Gender and cinema: un approach on the movies of two South American directors

Abstract

Approaching on part of the cinematograph production of Maria Luisa Bemberg (Argentina) and Ana Carolina Teixeira Soares (Brazil), directors which has explored  women’s subjects in their countries with films that have reached the commercial circuit from the seventies, I purpose a reflection about how these women searched to constitute a space of critics and vindication. Taking the filmic images and narratives as historical documents, I intend to reflect about how these works are part of a cinematographic memory turned to the questioning of hierarchical and traditional gender relations. I also purpose un analysis of the expansion of this kind of cinema, either feminist or not, in “peripheral” countries, at the moment that women’s manifestations raised through the occidental world and that the cinema was taken as another political instrument in the constitution of subjectivities also shaped, by the other side, by the tragic consequences of the military political system.