Women acess to the cinema industry in Spain and Portugal during the silent period - Women´s Access to Silent Cinema in Spain and Portugal

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Women’s access to silent cinema in Portugal and Spain : the case studies of Virgínia de Castro e Almeida and Helena Cortesina

Publication . Cordero Hoyo, Elena María; Soares, Luísa Suzete Afonso; Soto Vázquez, Begoña; Dall’Asta, Monica

This dissertation (re-)constructs the ‘bio/careerographies’ of the writer Virgínia de Castro e Almeida (Lisbon, 1874 – 1945) and the performer Helena Cortesina (Valencia, 1903 – Buenos Aires, 1984). Coming from different backgrounds, both women owned film production companies in which they played various decision-taking roles during the early years of 1920s in Portugal and Spain, respectively. Although they developed long international and intermedia professional careers, their life-stories have largely remained untold. In this dissertation, I reflect on the reasons behind their absence in film histories looking at the historiographical, conceptual and methodological challenges that the research and narration of their ‘careerographies’ entails. In this sense, I problematize the conventional film history-writing, proposing a ‘new cinema history from below’ approach. Also, I identify traditional categories of ‘authorship’, ‘woman’ and ‘pioneer’ as frames that limit the inscription into silent cinema histories only to those cases that conform to a certain nationalistic and individualistic narrative of success or heroicism. Furthermore, I describe core characteristics of film historiography, such as its dependence on film as source, its territorial delimitation, and its focus on cinema’s specificity as medium, as methodological problems that prevented Almeida’s and Cortesina’s stories to be appreciated. Finally, using a comparative perspective, I analyse the characteristics that allowed Almeida and Cortesina to overcome difficulties and be among the few women that achieved film-making in the Iberian countries during the silent cinema period. In that sense, I identify the two models of access to film-making they represent. Moreover, I argue that it was the affective relationship of ‘relational autonomy’ they established with their matrilineal caring network which provided the security they needed for their leap into cinema. However, their familial film production system proved to be ineffective in a growing male-centered capitalist and professionalized film industries.

2022-09-13Doctoral thesis

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