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SUMARIO / INDEX / 19
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Primera página / Page One: Mujeres y arquetipos / Women and Archetypes ALICIA MURRÍA
Dossier Arquetipos femeninos en el cine clásico americano Feminine Archetypes in Classic American Cinema 7
Fantasías y miedos en el Hollywood clásico Fantasies and Fears in the Hollywood Classic Mª DEL CARMEN RODRÍGUEZ FERNÁNDEZ
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Inocentes fatales, o fatal inocencia Fatal Innocents or Fatal Innocence MIGUEL MARÍAS
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Perversas: La mujer malvada en el cine clásico Perverse: The Wicked Woman in Classic Cinema CARMEN PÉREZ RÍU
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Francesc Torres. La memoria desnuda desciende una escalera Francesc Torres. Naked Memory Descending a Staircase JUAN CARLOS REGO DE LA TORRE
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Jorge Macchi. Resignificaciones y azares Jorge Macchi. Resignifications and Fates ALICIA MURRÍA
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CiberContexto EDUARDO VIÑUELA
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Info
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Criticas de exposiciones / Reviews
Portada / Cover: EDWARD STEICHEN Gloria Swanson, New York, 1924 Copia positiva de plata en gelatina, positivada en 1961. 42,1 x 34,2 cm. Cortesía de The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 1924 Condè Nast Publications. Obra que forma parte de la exposición Edward Steichen. Una epopeya fotográfica. MNCARS.
Women and Archetypes The phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words”, a cliché whose origins are lost in time, contained hints of a premonition. We live more in a world of images than of words, and increasingly our culture draws sustenance from an unceasing avalanche of visual information that grows at a dizzying pace. The currents of information are now multiplied globally, and with them the representations of the world. The power of images is overwhelming and, although every spectator if the 21st century considers himself to be a skilful reader of their contents, their power to be believed remains immense. Every image is a construction and belongs to a coded language and, for that same reason, is capable of deconstruction and decoding, and carrying out both these things from a critical plane becomes a necessary task. Much more than the photo, the moving image was and continues to be –although its distribution and consumption might have changed somewhat, substituting the dark projection room with television monitors, game consoles and Internet-- the most powerful medium for the showing and construction of collective imagery. Cinema soon realised its power as producer and transmitter of ideas and, now converted into an industry, it established itself as the most valuable purveyor of hegemonic values. The “factory of dreams” –and nightmares-- that Hollywood became with the Studio system, which controlled each and every stage of production and distribution, left little space for independent scriptwriters and directors. Women, who had an active presence in the origins of cinema –as would also occur with video-- were banished as creators and relegated exclusively to acting. Reflecting these conditions and in the context in which films were produced, Hollywood supported patriarchal values, and from the end of the 1920s and 1930s churned out impeccable and attractive products in which women acted out established roles and became the repositories of masculine fears. This brief commentary serves to introduce a dossier which addresses feminine representations and archetypes which have exerted fascination for decades and whose re-reading from a feminist perspective is presented by Carmen Rodríguez Fernández and Carmen Pérez Riu, along with Miguel Marías, who from the perspective of an unrepentant film buff ironically questions the readings which have been made over decades of a series of female characters traditionally defined as “femmes fatales”.
ALICIA MURRÍA
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FATAL INNOCENTS or FATAL INNOCENCE
MIGUEL MARÍAS* For reasons which I cannot fathom, and in contrast to what seems to be the norm (at least that is what is often believed or claimed), I am not a very mythomaniac film fan. In fact, I cannot even understand the attraction exerted by certain mythologies or the persistence of some myths, which have taken root thanks to their incessant repetition over the years, sometimes even over decades, but which almost never withstand analysis; most of these topics, some of which are legendary, do not have a basis in film –only a few of them do, and it is almost always the same ones: an oblique sample, in any case–, and instead are founded in the subjective vision of some commentator, later taken on by others, generation after generation, with a faith more suited to a better cause, and one which is blind to evidence, when not directly generated and driven by advertising and promotional materials (it is enlightening to see the deliberately sensationalist and defamatory epithets applied to each of the trailers to two such antithetical fictitious incarnations of Rita Hayworth in Gilda and Elsa Bannister in The Lady from Shanghai) . Within a genre which is so nebulously defined that even its creators and most frequent practitioners –the North Americans– have taken its name from the French noir (which here we have simply translated), the omnipresence of the so-called “femme fatale” has been established as one of its basic and constant features. Independently of the fact that in some isolated cases –an insignificant percentage of the production labelled “film noir”– it can be unfortunate for some (or even various) of the male leads, if we focus on this a little we are
somewhat surprised to see, unless we completely refuse to admit the prosaic truth, that generally it is they themselves who brought about their own misery, that they earnestly look for it, and there were few women who deliberately and maliciously laid a trap or even tried to seduce the fall guys who, in their blind obsession, were enslaved by the women, almost always passive and even patient sufferers of that unwanted infatuation, and scapegoats of the protector/saviour complex that afflicts many men who would like to be “knight errants” and go through life redeeming “lost” women, rescuing those women supposedly in “distress”, imprisoned by another (often a rich and powerful eccentric). A typical case, taken from one of the best (and visually most original, and at the same time canonical plotwise) of the genre would be, without doubt, the now famous and in its time underrated The Lady from Shanghai, 1947, by Orson Welles, with a Rita Hayworth stripped of her long head of hair, bleached blonde and listlessly exploiting, in self defence, (before the main character, played by the director himself, in civil life still her husband, although not for much longer) her effective condition of victim, as the wife of a not very scrupulous criminal lawyer, much older than she and a helpless invalid, who seems to use blackmail to keep her at his side and, one suspects, to use her as bait in his shady deals. As at the end, with her dead and the disenchanted Michael O’Hara surviving, the self-proclaimed “hero” acknowledges, he went looking for it himself. There is nothing like the wonderful first sequence of the film to make this clear, and any DOSSIER · ARTECONTEXTO · 21
remaining shadow of doubt is eradicated by the interior retrospective voice of Orson Welles, who is presented proclaiming “When I start acting like a fool not much can stop me... Since the day I met her I wasn’t quite in my right mind for enough time...”. A parallel story is that which is recounted by a film which is not labelled as belonging to the genre, although it has more things in common with it than some of the respected “classics” themselves: Vertigo, 1958, by Alfred Hitchcock, that could be described schematically as the combination of a film noir, Laura (1944) by Otto Preminger, and an earlier Hitchcock melodrama, Rebecca (1940) . If we search for the roots of the myth, the support platform initially found by some commentators, especially the French, we will have to go to the third and most famous version, finally of the same title, of the novel by Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon, written (so to speak) and directed by John Huston in 1941, that is to say, at the dawn of film noir, and its star, the anything but fragile, unreliable and not very seductive Mary Astor, whom the very ingenuous Sam Spade (Bogart) fell for, only to discover later that she was the cold, calculating and ambitious woman that every half awake spectator had suspected from the very beginning, in one of those cases in which the choice of actors makes it impossible to depict the ambiguity which is perfectly sustainable in the novel. The treatment she receives from Bogart at the end could not be more detached and miserable, undoubtedly resulting more from spite and irritation with himself than any desire for justice or vengeance. However, something must have made the misogynists excited for them to have changed Mary Astor into the paradigm of the wicked woman of film noir. I have to confess that I have always liked the beautiful heroines of film noir –by definition, if they have to be condemned, dark and the opposite of some vapid and simply pretty blonde Apart from often being really beautiful –like Ava Gardner– or, at least, “strangely attractive” or mysterious, which inevitably awakens and lastingly retains my curiosity, I have seen them accused (both on and off screen) of intentions that seem totally unlike those they could entertain, if they really had any, which was not systematically the case; often they found themselves obliged to improvise as they went, to embrace that opportunity that seems impossible, to escape from a fate more boring than death. Normally, and discounting the exceptions that that have become the supposed rule, these women are merely “hangers”, (and, if possible, “inaccessible, from married women to women “dominated” by others, from neurotic, sick or crazy women to those already dead) on which some frustrated, obsessed and dreamy men have hung their theoretical ideals, without paying attention to the fact that the virtues (and the defects) that they attribute to these women are almost always, at least \in a high percentage of cases, of their own making, without the women doing anything more than live, be, go about their business and have the bad luck to run up against them and see themselves often pursued, hounded and trapped by that unwanted and possessive suitor, who ended by developing a sickly and obsessive fixation on the woman, which was often oppressive even when it was guided and nourished by the most altruistic and generous intentions. 22 · ARTECONTEXTO · DOSSIER
It has to be admitted that this temptation, a mixture of redemptionism, superiority complex and unconscious narcissism, also affects quite a few women, no less determined to change “for his own good” the man chosen as the recipient of their attention, pampering and care, and those, with the equally kind-hearted interfering manner of a domineering mother or a missionary in pagan lands, tries to correct, convert or save the man that had taken their fancy from his propensity to violence or idleness, from his love of gambling or other men’s property, and the different dipsomanias that drove him mad. But as, until now, women have been in a position of legal and institutional inferiority with regard to men, they were usually more diplomatic, mild and astute in their reformist crusades than the men, which means that statistically, both in films and in real life, they are more often victims than executioners, which would be an extenuating, if not grounds for exemption, circumstance, in any attempt at flight or liberation, even with the use of poison, fake accidents or, much rarer, knives or guns. For every Martha Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), that, after a certain age, became the archetype of the bitter “bad” women with a trace of a frankly dangerous oppressed vitality, in Double Indemnity (1944) by Billy Wilder there are several that could justify, up to a point at least, their treacherous or scheming conduct, such as Elsa Bannister –from what is suddenly and hastily revealed at the end, although we see nothing and neither is it made clear what she is charged with, and anyway her supposed plan would be so confused and twisted as to be most probably ineffective, so her complete failure is not to be wondered at –in The Lady from Shanghai. In the genre there are many cases of unjustly slandered women –like the infamous and scandalous Gilda, to look no farther, the poor, almost the only decent and loyal character in the film, extremely troubled and, although written by women, with an unbreathably misogynous ambience– and even, if I am hurried, the lovingly sacrificed for following their beloved (from Sylvia Sydney in You Only Live Once, 1937, by Fritz Lang to Cathy O’Donnell in They Live by Night, 1947, by Nicholas Ray, and including Ida Lupino in High Sierra, 1941, by Raoul Walsh). It even seems an irresponsible (at least) exaggeration to me to describe as femme fatales ordinary beautiful women, often younger than their boring husbands or “financial supporters” –whether they be delinquents, alcoholics, jealous, poor agricultural workers or worn-out shopkeepers–, and with no love of housekeeping, who feel frustrated by a life without amusements, colourless, monotonous and humdrum, sordid and mean, in which they will rapidly be crushed until they loose their attractiveness and freshness, and therefore disposed to be tempted by any irresponsible, cocky outsider, with more get-up andgo and glibness, who is disposed to seduce them with promises of a more stimulating life and recruit them as an accomplice to getting hold of the husband’s or protector’s small capital and savings. This is what happens to that great majority –a long way from Lady Macbeth– who, instead of plotting criminal schemes in which they use men like mere pawns to carry out their plans (and whom they plan to drop as soon as possible), far from having boundless monetary ambitions (there is something of upward mobility, but who doesn’t want
Gilda (Columbia, 1946), an apparent libertine, turned icon of classic cinema. Directed by Charles Vidor
Out of the Past (RKO, 1947). Jane Greer plays one of the evil women par excellence in classic Hollywood cinema. Directed by Jacques Tourneur.
to go up in the world and improve their lifestyle?), without the need to fake strong feelings to dominate their deluded lovers; at the most, they allow themselves to be loved for a time, and make the husband an impossible obstacle in order to make his elimination more urgent and unavoidable. At heart, they are, if not always victims prior to the prospective victims, at least hostages to their family and social origins, of the impetuous passions their beauty inspires, of incomprehension, and of other deceits and unkempt promises. So, for example, are almost all the characters played by Ava Gardner in Robert Siodmak’s films in the 1940s, some of those portrayed by Joan Bennett, with both Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir, or the late but transparent example of Debra Paget in The River’s Edge, 1957, by Allan Dwan, really more usual than the greedy and icy harpies played by Angie Dickinson in the version of The Killers, 1964, by Don Siegel or in Point Blank, 1967, by John Boorman. In reality, it could be said that almost the women in film noir are innocents. Some because of their age and lack of experience of 24 · ARTECONTEXTO · DOSSIER
other ways of life slightly less simple than they are used to, others because of low intelligence or insufficient education, others because of their character or good nature, whether natural or imposed by bible readings or deterring examples, others because of simplistic and primary rebellion, at heart almost all of them are more ingenuous and innocent than anything else. And this same innocence is part of the attraction that they exert over those who want to feel sure of being smarter and be able to control and dominate them. In this they are certainly “fatal”. But, above all, for the women.
* Miguel Marías defines himself as “a film fan who writes”.
We are grateful for the photographic reproductions to: Columbia Tri Star Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures, Turner Entertainment Co. y Warner Home Video.
Laura Bacall, with the look of a “femme fatale” in a photo promoting the film The Big Sleep (Warner Bros,1946). Directed by Howard Hawks.
Jorge Macchi Resignifications and Fates
ALICIA MURRÍA
Seen from afar, Cuerpo sin vida [Lifeless Body] is a drawing which extends over several metres of paper, seemingly floating, with its undulating forms evoking those of a peculiar sea animal. As we get closer, however, we see that what we imagined to be pencil-strokes, are, in fact, small cuttings from newspapers; they have been used to compose sinuous lines full of information, the chronicles of the mournful events which come together in the sentence from which the show takes its title. This sort of carefully woven visual trap, where beauty and horror coexist, is important for Jorge Macchi. Paradoxes fuel the production of this artist, born in Buenos Aires in 1963, who has brought together a group of works from the last fifteen years, by means of which he establishes subtle dialogues and connections, and where, above all, he reveals –at length– the strange complexity they distil. Jorge Macchi is not excessively talkative, and he does not like to examine his work minutely, preferring viewers to draw their own interpretations and conclusions. He only speaks when asked about a specific element of his work; he wanders among his pieces as if he were unaware of what takes place around him. He seems tired but happy with the result of this exhibition at the CGAC, his first retrospective, made up of more than 40 pieces --previously on display at the Biennial of MERCOSUR (Porto Alegre, Brazil) and at the Blanton Museum of Art, in Austin1, Texas, in the U.S., but which as been expanded with several new additions-, articulated by means of a meticulous arrangement where nothing seems lacking or unnecessary. Macchi, who has become one of the best-known Latin American artists from his generation, seems to be thinking aloud when he speaks about his work method. “For me, the first thing is the image; I am a visual artist. My work does not emerge from ideas but from images. First comes that meeting, that surprise. And from then on I look for the 50 · ARTECONTEXTO
La ascensión, 2005. Courtesy: CGAC
JORGE MACCHI y DAVID OUBIÑA La Flecha de Zenón, 1992. Courtesy: CGAC
best way of making that first image visible; sometimes it needs to be moved to a specific medium, and other times it must go to another. Sometimes it becomes a drawing, and sometimes it becomes a video. As for its possible interpretations and analyses... I prefer for others to draw them, I do not want to be my own interpreter.” Sculptures, video-installations, collages, artist books, watercolours, sound installations and objects, a range of manipulated objects, taken out of context, perforated, re-made, “deceitful”, paradoxical, resignified, visually and semantically altered... Anatomía de la melancolía [Anatomy of Melancholy], as he has titled the exhibition, unfolds over two spaces, the rooms of the CGAC and the Iglesia de Bonaval, next to the museum, where several videoinstallations co-exist. They were produced at different times, and seem to have been especially created to be seen between the Gothic walls and Baroque ornamentation of this solemn building, this pantheon, in fact, of illustrious Galicians. The experience of time –to think of time, its lightness and thickness– is one of the subjects explored by the work of Jorge Macchi. On two large screens, one facing the other in the large central nave, we find La flecha de Zenón [Zenon’s Arrow] (1992) 2 and Fin de Film [End of Film] (2007), which seem to want to compress time and space. The first by means of the old aporia, and the second through an endless loop of hardly legible film credits, they both speak of that which never begins and that which never ends. It is almost a proposal which alludes to the origin and end of all things. Close to the apse, two stands holding sheet music with impossibly ascending lines (the artist book, La Ascensión [The Ascension] (2005) flank what, from afar, seems –again, only from afar– a digital clock threshing out the seconds of a whole day (Tiempo real [Real Time], 2007); as we get closer, however, we see that the numbers have been carefully constructed with matches, as if in a handmade video-animation. In the meantime, from a lateral chapel, we hear the muffled uproar created by the soundtracks randomly mixed by the video-installation Time Machine 2, with its THE ENDs from many old black and white never-ending narratives. It is hard to resist emotion at Bonaval. Sound is present in a large part of the work, sometimes explicitly and others like a vague background noise—ten years studying the piano leave their mark. It seemed that his musical training would define his professional life, but enrolling at the Department of Fine Arts would alter the course of his future. “I used to draw a lot when I was small, but I never thought of becoming an artist; not even when I began studying Fine Arts. At that point, it was much more important for teachers to be friends. It was 1983, the end
of the dictatorship, which had made a deep cut in Argentinean history; suddenly, we began to hear about the 1960s and 70s, about what had happened, and also about the art which was made during those decades, which had been hidden, silenced...“ We return to the CGAC, after walking down some stairs to the basement, where we are welcomed by a small drawing –it is here, in fact, that the exhibition begins–, a deer with huge antlers dips his head so that his antlers seem to pierce the ground; that which gives him strength also paralyses him, in yet another paradox, like that wooden step ripped out by his companions, which it is hard to recognise, and which sends a shudder through us, as it is resembles a small coffin. Close by, in a dimly lit space, is screened Streamlime (2006), in which the camera has captured a busy highway, with the cars speeding across the screen from left to right, and the white lines which guide the traffic become the stave of a composition in which each engine seems to play a note, as if the cars themselves, with their different sizes, colours and speeds, were generating the impressive and hypnotic soundtrack. The image of the stave is also the focus of other pieces, such as Nocturno, variación sobre el Nocturno Nº 1 de Eric Satie [Nocturne, Variation on Nocturne no. 1 by Eric Satie (2002), where the musical notes have been replaced by nails, or the video Caja de música [Music Box] (2004), where the rhythm section is ruled by chance, or the installation Música incidental [Incidental Music]3 (1997), in which, again, the cuttings of tragic news make up parallel lines adhered to three large sheets of paper, as if they were the pages of a large score whose slow rendition we hear through a pair of earphones,
Escalón, 1995. Courtesy: CGAC
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and where the words are again equivalent to the notes, and where the enveloping serenity of the music –composed by Edgardo Rudnitzki, who has contributed to a great number of his works– contrasts with the tremendous content of the words, provoking intense emotional frictions. The text, again and again, speaks of exceptional and day-to-day tragedies, murders, attacks, and death, death death...The artist seems to sew the sentences together. We can picture him taking cuttings for hours, gluing the tiny texts which draw lines and figures... One feels the urge to ask about the motivation behind this insistent, meticulous and systematic compilation of the chronicles of violence. A certain sense of shyness takes over. In a short text he wrote a few years ago, he already spoke of this fixation of his, not only for mournful subjects but, in general, for marginal texts which are consumed quickly and forgotten just as fast. “I cannot explain here why I centre my attention on that which is without fail left to one side: the fringes, police news and pretentiously lyrical sentences which illustrate the scenes of horror, words taken out of context, love messages lost in a newspaper, advertising texts, obituaries, the names which appear after THE END of a film, the texts which no one reads. I cannot explain it because I have no idea of why it is, and I don’t believe this to be the most important thing. Seeing it with a certain distance, there are not so many differences between this kind of waste and the sheets of metal or planks of wood I used to pick up in the street to build objects, ten years ago. Perhaps the waste belongs to different categories, but it is still waste. I wonder if to work on the issue of waste is a primitive and twisted form of photography; the truth is that they both attempt to slow or stop the process of decay and disappearance.”5 Cut-out words are, for Macchi, small tools, insignificant strokes of meaning, used to construct something which sounds different; but which also builds, by means of their removal. He sometimes eliminates
Guía de la inmovilidad, 2003. Intervention on a Buenos Aires street map. Courtesy: CGAC
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the text and superposes the pages, attaching their corners loosely, like when he empties out the box of an obituary to leave only the little cross, or the five-point star, which crowns it (Monobloc, 2003); nameless death, eternal coexistence to be read in a single day. But sometimes, the salvaged word also conceals a tender wink: PITU Feliz día TE AMO con todo mi corazón. Oscar. 21-04-99. Oscar, whoever he is, could never have imaged that his loving little note, published in the classified section of a local newspaper, would travel so far, or become so moving. Nothing like taking things out of context to make them take on a new voice. In a similar way, another piece has been produced by emptying pages and adding the quotation marks used to set texts apart 6, and which here only speak of absence; while another work only offers, repeated here and there, the word NO, and is entitled: Querría poder decir un sí incondicional [I Wish I Could Say an Unconditional Yes] (2004). But these pages also resemble soft and fragile buildings... And they are linked with other small pieces in the form of altered continental shapes (Antárctica 2, 2003), oceans (Blue Planet, 2003) and anarchic cardinal points, “cartographical nightmares”, as the author calls them; or with those street maps from which every building has been removed (Guía de la inmovilidad, [Guide to Inmobility], 2003), where the streets and avenues, only referred to by name, acquire the appearance of disturbing mazes (La ciudad perfecta [The Perfect City, 2003). He has lived in the cities he works with, but, above, he shows his own city, Buenos Aires. “Until 1998”, he says, “I lived in a city but I felt I should be somewhere else... After years travelling around Europe, when I returned home, I decided I needed a base, because the ideal place does not exist... I walk around the city looking at the ground, I am familiar with the codes of Buenos Aires, which liberates me and makes it easier to establish an internal dialogue.” But, undoubtedly, Jorge Macchi is a meticulous observer of his surroundings; with isolated words taken from the walls in the streets, from billboards, from posters in shops, from graffiti and unclassifiable. With this torrent of insignificant information he manages to compose sequences of images which, as they rush past our eyes, create arbitrary associations whose meaning is opened and spread, fluctuating between humour and poetry or the absurd. To stop and look at small things, at familiar and banal objects, at all those elements that we see so much each day that we stop noticing them, is an exercise which seems to have always accompanied him, and he points out: “The more familiar the object and the smaller my action on it, the more effective and enigmatic becomes the piece.” However, those changes in meaning never work in only one direction. Instead, they speak of the frailty of things, of how what is near us can be interpreted in countless ways, that facts and what seems firm and real is subject to contingency and chance, or is directly its product, that events are ruled by chance much more than by will or intentions. This
is the subject of Vidas paralelas [Parallel Lives], two versions of the same idea, dating from 1998; the first, a simple matchbox the inside of which is divided into two identical compartments, repeating exactly their –apparently random– distribution; in the second, two pieces of glass of 60x80 cm. have been minutely cracked in the same way. “I like to think that, at least by means of art, we are somewhat capable of reducing chance”. Minor interventions which are defining acts of resignification. * Is an art critic and historian.
NOTES 1. Its director, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, is the curator of this exhibition. 2. Made in partnership with the screenwriter and film critic David Ouviña 3. Video-installation presented in Madrid in 2005, at the Distrito Cu4tro Gallery, and which forms part of the permanent collection of the CGAC. 4. This work is part of the Colección ARCO, in Madrid. 5. Text published in the catalogue of the exhibition El final del Eclipse [The End of the Eclipse], curated by José Jiménez. Madrid, 2004. Fundación Telefónica 6. This piece became the official logo of the Biennial of São Paulo, in its 2006 edition.
Incidental music, 1997. Installation in Delfina Studios, London, 1997. Courtesy: CGAC
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CIBERCONTEXTO Women on a Thousand Screens By EDUARDO VIÑUELA The space devoted on the Internet to the representation of women in cinema is still small, with the exception of some isolated articles in online magazines, and the very few posts in the many blogs devoted to the world of film. On the other hand, the resources which are usually presented by the platforms which approach the virtual world are primarily centred on reproducing traditional formats, such as bibliographies and brief texts. However, there are some cases which can be seen as a model for the use of the Internet as a multimedia
Camera Obscura: feminism, culture and media studies http://cameraobscura.dukejournals.org/
Online magazine published by Duke University Press. Over eight years, it has published more than sixty issues devoted to analysing the way women are represented in the media, particularly in films, from a feminist perspective which brings together the perspective of queer and post-colonial theories. It combines academic texts with essays, interviews and reviews of film festivals and events. Likewise, it publishes many issues devoted to a single subject; among the most recent there are two volumes on the figure of the “diva” and another on women in silent films. Camera obscura provides free access to a great many of the articles in the journal, and includes a search engine which has turned this site into a research tool on the subject of women’s presence in the media.
territory. There are a great range of spaces, created by universities and research groups, or by collectives interested in women’s presence in cinema. From an academic position, or from the admiration aroused by classic Hollywood films, these sites weave a network of links through which we can access audio and video clips, photographs and forums in which the interaction of the users proves that the construction of female stereotypes in the audiovisual realm is in a constant process of rearticulation.
Scary women
http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/women/ This website forms part of the University of California (UCLA)’s film and television archive. It emerged as the result of a symposium on “scary women”, held in 1994, and aims to transcend this event and become a point of reference in the study of women’s role in horror films. In this website we can access the texts and recordings from the lectures presented at the symposium, as well as multimedia presentations which include stills and clips from the films examined. As extra information, this website offers a series of links to other sites providing information on this subject.
Movie maidens
http://www.moviemaidens.com/ “The most beautiful actresses in Hollywood… when they were young”: thus is presented this site, a real paradise for fans and lovers of the great female “stars” from classic cinema. Its start page includes a list of Hollywood actresses organised by period, going from silent films to the 1950s. This site states its aim as keeping alive the memory of the most beautiful actresses from classic cinema when they were young, as an antidote to the ugliness of their old age. This patriarchal ode to the actresses’ beauty conceals, however, an interesting document to help us gain first-hand knowledge of the survival and re-articulation of classic female archetypes in the present day; it is made up of forums, devoted to each actress, in which their admirers exchange views and discuss the stars’ “virtues”.
Women in film and television
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/womenbib.html
La biblioteca de la Universidad de Berkeley (California) ha elaborado este sitio web, en el que se recoge un amplio número de recursos para el conocimiento del papel de las mujeres en el cine y la televisión, tanto su representación en estos medios como su papel en la industria audiovisual. La extensa información de este portal incluye bibliografías temáticas sobre géneros cinematográficos, como el melodrama y el cine negro, y colectivos gays y lesbianas, con libros y artículos que, en ocasiones, contienen vínculos para su consulta on line. Además, se puede obtener información bibliográfica sobre directores y películas, así como un completo listado de links a webs relacionadas con la representación de los roles de género en los medios audiovisuales.
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