Helena Lumbreras’ Field for Men (1973): Midway between Latin American Third Cinema and the Barcelona School

Abstract

Abstract In 1973, Barcelona-based film-makers Helena Lumbreras and Mariano Lisa made a clandestine documentary called Field for Men (El campo para el hombre), which denounced the dismal conditions in rural Spain under Franco’s dictatorship, foregrounding the need for agrarian reform and land redistribution. The film is executed in a style midway between militant Third Cinema and 1960s European experimental and art cinemas. On account of her interstitial position between European ‘Second Cinema’ and Latin American ‘Third Cinema’, Lumbreras articulated a hybridized counter-ideological cinema that integrated experimentalism and political commitment. This article examines how Field for Men bridges both documentary and experimental genres, while expressing the need for economic, political and formal liberation. Additionally, it argues that Lumbreras’ intermediality is a political manoeuvre that associates, on a formal level, the concepts of medium purity and specificity as socially alienating, while aligning medium hybridity with utopian dreams of liberation.