INDEPENDENT EXAM – NIVEL SUPERIOR

NOMBRE: Nº DE ORDEN:
FECHA: .../…/…….

All answers should be written in SPANISH. This is a READING test in English (not an English Language test)
based on the course that is taught at this Faculty. You have FOUR hours to complete the test. You may start
the anticipation as you receive the exam. Follow directions; any answers that do not respond to the question
asked or the request made, will NOT receive the percentage assigned. You must reach a mark of no less than 4
(four) equivalent to 70% of the correct requested activities in order to pass the exam as established by the
regulations of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Make sure that your name is on all the sheets you turn in and
please sign your name when you complete the exam. You may use a dictionary and the Grammar Dictionary.

Nº de DNI: …………………………
Porcentaje de
actividades correctas Calificación
Correo electrónico:……………………………………… 0- 39% 1 (uno)
40- 59% 2 (dos)
CARRERA: ............................................ 60- 65% 3 (tres)
66- 70% 4 (cuatro)
71- 75% 5 (cinco)
76- 80% 6 (seis)
81- 85% 7 (siete)
86- 90% 8 (ocho)
91- 95% 9 (nueve)
96- 100% 10 (diez)

Grant, J., & Snelgrove, C. (2023). Returning to totality: Settler colonialism, decolonization, and struggles for freedom.
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537231219935.

ANTICIPATION (THIS SECTION IS NOT SCORED)

1. You have 30 minutes to do this section before you read the text. (This is a very important
section) 1-Read bibliographical data, title, and subtitles. Advance a general reading
hypothesis.

2. Choose two strategies to write the specific hypothesis of the text. State them and explain why
you consider them useful in this text.

Reading strategy 1:

Reason for choice:

Reading strategy 2:

Reason for choice:

3. Follow the strategies you selected in exercise 2 and put forward your specific hypothesis.

NOW IT IS TIME TO READ YOUR TEXT IN FULL.

VERIFICATION: 25%

4. Choose the five paragraphs that you consider the most important ones, state the paragraph
boundaries, i.e., lines where the paragraph starts and ends, and indicate the main idea in each paragraph.
Paragraph number 1 must contain the most important information in the text, the new
information provided by the author. In this exercise you must organize the selected
paragraphs hierarchically. Express the main idea using a short sentence, abstract and
conceptualise. (25%)

Order Paragraph Main idea

boundaries
1
2
3
4
5

INTERNALISATION: 75%

5. After analysing the argumentation, complete the table below with the ten most important concepts of
each paradigm/point of view presented and the ten most important concepts supported by the
authors. Provide a name for each paradigm/point of view. Express your concepts in noun phrases in
Spanish. Feel free to add more columns if needed. (25%)

NAME OF PARADIGM OR POINT NAME OF PARADIGM OR POINT NAME OF PARADIGM OR POINT

OF VIEW OF VIEW OF VIEW
(MAIN CONCEPTS) (MAIN CONCEPTS) (MAIN CONCEPTS)

6. Explain the authorial contribution to the field. What is their own approach and conceptualisation?
(20%)

7. Now, summarise the most important concepts of the text hierarchically in a brief paragraph with an
academic tone. This must include the most specific ideas presented by the authors. Indicate relations
among concepts. This summary paragraph should be no longer than 100-120 words in length. (30%)
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2022.2027803

Reproductive rights, othered women, and the making of

feminist documentary in Latin America
Lorena Cervera Ferrer
Bournemouth Film School, Arts University Bournemouth, Bournemouth, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Cine Mujer was the name of two feminist film collectives, one Received 17 March 2020
founded in Mexico (1975–1986) and the other in Colombia (1978– Revised 2 November 2021
1999). Sharing the same name but with no ties between each other, Accepted 5 January 2022
these collectives produced films that provided different representa­ KEYWORDS
tions of women, politicized personal experiences and domestic Cine Mujer Mexico; Cine
spaces, and promoted processes of consciousness-raising. Broadly, Mujer Colombia; Latin
this article looks at the Cine Mujer collectives as part of a larger American Women
phenomenon that, although informed by second-wave feminism Filmmakers; film collectives;
and the New Latin American Cinema, can be better understood feminist documentary
within the singular complexity of Latin American women’s move­
ments. Specifically, it analyses two documentaries, Cosas de mujeres
(1978) and Carmen Carrascal (1982), produced by the Cine Mujer
collectives in Mexico and Colombia, respectively. Drawing on Laura
Marks’ work on hybridity, excess, and haptic visuality, this article
explores the relation between modes of production and represen­
tation in these films and positions them as emblematic examples of
a formative moment in Latin American feminist documentary. By
emphasizing the emotional and sensorial appeal of these films, this
article also attempts to expand what is understood by political
cinema.

He gave me an injection to sleep, but I didn’t fall asleep completely. Then I felt that he was on
top of me. I couldn’t do anything because I fell asleep and when I woke up, he told me it was
all over. I felt an intense rage because my body had been used without me wanting it.
Besides, I felt like shit, completely rubbish.

This quote is an extract of the testimony intercut throughout the film Cosas de mujeres
(Rosa Martha Fernández, México, 1978). The man who raped this woman was the doctor
that had to procure her a clandestine abortion. With a very different approach, the
quivering voice of the protagonist of Carmen Carrascal (Eulalia Carrizosa, Colombia,
1982)—an artisan and illiterate woman who lives in a remote area of the countryside
with two of her nine children and her husband—also stresses the burden of motherhood.
She says: “I don’t want to have any more. I have nine children; I don’t want to have more.
But if God gives me another, I can do nothing. I have to give birth whether I want to or
not.” Far from the contemporary feminist debates on reproductive rights, Carrascal is an
embodiment of those women who were often othered by second-wave feminism. These

CONTACT Lorena Cervera Ferrer lorena.ferrer.17@ucl.ac.uk SELCS/CMII Departmental Office, 131 Foster Court,
University College London, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
2 L. CERVERA FERRER

two films were produced by the feminist film collectives Cine Mujer in Mexico and
Colombia, respectively, during the heyday of feminism in the region. Drawing on Laura
Marks’ work on hybridity, excess, and haptic visuality, this article explores the relation
between modes of production and representation in these films and positions them as
emblematic examples of a formative moment in Latin American feminist documentary. By
emphasizing the emotional and sensorial appeal of these films, this article also attempts
to expand what is understood by political cinema.
Latin American feminist film collectives were formed across the region during the
1970s to support the women’s movements with audio-visual content. These films offered
“counter-hegemonic representations of women” (Ilene Goldman 2002, 242), politicized
personal experiences and domestic spaces, and promoted processes of consciousness-
raising, as well as contributing to the making of a Latin America feminist cinema. For
several reasons, the study of Latin American feminist cinema of the 1970s and 1980s has
received little scholarly attention. It is not the purpose of this article to address these
reasons in depth, but to highlight and briefly summarize two of them. Firstly, the
prominence of the New Latin American Cinema and its failure “to challenge the (under)
representation of, give voice to, or involve, women” (Lorena Cervera Ferrer 2020, 152)
inadvertently cast a shadow that continues to obscure the work of Latin American women
filmmakers. Secondly, unlike in anglophone and European countries, the development of
feminist cinema was not accompanied by the creation of a circuit of women’s film festivals
that exhibited these films or by scholarly research and criticism that paid attention to this
phenomenon.1
In recent years, the digitalization of the original 16 mm copies and videotapes by film
institutions and universities has enormously facilitated the access to Latin American fem­
inist films of the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, research on this field has flourished. However,
most of these contributions tend to focus on a single collective, filmmaker, or a specific
country. This has been the case with the Cine Mujer collectives. Despite the numerous
similarities between them, these collectives have only been addressed separately, thereby
leading to a fragmentary understanding of their significance and impact. The research
published on the Mexican Cine Mujer has primarily focused on its history and production as
well as the continuities and discontinuities with second-wave feminism and the New Latin
American Cinema (Márgara Millán 1999; Elissa. J. Rashkin 2001; Gabriela Aceves 2013; Elena
Oroz 2018; Israel Rodríguez 2019). The work on the Colombian Cine Mujer has also covered
its history and production, and has paid more attention to formal analysis of some of its
films (Julia Lesage 1990; Ilene Goldman 2002; Paola Arboleda Ríos and Diana Patricia Osorio
2003; Deborah Martin 2012; Juana Suárez 2012; Lorena Cervera Ferrer 2020).
This article builds from and contributes to the corpus of work that is dedicated to the
re-historization and theorization of Latin American political cinema from a feminist
perspective.2 Broadly, it looks at the Cine Mujer collectives as part of a larger phenomenon
that, although informed by second-wave feminism and the New Latin American Cinema,
can be better understood as an intrinsic component within the singular complexity of
Latin American feminist and women’s movements. Specifically, it focuses on a formal
analysis of two films, Cosas de mujeres and Carmen Carrascal.
Cosas de mujeres was produced in close alliance with the Mexican women’s movement
and combines a mixture of realist and experimental aesthetics. Here I pay attention to the
concepts of excess and abjection as strategies that disrupt artistic representations of
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 3

women’s bodies. By contrast, Carmen Carrascal was made through a close alliance
between the filmmakers and the film subject. The mode of production relied on the
slow process of building relationships of trust, which was then reflected on the screen
through images that evoke haptic visuality and establish a bodily relationship between
the viewer and the image. My research methods combine oral-history interviews and film
viewing and analysis. This article has also benefited from the several conversations and
discussions I have held with scholars, feminists, and filmmakers. These methods allow me
to implement collaborative ways of creating knowledge that are respectful of both the
politics of the Cine Mujer collectives and the communitarian approach which is quintes­
sential to feminism.3

The Latin American Women’s Movement and the Cine Mujer Collectives
The 1970s was a flourishing decade for women’s movements in Latin America. The
acquisition of women’s rights was achieved thanks to women’s greater access to educa­
tion and the workforce, the migration from rural areas to cities, the political discourse of
emancipation, and the circulation of feminist ideas, which galvanized women to organize
themselves and challenge traditional gender roles. This feminist efflorescence was cata­
lyzed by the UN World Conference on Women, held in Mexico City in 1975. However,
within the context of Mexico and other Latin American countries, feminism was “mostly
understood as an imported imperialist dogma that prioritized issues of sexual liberation
over more pressing class-based and social justice agendas” (Jocelyn Olcott as cited in
Gabriela Aceves 2013, 5) and, as this conference exposed, “women from the popular
classes were badly underrepresented” (Jocelyn Olcott 2017, 6). In 1981, the First Latin
America and Caribbean Feminist Encuentro, celebrated in Bogotá, stressed the need to
incorporate “the region’s most vulnerable women into the project of feminism” (María del
Carmen Feijóo as cited in Virginia Vargas 1992, 201). This event also built a transnational
network through which feminist ideas travel and cultural artefacts, such as those films
made by the Cine Mujer collectives, are exhibited and discussed.4 For Clara Riascos,
a member of the Colombian Cine Mujer, “these Encuentros were of great theoretical
importance for women, who later applied those ideas in their own countries.”5 As the
women’s movements shifted towards intersectionality, particularly in relation to class,
race, and ethnicity, the protagonists and stories of the Cine Mujer films also changed,
giving epistemic advantage to subaltern women.
Although the Cine Mujer collectives were created in different contexts and did not
know about the existence of each other until they met during the First Encuentro in 1981,
there are a number of common factors they shared; the most obvious being their name.
Whereas the Mexican collective chose Cine Mujer to pay homage to Dziga Vertov’s Kino
Pravda, translated into Spanish as Cine Verdad; the reasoning behind the naming of the
Colombian collective obeyed a more down-to-earth logic as it brought together the two
keywords that defined its activity. Moreover, both collectives were formed by white,
educated, middle-class, urban women, and emerged from and contributed to the con­
temporary feminist and women’s movements through the making of films that aimed to
raise awareness about women’s issues and to intervene in social, cultural, legal, and
political contexts. They also implemented similar collective and collaborative modes of
authorship and production that disrupted the role of the auteur and the centrality of the
4 L. CERVERA FERRER

filmmaker. Their films were primarily distributed through alternative circuits, such as
unions, women’s associations, schools, universities, prisons, and film clubs, and also
through transnational networks, such as the Latin America and Caribbean Feminist
Encuentros. Unlike other Latin American political films, the Cine Mujer films were rarely
showcased at film festivals, whether Latin American or international.
Cine Mujer in Mexico (1975–1986) was founded by Mexican Rosa Martha Fernández,
Brazilian Beatriz Mira, and Frenchwoman Odile Herrenschmidt in 1975 while they were
students at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC), a film school at
the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The history of this collective is
divided into two periods in which they produced eight films. During the first period
(1975–1980), the founding members produced films that address issues about abortion,
rape, and domestic work: Cosas de mujeres, the Ariel-winner Vicios en la cocina, las papas
silban (Beatriz Mira, 1985), and the docudrama Rompiendo el silencio (Rosa Martha
Fernández, 1979). In the second period (1981–1986), Beatriz Mira and Ángeles
Necoechea, amongst others, took over the collective and five new films were made,
focusing on women’s gatherings, prostitution, and labor exploitation.6 These films are
Es primera vez (Beatriz Mira, 1981), Vida de Ángel (Ángeles Necoechea, 1982), Yalaltecas
(Sonia Fritz, 1984), Amas de casa (Ángeles Necoechea, 1984), and Bordando en la frontera
(Ángeles Necoechea, 1986).
Cine Mujer in Colombia (1978–1999) was founded by Eulalia Carrizosa and Sara Bright,
and later joined by Rita Escobar, Patricia Restrepo, Dora Cecilia Ramírez, Clara Riascos, and
Fanny Tobón. From 1978 to 1999, this collective produced short films, documentaries,
series, and videos, and became a distributor of Latin American women’s cinema. As I have
argued elsewhere, “its twenty years of activity make it one the world’s most enduring
feminist film collectives” (Lorena Cervera Ferrer 2020, 150). Most of their first films are
fictional representations that mirror the daily struggles of women from a similar back­
ground to the filmmakers and include films such as A primera vista (1978), Paraíso artificial
(Patricia Restrepo, 1980), and ¿Y tu mamá qué hace? (Eulalia Carrizosa, 1981). From the
1980s onwards there was a greater interest in making documentaries concerned with
representing subaltern women, such as in Carmen Carrascal and La mirada de Myriam
(Clara Riascos, 1987). From the mid-1980s, Cine Mujer produced several videos and series
for governmental and global institutions, such as Realidades y políticas para la mujer
campesina (Sara Bright, 1985), A la salud de una mujer (Clara Riascos and Eulalia Carrizosa,
1992), and Ver estrellitas por los ojos (Rita Escobar, 1992).7

Cosas de Mujeres (Mexico, 1978)

Cosas de mujeres was directed by Rosa Martha Fernández and produced by the Mexican
Cine Mujer as part of coursework for the CUEC. It is a 42-minute black-and-white hybrid
film that denounces the life-threatening conditions to which women, particularly those
from lower classes, are subjected to due to the illegality of abortion. As part of the
research process, Cine Mujer began collecting testimonies of women from different
backgrounds who had had illegal abortions, yet in very different conditions. It is worth
mentioning that Rosa Martha Fernández is a psychologist whose research methods
primarily rely on interviewing and whose work is deeply informed by her own personal
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 5

experiences. Thus, besides drawing from contemporary debates within the feminist
movement, Cosas de mujeres is also imbued with Fernández’s personal experience,
which allowed her to give precise directions to the film protagonist, Patricia Luke.8
Abortion was the burning issue of 1970s feminism and several films were made about it
in different countries.9 Thus, Cosas de mujeres “inserts the concrete demands of Mexican
feminists in a historical and transnational continuum: in a global struggle in favour of
women’s rights” (Elena Oroz 2018, 77). The title of this film has a sarcastic tinge that refers
to the resistance and reluctance on the part of male comrades to listen to or struggle for
those issues that were considered “women’s issues.” In 1976, the Coalition of Feminist
Women organized the first conference for the decriminalization of abortion in the
country, “where it was argued that the termination of pregnancy was an exclusive
decision of women and free abortion on demand should be provided in all public health
institutions” (Francesca Gargallo 2004, 111). Mexican feminists used various strategies to
make this issue more socially visible, ranging from dressing up in black clothes in public
protests to mourn all those women who had died in clandestine abortions to organizing
demonstrations for voluntary motherhood on Mother’s Day. These initiatives led to
a national debate from which a bill of law to legalize abortion was submitted to the
Chamber of Deputies and eventually refused by president José López Portillo in 1979 after
a fierce campaign of opposition by the Catholic Church. Within this context and as part of
the initiatives aforementioned, screenings of Cosas de mujeres “functioned as a didactic
tool to promote discussions” (Gabriela Aceves 2014, 333).
Cosas de mujeres includes three different parts: a fictionalized short film that follows the
story of a university student, her friend, and an invisible network of women who support
her search for an illegal abortion; a testimonial interview of a woman who went through
a traumatic experience of a clandestine abortion; and documentary footage that offers
information about the state of abortion in Mexico from medical and political perspectives.
Each of these three narratives employs different realist strategies, namely observational
footage, talking-head interviews, press clippings, intertitles, continuity editing, and
a voice-of-God type of commentary that reads the articles of the Criminal Code referring
to the legal implications of seeking or procuring an abortion. However, also each of these
narratives makes use of audio-visual devices that exceed conventional realist aesthetics,
including sound effects such as the use of bells as a symbolical reminder of the omnipre­
sence of the Catholic church and its ideological power; chiaroscuro lighting that evokes
both theatricality and dramatism; and unconventional camera angles that unsettle the
viewer’s position, amongst others. I contend that these devices break the cinematic
illusion and produce effects and affects that appeal to the sensorial and emotional
experience of the viewer Figure 1.
Cosas de mujeres mixes forms, blurs boundaries, and exceeds classifications. By combin­
ing different formal approaches, the film opens up a negotiation between the real event
and the different possibilities of representation, drawing attention to its own construction.
For Laura Marks, hybridity, whether cultural or cinematic, is necessarily “unpredictable and
uncategorizable” (Laura U. Marks 2000, 7). She writes: “by pushing the limits of any genre,
hybrid cinema forces each genre to explain itself, to forgo any transparent relationship to
the reality it represents, and to make evident the knowledge claims on which it is based”
(2000, 8). The mixing of forms was, according to Fernández, a necessary approach despite
going against the cinematic language–whether conventional or experimental–of the time.
6 L. CERVERA FERRER

Figure 1. Frame from Cosas de mujeres that symbolically points at patriarchy and the Catholic Church
as the main obstacles for the decriminalization of abortion in Mexico

The indexical value of documentary footage gives validity to or “authenticate[s] the

fictionalisation” (Stella Bruzzi 2000, 153) as well as providing a class perspective to the
cause for abortion rights. Whereas the fictional part positions the female body as a site of
alternative epistemologies through evoking feelings and emotions.
The impossibility of categorization has also been central to feminist theory and practice
through the concept of excess, which refers to those ideas that unsettle normative
categorizations and problematize existing hegemonic structures (Domitilla Olivieri
2012, 9). In Cosas de mujeres, one of the documentary scenes shows a curettage per­
formed on a woman at the General Hospital of Mexico City. While it is important to
highlight the political significance of representing a real abortion, what interests me is
how this image exceeds artistic depictions of women’s bodies. Throughout the history of
art, the female body and its excessiveness–namely blood, mass, and fluids–have been
contained and concealed.10 In The Female Nude, for example, Lynda Nead argues that “the
forms, conventions and poses of art have worked metaphorically to shore up the female
body–to seal orifices and to prevent marginal matter from transgressing the boundary
dividing the inside of the body and the outside” (Lynda Nead 1992, 6). In Powers of Horror,
Julia Kristeva extensively explores the subject of abjection to describe “what does not
respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Julia
Kristeva 1982, 4). It is what provokes disgust, horror, and causes rejection. One of these
borders is found in what separates the limits of the body from the objects that are
discharged from its inside. Thus, Kristeva argues, corporeal waste represents a threat to
the symbolic order.
In a similar composition to the painting The Origin of the World (1866) by Gustave
Courbet, Cosas de mujeres includes a close-up shot of a woman’s genitals. She is lying on
a hospital bed with legs spread while objects–medical devices (speculum and curette) and
fluids (pregnancy tissue)–traverse the threshold of the female body. The vagina is framed
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 7

even closer than in Courbet’s painting, undisturbed by other parts of the female body, and
with the edges of the frame dissolved in black, blurring its own boundaries. This image is
intercut with shots of doctors, nurses, and the woman’s sleeping face while we hear non-
diegetic sound of an interview with a doctor about how safe abortions can reduce
maternal mortality. Whereas the image might provoke feelings of repulsion, the sound
attempts to produce different effects. It confronts us with our feelings of disgust or, even
horror, about seeing a woman having a curettage but not about women dying from
a preventable cause. This idea is reinforced by the following image of a press clipping that
states “abortion continues to be the main reason for maternal mortality and, even,
women’s mortality.” Thus, the abject here serves the purpose of, as Kristeva argues,
threatening our understanding of reality and our morality.
Looking at this image from Cosas de mujeres alongside The Origin of the World invites
me to think about the distinction that Nead makes between obscenity and art, the female
body and its artistic representation. Despite Courbet’s painting shocking its contempora­
neous society, today it is defined in terms of “refinement” which “escapes pornographic
status” by the Musée d’Orsay. Cosas de mujeres’ image, however, can be defined “in terms
of excess, as form beyond limit, beyond the frame and representation” (Lynda Nead 1992,
20). It aimed to shock its audiences. Even today, more than 40 years after it was made,
Cosas de mujeres continues to exceed both the conventions of realist aesthetics associated
with documentary and the artistic representation of women’s bodies. It still presents us
with a moral dilemma that we must confront.
Cosas de mujeres ends with a series of photographs that show various groups of
women demonstrating in favor of the decriminalization of abortion in Italy, USA, Japan,
and eventually in Mexico during the 1970s, highlighting the transnational nature of this
particular struggle. Although the film’s political goal was not achieved and abortion
remained illegal, several other actions continued to happen in Mexico and the rest of
Latin America. In the Fifth Encuentro in Argentina in 1990, September 28 was named as
the Day for the Struggle for the Decriminalization of Abortion. In 2005, several demon­
strations across the region continued with these demands. Since 2021, abortion is no
longer a crime. Yet, in most of the country, it is permitted only under specific circum­
stances, such as rape, risk for the mother, or nonviable fetus. In this current context, Cosas
de mujeres remains a strikingly relevant feminist documentary Figure 2.

Carmen Carrascal (Colombia, 1982)

Carmen Carrascal was directed by Eulalia Carrizosa and produced by the Colombian Cine
Mujer in 1982. It is a 27-minute ethnographic documentary about the life of a rural artisan
from the region of Sucre, in the Atlantic side, who weaves baskets made out of iraca leaf
through a craft that she invented. According to the synopsis included in the catalogue
Con ojos de mujer, “Carmen, the craftswoman, is the expression of human capacity for self-
assertion (. . .) Carmen, the film, is an intimate documentary, close to its character, and
respectful of her” (Guiomar Dueñas-Vargas 2000, 4). In this analysis I contend that Carmen
Carrascal is an emblematic example of what Israel Rodríguez, although referring to the
Mexican collective in more general terms, describes as a “displacement from historical
feminism towards popular feminism in film productions” (2019, 202). In particular, I focus
8 L. CERVERA FERRER

Figure 2. Frame from Cosas de mujeres showing a demonstration for the decriminalization of abortion

on how the mode of production was reflected on the screen through images that evoke
haptic visuality and establish a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image.
Thus, I contend that this film attributes political value to the sensorial and emotional.
The different cultures and ethnicities that coexist in Latin American countries made
feminist filmmakers realize the need for inclusion and diversity in the type of women and
stories represented in feminist cinema. From the 1980s onwards subaltern women, in
their roles as mothers, wives, artisans, and community leaders, became the protagonists
of Latin American feminist cinema.11 Carmen Carrascal is the first film in the filmography
of Cine Mujer that exemplifies this shift. The protagonist is an illiterate artisan and mother
of nine children. Through the use of Carrascal’s own voice, the film highlights not only her
craft, but also the troubled relationship with her husband, the efforts to give an education
to her children, the suffering caused by not having them around but also her wish of not
having any more children, the precarious conditions of artisan work, and mental health
problems.
Furthermore, this film also represents an important shift within Colombian public
discourse and even that of the New Latin American Cinema. Following the period of
upheaval known as La Violencia (1948–1953), by the 1980s, the Colombian conflict–this is
to say, the unofficial war between guerrillas, drug trafficking organizations, the Colombian
government, and far-right paramilitary groups–affected rural areas through the killing of
community leaders and local populations, sexual violence, and forced migration. In “An/
Other View of the New Latin American Cinema,” B. Ruby Rich notes “a shift from
‘exteriority’ to ‘interiority’” in Latin American cinema through films that turn away from
the epic and spectacular towards everyday life, fantasy, and desire. She adds that these
films “share a refusal to attribute ‘otherness’ to subjects formerly marked as such,
accompanied by a commitment to the narrative inscription of an ‘other’ selfhood, identity,
and subjectivity” (B. Ruby Rich 1997, 280). This shift, she claims, has “opened the field to
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 9

women” (1997, 281). As an anthropological portrait of a subaltern woman made through

collaborative modes of authorship and production, Carmen Carrascal casts light on the
hardship that rural women in particular endure in Colombia, a theme that has hitherto
been overshadowed by the grand stories of the Colombian conflict. It does so not in order
to victimize or other its protagonist, but to challenge wider ideas about national identity
and womanhood.
Initially, Cine Mujer wanted to direct this film collectively, implementing a collaborative
mode of authorship. Each member of the collective was supposed to act as director for
a day and the film would “reflect the agreements and disagreements in the search for
a feminist cinema.” However, as Carrizosa says, “this approach proved to be unviable”.12
Eventually, she became the sole director, but the script and the most important decisions
were discussed collectively amongst the Cine Mujer members and in collaboration with
the film subject. Even though the Cine Mujer members came from very different back­
grounds to Carrascal’s, their mode of production also relied on the slow process of
building relationships of trust and allowed the making of an intimate portrait. Clara
Riascos described this close relationship with the subjects as “a sisterhood. It was not
an intellectual or cinematic relation. That was the attitude of male filmmakers (. . .) We
really got to know them and joined forces with them. We respected their lives, portraying
them with great dignity.” Figure 3
Carmen Carrascal began making handcraft baskets because she did not have enough
money to buy school backpacks for her children. When she went to Bogotá to collect an
award by Artesanías de Colombia, Eulalia Carrizosa learnt more and was moved by her
story. The pre-production process involved a couple of trips to the remote area where
Carrascal lived. During these trips they were able to build a close relationship and discuss
the making of the documentary in greater detail. Later, the collective secured funding
from the Inter-American Foundation through an application that emphasized the need to
tell stories of different women. Later on, a small crew formed by Carrizosa as the director,
Sara Bright as the sound recordist, Rita Escobar as the script supervisor, and Luis Crump as
the cinematographer, filmed Carrascal’s daily life. The intention was to focus on the
interweaving of her life-story and the creative process of craft-making.
In formal terms Carmen Carrascal follows a conventional realist approach and, unlike
Cosas de mujeres, maintains a coherent style throughout. The film combines a talking-
head interview with Carrascal with observational footage of her daily life. The closeness of
the interview shot often reveals Carrascal’s moments of doubt, her timid laugh, and the
silent thoughts, emphasizing that this film is not only about seeing or listening but also
about feeling. The observational footage shows the rural environment in which Carrascal’s
life takes place with detailed attention to the process of making the baskets, from
collecting and cutting the iraca leaf, the braiding and weaving, to its transport to the
nearest town. The sound track consists of a combination of music, diegetic sound,
Carrascal’s voice, and a touching song sung by the protagonist about a mental health
episode. Carrascal had initially requested that this song should be excluded, but the fact
that it made it to the final cut points to some of the flaws involved in the collaborative
processes, proving that the filmmakers did not completely relinquish their agency.
In Touch, Laura Marks describes haptic visuality as a multisensorial experience that
“occurs in dialectical relationship with the optical” (Laura U. Marks 2002, 12). Haptic
images do not rely on the viewer’s identification with the image through distance,
10 L. CERVERA FERRER

Figure 3. From left to right, Eulalia Carrizosa, Carmen Carrascal and Sara Bright during the shooting of
Carmen Carrascal

distinction, and disembodiment but through a bodily experience that “invite[s] the viewer
to dissolve his or her subjectivity in the close and bodily contact with the image” (2002,
13). In documentary cinema, as Marks notes, “haptic visceral intimacy engenders an
ethical relationship between viewer and viewed, by inviting the viewer to mimetically
embody the experience of the people viewed” (2002, 8). Marks argues that the haptic is
not a feminine form of perception, but “a feminist visual strategy, an underground visual
tradition in general rather than a feminine quality in particular” (2002, 7). She summarizes
as follows: “what is erotic about haptic visuality, then, may be described as respect for
otherness, and concomitant loss of self in the presence of the other” (2002, 20).
We can point to the presence of the haptic in Carrizosa’s film. The cinematic language
of Carmen Carrascal privileges details that evoke sensorial and bodily experiences by
meticulously following her craft-making process. Throughout the documentary there are
numerous close-ups of precise hand movements, subtle facial expressions, and skin and
material textures that poetically capture the laboring body. The fragmentation of the
body and the juxtaposition of close-ups of hands and face through adroit editing, camera
movements, and sensitive zooming emphasize the dialectical relation between haptic
and optical visuality and between distance and closeness, which enables us, as viewers, to
establish a bodily relationship with the image and to embody her experience. Moreover,
the graininess and materiality of the 16 mm film also contribute to the stimulation of
a tactile consciousness and its ochre tone blends the different colors found in this rural
environment. Here, Carrascal, her husband, and children are shown as living harmoniously
with cows, cats, pigs, chickens, and a mule. Most of what they need is taken from the
natural world around them and there is almost no waste. However, despite this seemingly
idyllic description, Carmen Carrascal is not a contemplative film that exoticizes the
environment.
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 11

In the final sequence the film follows Carrascal’s journey to Colosó, where she sees her
children and drops the baskets. Here we see that her handcraft technique has also been
learned by members of this community, transiting from the individual to the collective.
Despite being a character-led film, this final scene emphasizes that Carrascal represents
a broader community and positions their laboring bodies as conveyors of knowledge.
Similarly, the representation of her handcraft on screen and the ethical relationship
engendered through haptic visuality have the potential of producing embodied experi­
ences, respect for otherness, and politicized bodies in the audience. Instead of engaging
with the rational, this film privileges emotional and sensorial attachments and invites the
audience to challenge hegemonic ideas about both national identity and womanhood.

Conclusion
The Cine Mujer collectives were part of the 1970s international effort to bring women’s
issues to the forefront of political debate. As part of this large phenomenon, they were
informed by different transnational flows of ideas and praxis–including the New Latin
American Cinema and anglophone and European feminism and feminist cinema.
However, these ideas and praxis were received, interpreted, and developed in conversa­
tion with national spaces and cultures, contributing to the making of a distinctive cinema
that linked national identities and struggles with transnational cinematic modes. As I have
argued, the filmography of these collectives constitutes a valuable contribution to both
the struggles for women’s rights and the making of a Latin American feminist cinema.
Both films analyzed in this article were conceived as political tools to intervene in
particular contexts. Cosas de mujeres was part of the collective effort for decriminalizing
abortion and Carmen Carrascal aimed to challenge hegemonic ideas about both national
identity and womanhood. By foregrounding women’s issues that had been previously
ignored and implementing collaborative modes of authorship and production, these
collectives also forged new ways of making political cinema. However, their films’ effec­
tiveness as a political tool was limited partly due to the marginalization of feminist
documentary within the Latin American film circuits and also within transnational
women’s cinema. In both cases, the main distribution channels were alternative circuits,
with some exceptions. For instance, Cosas de mujeres was showcased at the First
International Women’s Film Conference in Amsterdam in 1981, organized by the Dutch
feminist film distributor Cinemien, and at the Third UN Conference on Women, held in
Nairobi in 1985. Carmen Carrascal was awarded at the Cartagena film festival and
showcased at the Moscow International Film Festival.
The difficulties involved in accessing Latin American feminist documentaries of the
1970s and 1980s still exist and continue to be a barrier for their inclusion in the history of
political cinema in Latin America. This situation is, however, slowly changing. In both
Mexico and Colombia, universities have played a fundamental role in the digitization and
preservation of the Cine Mujer’s filmographies. However, the conditions of these archives
are precarious. Internationally, some of their films are also distributed through organiza­
tions that promote women’s cinema, such as Women Make Movies and Cinenova. Despite
the limitations, these initiatives have enormously contributed to the dissemination of
Latin American feminist cinema and have allowed several scholars to re-write the history
of political cinema. This article joins this collective endeavor by highlighting the
12 L. CERVERA FERRER

complexities and formal sophistication of two feminist documentaries made during

a formative moment in Latin American feminist cinema. In doing so, it also attempts to
expand what is understood by political cinema, moving away from the focus on the
rational and historical of the New Latin American Cinema towards a cinema that intersects
politics, aesthetics, emotion, and affect.

Notes
1. Cocina de imágenes took place in Mexico City in 1987 and was the first Latin American
women’s film festival organized in the region.Julia Lesage is one of the first scholars who
gave value to Latin American feminist cinema during these formative years. Her work has
been crucial for researchers who, like myself, are interested in unearthing feminist films of the
1970s and 1980s.
2. Women’s cinema—broadly understood as those films made by women—timidly began in the
early 20th in Mexico, through the work of Adela Sequeyro, Adriana and Dolores Ehlers, and
Matilde Landeta, amongst others; and from the late 1950s in Colombia, through Gabriela
Samper, Marta Rodríguez, Camila Loboguerrero, and Gloria Triana. In both cases, it was
during the 1970s when a conscious feminist approach to film was developed through the
work of the Cine Mujer collectives. Other feminist film collectives of the region include the
Venezuelan Grupo Feminista Miércoles, the Brazilian Lilith Video, and the Peruvian WARMI
Cine y Video.
3. The re-writing of this article happened alongside and benefited from the organization of the
International Online Conference “Cozinhando Imagens, Tejiendo Feminismos. Latin American
Feminist Film and Visual Art Collectives” that took place in April 2021.
4. The Colombian Cine Mujer documented the two Encuentros in Llegaron las feministas (1981)
and En que estamos (1983).
5. Interview with Clara Riascos on August 24, 2018, in Bogotá. All interviews and text
translations are mine unless stated otherwise.
6. Other members included Ellen Camus, María del Carmen Lara, Carolina Fernández, Sonia Fritz,
Lilian Liberman, Laura Rosseti, Guadalupe Sánchez, Eugenia María Tamés, Pilar Calvo, Sibillie
Hayem, Amalia Attolini, and María Novaro.
7. The Colombian Cine Mujer became a distributor of Latin American women’s cinema and
published three catalogues with all the films of its collection—Catálogo Distribuidora Cine-
Mujer (1989), Con ojos de mujer (2000), and Con ojos de mujer 2 (2006). According to the most
recent catalogue, the last production by Cine Mujer was Ciudadanía plena (1998).
Nonetheless, its end is marked by a letter signed by Patricia Alvear donating the Cine
Mujer’s archive to the Colombian Film Heritage Foundation on November 17, 1999.
Currently, the Cine Mujer’s archive is managed by the Fondo de Documentación Mujer
y Género Ofelia Uribe de Acosta, located at the Colombian National University.
8. Interview with Rosa Martha Fernández on April 4, 2021, in Zoom.
9. Some of the feminist films made on abortion are It Happens to Us (Amalie R. Rothschild, USA,
1972), the slideshow La realidad del aborto (Eulalia Carrizosa & Sara Bright, Colombia, 1975),
and Whose Choice? (London Women’s Film Group, UK, 1976), to name a few.
10. An important exception is the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in paintings such as My Birth
(1932), which represents a semi-naked woman on a blood-stained bed giving birth to the
artist herself; and Henry Ford Hospital (1932), a similar painting of Kahlo crying on a blood-
stained hospital bed in Detroit after having a miscarriage.
11. A predecessor of this shift is The Double Day, a documentary by Brazilian Helena Solberg and
produced by the International Women’s Film Project in 1975 that addresses issues of class,
ethnicity, and gender and exposes how women’s incorporation to the workforce forces them
to carry out a double work shift.