Fusing a distinctive feminist aesthetic with a startling vision of twentieth-century Spain, the work of Cecilia Bartolomé casts a new light on the histories of both Spanish national film, and transnational women's cinema.
The Cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé analyses the director's shorts, medium- and feature-length films, television work, as well as her un-filmed scripts. Deploying extensive archive work, the book adopts an auteurist perspective, but nuances it to include speculative approaches to censored and un-filmed work, thereby fashioning a new way of writing a feminist creative life in film. The volume also includes a new interview with the director, the first to be published in English.
Each text is placed in dialogue with intersectional feminism, including Girlhood Studies (the approach to ¡Vámonos, Bárbara!), political activism (a focus on the diptych documentaries) and race (the framework in which Lejos de Áfricais placed). The book also highlights not only Bartolomé's opposition to dictatorship, but that each text must be placed within the contexts of socio-political developments in Spain.
By focusing on Spanish-language cinema of the 1960s-90s, the period when feminism, like democracy, was reborn and seemingly consolidated in Spain, the study brings historical depth and transnational reach to current debates in the wake of #MeToo, and places Bartolomé among other key auteurs of Spanish and feminist cinema.

Sally Faulkner is Professor of Spanish (1933) at the University of Cambridge

Introduction: feminism and Francoism
1 Film School shorts: La noche del doctor Valdés / Doctor Valdés's Night (1964) and Carmen de Carabenchel / Carmen from Carabenchel (1965)
2 Feminism and Francoism, Margarita y el lobo / Margarita and the Wolf (1969).
3 The un-filmed scripts: Qué tal Margarita... pero bien / What's Up Margarita...? Not Bad (1974) and La linda Casilda / The Beautiful Casilda (1976).
4 Putting Bárbara into ¡Vámonos, Bárbara! / Bárbara, Let's Go! (Bartolomé 1978): Girlhood studies and 'Spain's first feminist film'
5 Filming between the jaws of the wolf: documentary and denunciation in the diptych Después de... primera parte: No se os puede dejar solos / Afterwards... Part One: You Can't Be Left Alone and Después de... segunda parte: Atado y bien atado / Afterwards...: Part Two: All Tied Down (co-directed with José Juan Bartolomé 1983).
6 'Es que no sabéis mirar' (It's that you don't know how to look): colony and memory in Lejos de África / Far from Africa (1995).
7 The Admiral and the Alcántaras: political biopic meets popular soap in "Especial Carrero Blanco: El comienzo del fin" / "Carrero Blanco Special: The Beginning of the End", Cuéntame cómo pasó / Tell Me How It Happened (various authors 2005).
Conclusion: Cecilia Bartolomé and the incomplete history of Spanish cinema
Filmography
Bibliography
Appendix: Cecilia Bartolomé interview, Sally Faulkner and Núria Triana Toribio, 2022. Translated by Mar Diestro-Dópido.
Index