Spain’s ‘first feminist film’: Feminism and Francoism, Margarita and the Wolf (Cecilia Bartolomé 1969)

Abstract

This article argues that, if we widen our focus beyond commercially-distributed, feature-length films, a new picture of feminist cinema in Spain emerges. If we include Film School assessment pieces, Cecilia Bartolomé’s final-year medium-length film, Margarita and the Wolf, completed in 1969, preceded the acclaimed ‘feminist trilogy’ of feature-length films by Bartolomé, Pilar Miró and Josefina Molina by a decade. Rejecting a retrospective approach to Film School work as an early sketch of a later auteurist signature, this study analyses Margarita as complete – for the combined forces of Francoism and sexism meant it was banned and the director could not extend it to feature-length. Following an analysis of documentation that reveals the obstacles Bartolomé faced at Film School, the article reads Margarita as an innovative, transnational, literary adaptation, which echoes and extends French writer Christiane Rochefort’s popular feminist novel. Generically hybrid, Margarita moves beyond Rochefort to plural literary, musical, film and TV sources to target not only patriarchy, but also Francoism and Catholicism. Hailed by critics as Spain’s ‘first feminist film’, Bartolomé’s fusion of female subjectivity and comedy looks forward to future feminist film and writing, especially British writer Angela Carter’s 1979 re-writing of the fairy tale.