Screening Room: Spanish Women Filmmakers View the Transition

The women-built screening room casts light upon a critical period in Spanish history while enlarging the scope and methods of filmmaking for their successors, female and male. As a technological product and economic commodity, the feature film provides an index of industrial development within its country or countries of origin. The reception of Bartolome’s film in the general and specialized film press was largely positive, with an emphasis on the film’s “feminist” novelty value, accompanied by expressions of regret over the dearth of women filmmakers in Spain. The chapter focuses on the role of women filmmakers during the transition to democracy in Spain. It explores their multiple interventions-textual and institutional, social and political-as manifested in the emergence of the first professional class or cohort of women filmmakers beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the early '70s.