Margarita, the Big Bad Wolf, and the film censor: film, feminism, and dictatorial repression in Spain

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article studies the themes, techniques, and aesthetics of some of the student films that the Spanish filmmaker Cecilia Bartolomé made at the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía (Official Film School, EOC) during the 1960s, framing them within the cinematographic currents and the cultural expressions of feminism in the national and international sphere of the time. Through historical analysis, archival research, and interviews, the above-mentioned aspects will be related to the filmmaker’s vicissitudes with censorship, examining how they marked her formative years and the beginning of her professional career until the mid-1970s, when the feature film project intended to launch her professionally was curtailed. Ultimately, I seek to explore the way in which Bartolomé experimented with narrative techniques and cinematographic language while articulating a feminist film discourse that incurred the censors’ wrath, making it impossible for her to work until the coming of democracy in Spain.