Into what kind of film culture and industry was Bemberg’s cinema intervening? With many actors and directors in exile, and others blacklisted, comedies and other ‘safe’ themes had become, in the early 1980s, the staple o f domestic film production, while, because the military junta favoured foreign films, there was a glut o f US titles. Therefore, it was not just the number but the quality and kind of films that had been severely affected by the junta and thus ‘cinema
diminished in national importance in the late 1970s’ (López 1987, 74). Such diminishment was aided by competition from the increasing TV market and a decrease in purchasing power owing to inflation and subsequent wage freezes. Not until Alfonsin scrapped the Board o f Film Control, and complete freedom from censorship was promised for newspapers, books, television and radio, could cinema begin to revive and put itself in the vanguard o f exposing the atrocities o f the Dirty War. Shot before Alfonsin’s election, Camila anticipated the new freedoms.
Nevertheless, and despite increasing censorship, Bemberg’s filmmaking was preceded in the years 1955-1976 by what Ana López (1987, 73) argues were ‘the (two) most influential decades o f Argentine cinema.’30 López cites the socially- conscious documentary work o f Femando Birri alongside the cinema d’auteur of the New Wave directors, as examples o f the ‘outstanding’ heterogeneity o f Argentine cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. Fernando Birri, founder o f the Escuela Documental/Documentarv Filmmaking School in Santa Fe prophesied: ‘There will be no lasting revolution without revolutionising language.’ Such
manifestos, however, continued to exclude women and a feminist language from film, as did the films o f the New Wave. The New Wave filmmakers included Simón Feldman, José A. Martinez Suárez, Manuel Antin, David José Kohon and Rodolfo Kuhn, whose films became a vehicle o f self-expression (in which as for the directors o f the European New Wave, male friendship was an important theme). These filmmakers had been inspired by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson and Fernando Ayala, who already were producing an intellectualised cinema for a privileged Argentine urban élite. In Ayala’s Paula cautiva/Paula. The Captive (1963) and Torre Nilsson’s La casa del áneel/House o f the Angel (1957), there was respectively a sumptuous aesthetic depicting a splendid decaying
aristocratic world, and a langorous film style informed by such European arthouse directors as Bergman. Torre Nilsson’s film suggested the suffocating constrictions (its sexual mores and hypocrisy) o f a girl’s class. Likewise his La caida/The Fall (1959) deals in the contradictions and decline o f the Argentine upper class and genteel bourgeois society (a theme that Bemberg would develop in Miss Marv). At the same time, Ayala’s El iefe/The Boss (1958) was
symptomatic of those films that - directly critical o f Peronism - express the mood o f change in late 1950s and early 1960s Argentina, especially the mood of the political optimism of the middle classes under Frondizi. There was an unforeseen irony about this optimism.
Firstly, the Peronist militant films o f the Cine Liberación Group brushed the ‘New Wave’ aside. These films, such as Fernando Solanas’ and Octavio Getino’s La hora de los homos/The Hour o f the Furnaces (1966-1968),
30 Filmmakers were encouraged by the Cinema Law o f 1957, the Decreto Lev 62-57. in force until 1973, which provided up to fifty per cent funding for any one film. This meant that
inaugurated Third Cinema debates and were the most famous Argentine films internationally. These debates were characterised by a social/socialist project (to empower the dispossessed) and by not only neo-realist subject matter, but by neo-realist forms. To that end they employed non-professional actors, and filmed on location with hand-held cameras. The ITDT Arts Centre itself was pilloried in The Hour of the Furnaces. Early in the film is inserted footage that (in context) disparages its ‘decadent’ young visitors who are listening to European pop. These bourgeois art lovers are explicitly linked with a decadent aristocracy, so that art lovers o f Bemberg’s class were singled out for disdain. After its initial textual slogans declaring war (beginning as small white dots in the centre o f the screen, fanning out in strobe effect to its front and edges and set against drum beats that get progressively louder), the film’s first voice-over declares: ‘For the ruling class, a war o f oppression. For the oppressed peoples, a war o f liberation.’ Bemberg’s position at this time (as an aristocrat, but feminist who could hardly be associated with the ruling class’ exaltation of the nation and the family) must have felt contradictory. However, and secondly, although between 1973 (the return o f Perón, and Octavio Getino’s liberalisation o f censorship as head o f the state censorship board) and 1974, there had been a temporary (but great) increase in film production, especially in those films expressing a third-world populism, this ‘movement’ was wiped out by the dictatorship.31 The three main members o f the Cine Liberación Group went into exile after Gerardo Vallejo’s house was bombed. Fernando Solanas went to France, Octavio Getino went to Peru and Vallejo went to Panama. Even Torre
directors could become their own producers.
31 Further examples o f this third-world populism are the anti-imperialist La Patagonia rebelde/Rebellion in Patagonia (Héctor Olivera, 1974), denouncing British control in the south
Nilsson (who was not politically committed) chose exile, and so began the temporary decline in Argentine cinema.
Finally, all o f these examples of Bemberg’s predecessors and contemporaries indicate that filmmaking in Argentina was and (still is) the preserve o f the man.32 The low proportion o f female to male filmmakers worldwide is even lower in Argentina - a country that has a prestigious and large cinematic industry and history.33 A collation o f entries in all dictionaries gives a total o f eight women o f 167 Argentine filmmakers listed up to two years after Bemberg’s last film in 1995.34 These include Nelly Kaplan, working in France and Jeanine Meerapfel, working in Germany. With John King’s (1989) and Luis Trelles Plazaola’s (1992) additions, only fourteen women filmmakers are documented since the inception o f cinema in Argentina in 1900. Whilst Kaplan and Meerapfel receive critical attention in France and Germany respectively, Bemberg’s six female predecessors and seven female contemporaries were and continue to be neglected by Argentine critics o f film. As the only woman
o f Argentina in the 1920s, and Quebracho (Ricardo Wullicher, 1974), dealing in worker’s struggles against British interests in the first half o f the century.
32 Symptomatic o f such a failure o f recognition are the missing entries - o f women’s filmmaking - in Argentine dictionaries. Only three books in the library o f Argentina’s Escuela Nacional del Cine/National Film School contain information on women directors. These are those o f Kriger and Portela (1997), Martin (1987) and Trelles Plazaola (1992). They do not agree on names and numbers. My total o f seven women filmmakers (up to 1997) is arrived at by collating
information from all sources. No lists could be accessed beyond this date, although there are several women directors working presently in Argentina.
33 It is worth noting that in Clara Kriger and Alejandra Portela’s (1997) dictionary o f Latin American directors, the Argentina section, pages 11-184, dwarfs all the other sections. 34 One of these women filmmakers is Eva Landeck who - having made six shorts and three features - is the only filmmaker to stand some kind o f comparison with Bemberg. But although Landeck made some o f her films in Buenos Aires, she was a Uruguayan citizen. John King (in Bassnett 1990, 158-159) names five further women (all o f them Bemberg’s predecessors), two of whose prints o f silent film have not survived: Emilia Saleny (Clarita. 1919) and Marfa Celestini (Mi Derecho/Mv Right. 1920). The other women are Elena de Azcudnaga and Dolly Pussi - eminent female documentary filmmakers o f the 1960s. King also names Narcisca Hirsch as one other feature filmmaker. Finally, Luis Trelles Plazaola’s book (1991), on five Latin American women directors working in Europe, discusses Kaplan and Meerapfel.
consistently recorded in lists o f Argentine filmmakers, Bemberg’s feminism rightly addressed the censorship o f women.
Bemberg’s less popular contemporaries include her producer, Lita Stantic (1941-), who made her first and only film, Un muro de silencio/A Wall of Silence, in 1992. This deals with the question o f the disappearances. Clara Zappettini (no dates given), a documentary filmmaker, worked on Camila as an assistant director.35 At the time o f the dictionaries’ compilations (1997), Mercedes Frutos (1947-) had made five shorts before her two listed features, Otra esperanza/Another Hope (1984) and Debaio del mundo/Undemeath the World (1986).36 It is no surprise that Bemberg’s contemporaries have close connections with her in an embattled world o f female filmmaking. That world (we have seen) was rendered the more difficult for Bemberg in that her subject matter made an upper-class intervention into a film culture whose socialist project did not embrace the theme o f women.
Thus, when in 1984, Camila broke all box office records, and when it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Bemberg set the scene for a reassessment and redefinition of Latin American cinema. As the final part o f this chapter elaborates, this was eventually recognized by the press at home, so that ‘Camila inaugurated a new cinema’ fÜltima Hora. 3 November 1986). This cinema was one that whilst speaking o f grave matters indeed could compete on
35 The International Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) does not give biographical dates for Zappettini, Azcuénaga, Celestini, Landeck, Pussi or Saleny. However, Pussi and Landeck have entries: Pussi's last entry was for 1989 as production manager for Verano del potro/Summer of the Colt (André Mélancon, Argentina/Canada), and Landeck's last entry was for 1979 as director for Sitio del humo/Place o f Smoke (Uruguay). (IMDB last accessed 20 July 2003.)
its own terms with Hollywood and was one that could be directed by women. Such inauguration, however, was not critically celebrated at the time.