• Malaga Festival What if it is a goat that is destined to save Spanish cinema?
  • Malaga Festival Laia Costa, the actress who cries beautifully, returns to sweep Malaga
  • Malaga Festival A documentary rescues the lifeless life of the child painter who disappeared in the 80s

The censorship code of March 8, 1963 prohibited scenes that offended the intimacy of conjugal love; forbade anything that undermined the institution of marriage and the family; forbade images that provoked low passions in the viewer; prohibited the justification of unlawful sexual relations; expressly forbade anything that undermined the Catholic Church... Prohibited. The idea was to safeguard, in the face of the threat of tourism, the ideal of woman that the dictatorship had built under the aegis of repression. And so on until a few years later, in 1975 and with the Transition still pending, a new regulation, finally, allowed something: "Nudity is allowed as long as it is required by the general unity of the film, discarding when its intention is to raise passions or influence pornography," read the text. It wasn't much.

What followed, in fact, is already legend. In La trastienda (Jorge Grau, 1975) the first frontal nude was witnessed. And from there the uncovering. Until now, the most common reading has made it a movement of liberation, of advancement against the impositions of national-Catholic puritanism. And yet, and as the documentary Mujeres sin censura, by Eva Vizcarra and recently presented at the Malaga Festival, reminds us, it was also the opposite: one more excuse to perpetuate the objectification and domination of the female body. The rules changed, the prohibitions, the submission of always and in the same sense was kept on fire. As they say at the beginning of the film: the screens were filled with female nudes and the cinemas with men.

María José Cantudo in the famous scene of 'La trastienda', by Jorge Grau.

"When I thought about making the documentary, I realized that nobody really wanted to remember anything. The protagonists, the ones considered muses (what barbarity, in reality they were only used), because they felt in part humiliated, abandoned; And the rest because it was a time of bad cinema that everyone wanted to forget." The film takes care of the hurtful contradiction that was that the flag of freedom was carried by subjugated bodies. And she does it from the testimony in front of the camera of Cecilia Bartolomé, punished to silence for daring to make the first feminist film shot in Spain (Margarita and the wolf); of Josele Román, who, to the derision of everyone's gaze, undergoes the experiment of repeating some scenes of Manolo la nuit, but she in the role that Alfredo Landa gave life in the film; Teresa Gimpera, who has no qualms about acknowledging that half of the 150 films in which she participated are obviously bad; of Sandra Alberti, who remembers without flinching when after appearing naked on the cover of Interviú they contacted her to meet the then King Juan Carlos; Claudia Gabry, who is unable to forget her first casting only contemplated by men; by Eva Lyberten, who reconstructs the moments in which she was humiliated near the rape by Ignacio F. Iquino, a man with a commemorative plaque in his village...

Find out more

Cinema.

The irrelevant impact of MeToo and the Weinstein Case on Spanish cinema

  • Editor: PHILIPP ENGEL Barcelona

The irrelevant impact of MeToo and the Weinstein Case on Spanish cinema

Cinema.

Cate Blanchett: "We suffer from a patriarchal society, but I trust that we will never live its opposite: a shitty matriarchy"

  • Writing: LUIS MARTÍNEZ Venecia

Cate Blanchett: "We suffer from a patriarchal society, but I trust that we will never live its opposite: a shitty matriarchy"

"After reviewing a lot of testimonies, you realize that what was told in MeToo is just a joke with what many of these women went through," says the director and, in some way, corrects herself: "In any case, and without being able to ignore cases like that of Nadiuska, who was abandoned to misery, the truth is that many of them were authentic heroines who fought for their liberation in a cruel and very bad time. sad." In the latter case, and in a place of exception, there is the testimony of María José Goyanes. His nudity in Peter Shaffer's play Equus earned him all kinds of insults, death threats, humiliations... "It was terrible, but what hurt them was none of the edges of a text undoubtedly hurtful for many reasons. Those who went to Madrid to see me naked, were irritated that my tits were small because I have always had a very adolescent body, "she says and, at one point in her narration, she can not help but cry.

Teresa Gimpera.

Manuel de Blas, from the other side, that of the actor in front of the naked actress, rescues from memory the undoubtedly anomalous fact that of all the rape scenes that throughout his career have been many, he never showed an inch of his skin. Remember that and how the aforementioned Iquino (the same one who fired Eva Lyberten for not wanting to introduce a chocolate in the vagina in an off-script scene) never explained an erotic sequence to his interpreters: «He just told us to do the same as him and, in effect, it was he who got into bed and overwhelmed the actress before shooting anything».

The uncovering crossed all genres. "It didn't matter what the film was about, at one point, she would undress," says the director and to corroborate it Josele Román tells when, after a film, she was quoted again with the excuse of some poorly revealed sequences "because the director had forgotten that I had to take off my shirt." It was a time when, as Goyanes says, "the female body was the gasoline of industry"; a time when only Susana Estrada dared with a nude that the writer Marta Sanz describes as "aggressive" because she did not conform to the reassuring idea of submission offered by cinema.

And so, until the X rooms arrived, the video, the porn... And those women were both celebrated as a symbol of the new and thrown into oblivion. Our forgetfulness.

According to The Trust Project criteria

Learn more

  • March 8
  • theatre
  • cinema
  • Feminism