Middlebrow cinema by women directors in the 1990s

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reviews cinema of the 1990s to argue that, besides the transformation of the industry through the shift from national to transnational funding structures, one of its most remarkable achievements was the rise of women directors, an achievement that is today all the sharper in focus as this rise was not sustained over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The article reconsiders the dismantling of the Ley Miró in the period to suggest that the “Mirovian” films that this legislation funded in fact continued to be influential. It therefore proposes, against the popular thesis of 1990s novelty in Spanish cinema, that there was continuity between the 1980s and 1990s in the area of middlebrow films. Positing a flexible definition of this category of accessible, didactic cinema, which brings cultural prestige to viewers, it argues that middlebrow film was a particular strength of films by women in the period, as subsequent developments in Spanish film and TV confirm. Testing this hypothesis against three female-authored films, it argues for Azucena Rodríguez’s Entre rojas (1995) as newly relevant. A film that may be recovered both by feminism and by scholarship on the middlebrow, it proves that women’s cinema is an important and thus far little-acknowledged category within middlebrow film.