A Family Affair? Women’s Amateur Cinema in 1930s–1950s Catalonia

Abstract

Abstract: A handful of women stand out as amateur filmmakers in Catalonia’s rich twentieth-century amateur scene (such as Madronita Andreu); others appear in the shadow of their husbands’ work. This article focuses on the trajectories of female Catalan amateur filmmakers Francesca Trian, Emilia Martínez, and Miquelina Fiter, who worked with and for their husbands; the archival traces of their careers often appear under their partners’ names. This article asks: How do we undertake a feminist archival film history through social, institutional, and historical structures that obscure women’s labor? How do we determine authorship in amateur and domestic cinema? Using cinematographic and print culture archival research, this article presents the case of three women amateur filmmakers active before the Spanish Transition whose work is only accessible through state archives and ephemera that document their filmmaking trajectory.