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Networks of Empowerment. Women in the Early Ibero-American Film Clubs (1909 to 1959)

Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis project aims to study the international networks established among women who participated in film clubs in Ibero-America during the first half of the twentieth century. It aims to analyse national, regional, and transnational film club networks, the women mediators involved, and the international role that film clubs played in the emergence of multiple film cultures in Ibero-America, including a women’s film culture. To do so, I have chosen three case studies: 1) first documented film clubs in Barcelona, and their relationship to amateurism, being them the Club Cinematográfico de Horta (1923), Barcelona Film Club (1929) and Sessions Mirador (1929-1930), the last two having María Luz Morales as a founder and participant; 2) one private film club and the first one documented in Buenos Aires (Cine club de Buenos Aires, 1929-1932), in which Victoria Ocampo was involved; 3) and the first three film clubs documented in Ciudad de México (Cine Club Mexicano 1931-1935, Cine club de Mexico 1934-1938 and 35 mm Cinema 1938) all of them co-founded and managed by Lola Álvarez Bravo, the first of them had ties with a public Mexican university. By studying the role each of the chosen film clubs played in each context, we may understand their pivotal role in the development of multiple film cultures in Ibero-America. Therefore, we will explore the contribution of women in the development of film cultures through their participation in film clubs and propose a women’s film culture based on the networks they succeeded to create. This research proposes several decentralisations within the historiography of cinema. Firstly, it concentrates on a marginal entity for cinema studies, namely film clubs. Secondly, it emphasises initiatives originating from regions traditionally deemed peripheral within the context of Western film club history, such as Ibero-America. Finally, it places focus on agents traditionally marginalised within both cinema historiography and film club history, namely women. This proposal for decentralisation has proven its worth by demonstrating that privileged white Ibero-American women held significant positions in the emergence of Western film club culture. To achieve the proposed objectives, I have incorporated gender and global perspectives, alongside qualitative methodological tools rooted in relational sociology, as well as quantitative methods. In applying the gender perspective, I have focused on deconstructing authorship and supporting the principle of distributed collective authorship through networks, while also advocating for the theoretical contributions of self-reflective texts such as letters, diaries, or chronicles. The global perspective has facilitated the tracing of women's networks on a transnational level, allowing for an understanding of oppression dynamics and strategies for challenging them within a broad framework. Among the qualitative methods, the most utilized has been network construction, employing Actor-Network Theory. I have traced both human and non-human actors, such as cultural objects or spaces, that comprised the networks of the mediators to whom I have dedicated my case studies. Among the quantitative tools, I have employed Social Network Analysis with the aim of developing a methodology that can be extrapolated to other historical and marginalised. In line with this approach, as part of the research, I have published a dataset accompanied by various interactive visualisations of the data contained within it. The objective of openly publishing the data I have compiled over the course of this research is to promote collective work and open science.
Source: media/rep/
DOI: 10.25969/mediarep/25347
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7126318435
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