Before Bemberg

Women Filmmakers in Argentina

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by Matt Losada

Type: Studies
Subject: Countries > Latin America
Keywords: Argentina, women, director
Publishing date: 2020
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 196 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-9788145-4-7

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Book Presentation:
Before Bemberg: Argentine Women Filmmakers calls into question the historiography of Argentine women filmmakers that has centered on María Luisa Bemberg to the exclusion of her predecessors. Its introductory discussion of the abundant initial participation by women in film production in the 1910s is followed by an account of their exclusion from creative roles in the studio cinema, which was only altered by the opportunities opened by a boom in short filmmaking in the 1960s. The book then discusses in depth the six sound features directed by women before 1980, which, despite their trailblazing explorations of the perspectives of female characters, daring denunciations of authoritarianism and censorship, and modernizing formal invention, have been forgotten by Argentine film history. Looking at the work and roles of Eva Landeck, Vlasta Lah, María Herminia Avellaneda and María Elena Walsh and Maria Bemberg, the book recognizes these filmmakers’ contributions at a significant moment in which movements to eliminate gender-based oppression and violence in Argentina and elsewhere are surging.

Watch some of the films discussed in the book with English subtitles (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF_6F4am5024rklIWwExUVA?view_as=subscriber).

About the Author:
MATT LOSADA is an associate professor of Hispanic studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. He teaches and researches on modern Latin American culture, with a particular interest in 20th-century Argentine film. He is the author of The Projected Nation: Argentina Cinema and the Social Margins (2018).

Press Reviews:
"Before Bemberg excavates a fascinating history of Argentine women filmmakers that have rarely been acknowledged. The book promises to widen the framing of important filmmakers in the Argentine film canon including Maria Luisa Bemberg, Lucrecia Martel and other contemporary women directors. Matt Losada’s work presents an important contribution to the lesser known, but equally important women directors from earlier eras that are at last gaining wider recognition."
— Tamara Falicov

"Film production in Argentina had been very much a male affair until the emergence of María Luisa Bemberg in the 1970s. Losada has undertaken a significant documentary history of Bemberg’s predecessors, in a study that contributes to our understanding of both the difficulties women faced in the industry and their contributions to cinema."
— David William Foster

"Losada's contribution to the scholarship of Argentine cinema and Latin American women's cinema is invaluable. Specifically, his archival research into Argentine women directors before Bemberg is instrumental in understanding the true history of women's active participation in Argentine cinema from the very beginning."
— The Americas

"In short, Losada presents us with a text full of information, destined to rewrite the history of the cinematographic directors who preceded Bemberg. Added to the archival work is the wide dissemination of the research carried out by Argentine critics, many of whom are linked in one way or another to AsAECA. Although the analysis of the films is excellent, this reader is left wanting to know more about the time and who marked it, but as long as that is the reaction, Losada has more than fulfilled its objective."
— Imagofagia, Magazine of the Argentine Association of Film and Audiovisual Studies

"The book's initial claim to recuperation, one that would allow today's cinephiles and scholars to access a more complete history and acknowledge the past difficulties and possibilities for women', is substantiated by the critical reading of a wide range of primary and secondary sources, combined with impeccable textual analysis. What eventually enables the delivery of the far more complex story' that this study aims to accomplish, is the author's ability to navigate from the macro i.e., the working conditions of women within the industry, during the era of the studio system in Argentina), to the micro (i.e., the detailed examination of how the gendered mechanics of the cinematic apparatus are challenged and de-constructed in the films that form this study's corpus)."
— Constanza Burucúa

See the publisher website: Rutgers University Press

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