Leading Women in Spanish Cinema and Television, 1970-1980

This volume returns to this crucial time of the advent of democracy in Spain and deploys innovative investigation of below-the-line roles to rewrite the history of film in the period, thus offering critical historical and transnational dimensions to debates about women and film today.

Were it not for the presence of female actors, you might think that women have never made any contribution, or only a vanishingly minor one, to the history of Spanish film and television. Twenty-five years after the mid-1990s boom, when more women became directors, you can count those with a sustained career with one hand; you need even fewer fingers to count those with transnational success. When researchers look for women, they have directors and 'above-the-line' jobs in mind.

Looking for women in directing and other above-the-line professions is a false solution. In the 1970s, when changes in legislation permitted women to work outside the home, women in fact joined crucial below-the-line film professions - indeed some were performed almost exclusively by women, like editing. If we know how to look, women were in fact everywhere in the film cultures of Spain.