Matt Losada presents a prehistory of women's cinematic participation in Argentina. In particular, Losada examines the contributions of women filmmakers before María Luisa Bemberg, a director who has captured much of the critical attention. The author highlights the significant work done by such creators as Vlasta Lah, María Herminia Avellaneda, María Elena Walsh, Eva Landeck, Narcisa Hirsch, and Lita Stantic. Losada emphasizes how these directors worked outside of the studio system and presented what had been lacking in national cinema up to that point, namely, female subjectivity and female desire.
In Chapter 1, “A History of the Gendered Division of Labor in Argentine Cinema,” Losada finds that more women participated in the filmmaking process in Argentina prior to the studio system because of the ability to work independently and to focus on craft and artistry in filmmaking rather than on financial concerns and union restrictions. Some of the early women in Argentine film include Camila Quiroga, Emilia Saleny, Elena Sansinena de Elizalde, and María B. de Celestini. Early film contributions by women included philanthropic projects, creative experiments, and examples of feminist activism in which, similar to contemporary cinema, class, politics, and gender intersect. With the advent of sound cinema and more structure around filmmaking, women were relegated to behind-the-scenes and less creative roles in filmmaking, including positions such as negative cutter and “script girl,” or the person who ensures continuity from one scene to the next. From the 1930s to the 1950s, Amanda Lucía Turquetto and Irena Dodal directed short films; however, they are exceptions to a rule of almost full male dominance in filmmaking of the period.
As Losada explains, the 1950s saw an increase in an alternative film culture and film clubs, and the 1960s an increase in international as well as national film schools, which afforded women another limited entrance into filmmaking. In the 1970s, Narcisa Hirsch stands out within the experimental filmmaking movement with her films Come Out (1971) and Taller (1975), in which the director explores a structural filmmaking that echoes linguistic formalism. Finally, Losada introduces Lita Stantic's film contributions as director and producer, which would continue into later periods of Argentine cinema. One of the exceptions to what the author recognizes as the dearth of critical work on early Argentine women's cinema is Máximo Eseverri and Fernando Martín Peña's Lita Stantic: el cine es automóvil y poema (University Press of Buenos Aires, 2013), which Losada mentions at the end of this chapter.
In Chapter 2, “Eva Landeck,” Losada begins with a political history of Argentina from 1966 through 1976, including the succession of dictatorships and authoritarian governments. Much of the cinema produced during this time has been termed Nuevo Cine and has received well-deserved critical recognition. However, Losada draws our attention to Landeck's lesser-known work, made so, according to the author, because of government suppression, unavailability, and critical neglect. Losada mentions the director's early short films—Barrios y teatros de Buenos Aires (1963), Entremés (1966), Horas extras (1967), and El empleo (1970). Then he sustains an in-depth critical analysis of Landeck's first two feature-length films, Gente en Buenos Aires (1973) and Ese loco amor loco (1979).
As the author states, Landeck had more creative control while making her first feature due to the independent, cooperative funding structure, and she was openly critical of the economic and political violence of the time. Losada relates Landeck's film to other militant cinema in Argentina, which included footage of government repression and violence, a yet unvanquished optimism on the political left, and the possibility for cross-class solidarity. Gente en Buenos Aires is unique in its inclusion of a rural perspective in the dispossession of family lands and the presence of paramilitary violence set in the present. In his discussion of Ese loco amor loco, Losada utilizes the idea of poder desaparecedor in which unreliable characters explain away violent and repressive events with openly faulty rationalizations, mimicking the reality of Argentina at the time. Losada ends the chapter with a brief discussion of Landecks’ third feature-length film, El lugar del humo (1979), which he describes as a more compromised project in terms of censorship.
In Chapter 3, “Beauvoir before Bemberg,” Losada makes an intriguing argument for the influence of Simone de Beauvoir in Argentine women's cinema predating Bemberg. The author traces the arrival of Beauvoir's work in the country in the 1950s and its influence on directors Vlasta Lah, María Herminia Avellaneda, and María Elena Walsh well before its popular acceptance in Argentina in the 1970s. This partly explains why these directors’ films were not well received at the time. Only in the 1970s and later, when Bemberg was making films, did Argentine society began to accept second-wave feminism and the gender theories expounded by Beauvoir. Losada ends the chapter with a brief examination of Bemberg's early work, which he describes as more dissentient than her later films.
Losada's contribution to the scholarship of Argentine cinema and Latin American women's cinema is invaluable. Specifically, his archival research into Argentine women directors before Bemberg is instrumental in understanding the true history of women's active participation in Argentine cinema from the very beginning.
