1895-1920