The Woman on the Edge of the Story. Some examples of female presence in the Spanish cinema of the 1940s

Abstract

Through an analysis of the films Altar mayor [High Altar] (Gonzalo Delgrás, 1944), El clavo [The Nail] (Rafael Gil, 1944) and Tuvo la culpa Adán [Adam's Fault] (Juan de Orduña, 1944), I attempt to support the hypothesis of a certain kind of expulsion of female characters in Spanish fiction films in the years immediately following the Civil War, which would not only exclude them through ideological discourse, but also through the mise en scène. The analytical method adopted here moves away both from historiographical approaches and from the politique des auteurs, as well as from cultural studies and other similar disciplines, to take a direction already begun by other authors towards a possible history of forms in Spanish cinema. I thus analyse questions such as the relationship of the actress with the shot and the narration, her disappearance from the borders existing between them, her conversion into phantasmagoria, and, in short, the construction of an alternative, rebellious story in opposition to the official one. To conclude, I argue for the possibility of viewing the actress’s body and gestures as instigators of a kind of materialist poetics in film analysis.