Women in Pieces

The Filmic Re/Constructions of Joseﬁna Molina

María Suárez Lafuente UNIVERSITY OF OVIEDO

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to show the way in which film director Josefina Molina dissects the effect traditional education had on Spanish women. In Evening Performance, Molina deconstructs the life of a wife as an individual, while in Most Natural she centres on the family as a social unit. Once both, wife and family, are torn and displayed ‘in pieces’, the director reconstructs them as a new, hopeful whole. These films study the difficult transition Spanish women had to undergo from a society enchained by a national-Catholic education into contemporary, European Spain, and from monolithic thinking to plurality. Spanish women were defined as ‘wives and mothers’ till the 1980s, and it was not easy, either individually or as a group, to reach the status of independent citizen.

KEY WORDS Miguel Delibes female voice ﬁlm Lola Herrera Joseﬁna Molina national-Catholic education intertextuality traditional family

The Spanish film director Josefina Molina has been instrumental in subverting stereotypes about women in the aftermath of Franco’s dictatorship. Her films, together with those of Pilar Miró, were a significant change for female audiences. Women’s psyche had suffered the devas- tating effects of 40 years of a film industry dedicated to epic and local- colour films, where women were the embodiment of discipline and self-sacrifice to the glory of God and country, or else cheap comedies where the female body was a mere sexual object for the male gaze. Spanish cinema was part of the state apparatus to keep men entertained and under control, and to provide women with the correct and incorrect models of national femininity. It is no exaggeration to say that during the 1950s and the 1960s women were educated in the official social morals and manners primarily through their Sunday visit to the cinema, and that their preferences lay with the Hollywood comedy and the Spanish local-colour film. Thus, few women dared aspire to become

The European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 10(4): 395–407 [1350-5068(200311)10:4;395–407;036955] 396 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(4) anything but wives and mothers, and they looked at themselves through male eyes. With the first women directors, female spectators were confronted with their own frustrations and faced with the need to make decisions. In 1982, Josefina Molina addressed the most revered icon in Franco’s Spain, Saint Theresa of Avila, known in Spain as Saint Theresa of Jesus, in a much acclaimed eight-hour television series. Molina deconstructed the traditional saintly nun by presenting an ambitious, active woman, who, in the manner of her foremothers, Hildegard von Bingen or Hrotsvitha de Gandersheim, managed to act ‘like a man’ and left her indelible mark on the society of her time, Castille in the 17th century. Furthermore, Molina included her own vision of Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Eboli, another historical woman ventriloquized by official voices. Having a mind of their own though different capacities for action, both women emerged from the series with more flesh for thought. Saint Theresa saw her title dropped and, for better or for worse, became Theresa of Jesus, and Ana de Mendoza was allowed to bequeath traces of her views on life, right or wrong as they might be. Although she already had a consistent curriculum behind her, the television series helped the name of Josefina Molina to become known to a wider Spanish audience. Born in Cordoba, Andalucia, in 1936, Molina was the first woman to obtain a diploma in direction at the official School of Cinema in Madrid, and by 1967 she was working in Spanish television as assistant to Pilar Miró, then and now the best-known woman director in Spain. For several years she worked on adaptations for television and on short films, till, in 1973, she directed her first movie, Vera, un cuento cruel. This was followed by La tilita in 1979, Función de noche (1981), Esquilache (1988), Lo más natural (1990) and, her last film so far, La Lola se va a los puertos, in 1993. Josefina Molina draws her themes from the history of Spanish culture, and her characters run from the popular, like la Lola, to the political, as in the case of Esquilache. However, she validates Molly Haskell’s (1987: 286) assertion in From Reverence to Rape that ‘The images of women in European films came not just from society but from literature as well’, her first two films are based on short stories and Función de noche is based on a much-read Spanish novel. Molina’s contribution is to inscribe her own interpretation from a contemporary perspective. Her agenda is not openly feminist, but her camera foregrounds women as subjects. Therefore she succeeds in leading her female characters towards an articulation of their own voices: this makes her historical characters be valued as models to contemporary women, and her contemporary characters’ awakenings act as a consciousness-raising session for female spectators. For our purposes here I deal only with two of her films: Función de noche (1981) and Lo más natural (1990) since they focus on the (un-)education Suárez Lafuente: Women in Pieces 397 contemporary Spanish women were forced to overcome in order to emerge with a consistent ‘I-dentity’. In the late 1970s, female spectators were in need of filmic models which might stimulate change and variety, and it was Molina who provided us with films made with a view not only to challenge the established order but to change and further women’s predefined lives. These films analyse the given conditions of married women as wives and mothers, denounce the traps they have been set, subvert the monolithic, patriarchal ideology behind the traditional inevitable roles and open the way to the reconstruction of freed female identities. Función de noche (Evening Performance) deconstructs the stereotype of the national-Catholic ‘good woman’, educated in the strict moral conditions of the postwar period, intent on keeping women at home under male supervision. These women, in their late forties, become slowly and painfully aware that in order to subdue them patriarchy has robbed them of their sexuality. Lo más natural (Most Natural) deals with the family as the pillar of society, again with women encapsulated in a fixed role. The main character, also in her late forties, is the product of a more lenient education, having been born 10 years after the women in Evening Perform- ance, in spite of which she is also trapped in marriage ‘till death us do part’, terms to which she has agreed and in which she has been taught to believe, only to find herself betrayed and abandoned on reaching middle age. In both films, the outcome will be positive and hopeful, insofar as the women involved envisage the possibility of acquiring full command over their lives, enjoying their successes and taking responsibility for their errors. The resignation they previously assumed a virtue has now changed to determination, a determination to survive and live the rest of their lives as fully as possible. The last scene in Evening Performance is a good example of such expectations: the camera travels from the inside of a house, through a window, into a glorious, sunny landscape, while we hear the main character speak about the need to take a rest from the turmoil of her past. In Evening Performance, Josefina Molina examines the possibilities of intertextuality and the delicate balance between fiction and reality. The film is based on the novel Cinco horas con Mario (Five Hours with Mario) by Miguel Delibes, published in 1966; it is the interior monologue of Carmen Sotillo, a middle-class woman, sitting by the coffin of her husband, Mario, who suffered an untimely death in the conjugal bed. Carmen, all in black and the very image of propriety, pours out her heart’s contempt and the frustration of many years of silence and relegation over her husband’s corpse. Once she starts her complaints, she finds she is resentful of many more things than she had ever been aware of, and, by dissecting her life inadvertently, she provides us with an accurate picture of life in the provinces in the 1950s and 1960s. Carmen Sotillo is a good example of 398 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(4)

Haskell’s (1987: 278) analysis: ‘Woman’s image of herself is so entwined in the tangle of myth and inventions made by man that it is hard to look at it straight. It is even harder in Europe, where centuries of tradition and all the forces of culture have reinforced these myths.’ Delibes’ character was perceived by male critics as the last blow dealt to Mario by life: an inconsistent, ignorant wife, incapable of understanding his superior mind, and who will now become an inappropriate widow to honour his memory. But female readers understood Carmen’s cry of despair and sympathized with her. Josefina Molina obviously counted herself among them, since in 1979 she decided to adapt the narrative text for the stage. The play was directed by Molina herself. It kept the same title as the novel, Five Hours with Mario, and was performed by the actress Lola Herrera. Herrera dissects, in the play’s 90 minutes’ duration, Carmen’s life on an empty stage, while sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair next to a sealed coffin. The stage is otherwise bare and in darkness, but for a spotlight shining on Carmen. In what by then was a democratic Spain, audiences understood the message; female spectators appreciated the effort; and the play was a success. It ran for two years, in Madrid and in other major Spanish cities, six days a week, two perform- ances, early and late evening, a day. The actress became so involved in her role as Carmen that very soon she realized how many life experiences she shared with the fictional character, not least because she had lived herself for a good while in the city where the action was set, a dreary, Catholic, provincial place at the time. Lola Herrera also found it increasingly hard to separate herself from her character when leaving the stage and resuming her everyday life. The breakdown was setting in, not just from stress and hard work, but because of the frustration and anger accumu- lated on stage and transported back to her life, doomed under the same conditions. At this point, Josefina Molina and Lola Herrera decided to produce the film Evening Performance, both as an escape valve for so much accumu- lated tension and also as a further reading of the archetypal wife in the last years of the dictatorship depicted in Delibes’ novel. The film was finished in 1981 and provided an outstanding example of an intertextual documentary. Eighty percent of the film’s duration takes place in Lola Herrera’s dressing-room, during the intervals of the play Cinco horas con Mario, playing herself as the actress playing Carmen Sotillos. Then, Lola Herrera actress acting as Lola Herrera woman meets her ex-husband, to discuss the terms of the annulment of their marriage by the Catholic court of La Rota. Significantly, the role is played by the ex-husband himself, Daniel Dicenta. The discussion centres on the disaster of their married life, conditioned by their archetypal education and the values inherited as they grew up. Molina conveys the very close correlation between the social and the Suárez Lafuente: Women in Pieces 399 individual categories by filming a fragmented composition. The stage, the dressing-room and the streets of Madrid alternate in such a way that they serve to render clearly the fusion of the lives of Lola and Carmen. This aim is also reinforced by other props, such as the newspaper clip announcing Mario’s death (straight from the novel) or the appearance of Lola’s children in the film. The fragmentation and the pace mirror both Carmen’s erratic stream of consciousness and Lola’s slow and painful awakening to her own voice and individuality. The camera is static, observing the contenders, Lola/Carmen and husband, who take turns to explain themselves, while the frame is most elementary, with only the dressing-room’s large mirror to give the scene some movement and sense of depth. This, again, functions as the trope of Lola/Carmen’s married lives, in which they had been only reflections of their husbands’ opinions and choices. With a minimum of furniture, the same clothes throughout the film and low lighting, Evening Performance mimics the very dreary lives it is portraying. Maria Donapetry (1998:23) defines the film as ‘cinema verité’ insofar as its controlled montage creates an obsession out of its pure ordinariness. The female I in the film is multiplied to the extent that it recalls ‘every- woman’, since, as Annette Kuhn (1990: 262) points out, ‘the combination of the autobiographical material with documentary codes permitted identification on the part of female spectators with the women in the films’. In the first place we have Carmen Sotillo, the literary character that triggered the whole tirade, but there is a different Carmen as well, that played by Lola Herrera on the stage. When Lola falls prey to depression, Carmen disappears altogether from the stage and from the film; we are, therefore, left with Lola, the character, the main role in Evening Perform- ance, so closely resembling the Lola of real life. This exchange at the boundary where fiction meets reality calls attention to the traditional role played by those women, how they suffer the pangs of essentialism; thus the subject is multiplied ad infinitum, and Molina succeeds in pointing out the common fate Spanish women have to confront and deconstruct. ‘Lola Herrera decodes Carmen’s literary encoding simply by playing her part on stage, in a process of deconstruction; but she encodes her again, albeit in different terms, when she interprets herself and her circumstances in Evening Performance’ (Donapetry, 2001: 115; my translation). Paraphrasing Laura Mulvey, Donapetry applies the terms ‘bearer’ and ‘maker’ to Carmen and Lola respectively; the former bears the burden of the patriarchal symbolic order while the latter ‘makes’ meaning (Donapetry, 1998: 22). I would add that Lola (un-)makes the patriarchal order by reflecting on its fallacies and by articulating the terms of oppression in words, while Molina makes art a tool for her subversion. The matrix of the film is that of Five Hours with Mario: a woman left alone in darkness with her memories. Indeed, both Carmen and Lola have 400 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(4) been lonely women, even when their husbands were a physical presence at home. Darkness encroaches into the concept ‘loneliness’ and pervades their lives completely: they are in the physical darkness of the wake and the stage, wearing black for mourning, but also being in the dark about their own possibilities, ignorant of the power they should have to build their own destiny. Widowhood for Carmen and divorce for Lola threaten with throwing them into social darkness, and hence into the darkness of their own minds and, possibly, actual death. After all, that has been the fate of many a literary heroine well into the 20th century. But contemporary feminist thought has created other routes into a positive individuality, it has shown that it is never too late to find a voice and a way. Carmen/Lola have to face first the ruin of their identity in order to find in themselves the strength to construct their voice in freedom, which, in philosophical terms, implies being able to name their own existence. Lola’s cry in one of the psychological climaxes of the film, ‘I did not have the freedom to live’ (to make my own existence), is the realization that she has been living in darkness, that she has been as good as dead, but that she knows better now. The last item in the sentence about the film’s matrix mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, ‘memories’, will push these women onto the road to self-definition, since these are the memories that will be articulated as the deconstruction of a series of wrong, commonplace notions about women. The body is the basic mediator between the mind and the world, although women have not defined their body for centuries. So, when Carmen refers to her breasts she has to use a foreign word, in French, poitrine, to deal with a subject forbidden for her. Spanish women had been socialized into despising their body, as the result of which they lacked the vocabulary to deal with it, fundamentally in the symbolic order, which is, after all, the space where adults define themselves. Contemporary literature and film are doing wonders towards ending this situation, but Lola and Carmen are still representatives of Catholic Spain in the 1950s and 1960s. Lola goes to a plastic surgeon aspiring to the ideal breasts that will give her social self-esteem, but abandons the idea as she eventually learns to take her life in her own hands. Josefina Molina deals not only with the deplorable consideration of the female body, but also with the poor body language such women exhibit. Their dependence and confusion surfaces in the form of silences, in their proneness to tears, their many hesitations and the use of commonplace tags when they speak, and, on the whole, in the way their legs and arms are inhibited throughout conversation. Lola also displays fear in her eyes and seems to implore an excuse when looking at her ex-husband, at the doctor she visits or at the priest in charge of the annulment of her marriage. In order to socialize adequately with their surroundings, so as to make amends for their difficult relationship with their bodies, the likes of Suárez Lafuente: Women in Pieces 401

Carmen or Lola resort to external help such as wearing the appropriate clothes or exhibiting the right hairdo. At this point, Juana Ginzo is intro- duced in the film; she is one of Lola’s friends and a reputed radio presen- ter in Spain in the 1960s. Ginzo does not pay any attention to fashion or current social manners and leads a satisfactory life out of wedlock with a man half her age. She offers Lola support to get out of the archetypal role she was educated into. Together the two friends work out the way women are constructed inadvertently by a patriarchal social order. Carmen was aided in her ‘growing down’ by Mario’s discourse, that was politically advanced and subversive, but was as conservative as any other when it came to women’s individuality. Likewise, Lola was clearly shaped by Daniel’s view on life and by the sociolect of Valladolid (a town with a reputation for its conservative discourse). The outcome of such forces is a ‘good girl’ that has been awarded first prize for her obedience: the prince of her dreams, a nice husband. And there the tale ends and life begins. The prince turns into a Bluebeard and the good girl disappears into the rooms of the castle of marriage. The script was so universal that female spectators wept for themselves in watching Evening Performance. In both novel and film, the voice belongs to the female character. But Carmen’s monologue is a long line of complaints, because she is focaliz- ing her life, as always, through Mario’s. Carmen’s life in Five Hours with Mario is a dead-end, she existed only as Mario’s wife and will be Mario’s widow after the novel is finished. Lola, on the other hand, is not merely complaining, she is reflecting on her past life, realizing that it is time for change. At the beginning of the confrontation with Daniel she remains the former, fearful, tearful wife, and he defends himself with an asserting voice rich in ‘Is’ (first person pronouns) and ‘exactly’ and ‘I understand’; she remains seated while he moves around, washes his hands or pours himself a whisky. As she gains confidence Daniel loses ground, his language becomes more tepid, and, eventually, they come to be sharing the space in the dressing-room, at which point he cannot look straight at her, which signifies that she is becoming her own woman. Miguel Delibes’ character stops short in her complaints, but Josefina Molina makes hers advance towards, at least, a sense of self-recognition: ‘I have just learnt, at 45, that I have to take the decisions in my life, that I have to run my course alone.’ Women mastering the voice of their individuality are a menace to those men entrenched in the privilege of their masculine stereotype. From the outset of Christian patriarchal legend, that of the Garden of Eden, Adam tried to push Eve away, so literature tells us. Jennifer Strauss, Ursula Le Guin or Dorothy Hewett inscribe Eves with a voice, which, just by itself, proves that Adam is not the only individual around, that he is not by right master over anybody. Traditionally, both in literature and in films, men have reserved for themselves alone the space of dialectics as the sure 402 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(4) means to preserve a patriarchal language marked by gender. Molina encloses man and woman in an isolated place to make possible the deconstruction of an ancient, vicious situation. Lola is able to react because she now possesses the knowledge that there are other ways, that she is not the only suffering female, the only ‘inadequate’ wife, the only (un-)maternal mother. She now knows that Carmen is there too, and that Juana, and Molina for that, will provide the sorority they all need as individuals. Carmen and Lola partake, at the start, of all the stereotypes Mary Ellmann (1968) proposed in Thinking about Women. Their physical, mental and verbal states lack a clear purpose, merely following the traditional path, the ideas and the words society have designated for them. They are passive and unstable, and are tied to the world of the concrete, since the realm of abstraction, where important matters lie, is an exclusively male world. Thus, women remained tied to their essentialism, which exacted from them passivity and sexual service to their men. Molina makes Lola face that ordeal; Lola’s sexuality, like Carmen’s, had been defined by the most orthodox doctrines of national-Catholicism, that constrained the body, mind and language of women for 40 years. Lola’s cry is voicing many a woman’s tragedy, including her own: ‘I’ve never had an orgasm, I’ve never chosen a man, I’ve always been the one chosen.’ Being the object in the sexual game entails pretending that you are enjoying yourself, which only adds gall to a pathetic situation. The new Lola complains that this is all topped by yet another iniquity: when a woman says no to sex, men are sure she means yes but is too conceited to admit it. This embarks women on a nightmare of abuse, rape and misunder- standings that undermine any possibility of their ever becoming mature individuals. Lola and her ex-husband grope along in a monotonous, confined space that mirrors the atmosphere in which conventional marriages are gener- ally embarked. There they move according to the social manners of their peers, not getting involved in each other’s feelings and leading parallel lives to nowhere. The performance is interrupted when Lola – her life and her self shattered to pieces by the verbal confrontation – stops and asks herself ‘what can you do when you don’t like your life so far?’ That is the beginning of the (re)construction. ‘Initially, there is a healing in the very act of naming and understanding women’s general oppression, in collec- tively creating this new knowledge and identity’ (Lesage, 1990:230). As happened with its previous deconstructive process, this is a reconstruction that touches the boundary between fiction and reality: in the autumn of 2002, actress Lola Herrera stepped on to the stage to bring Carmen Sotillo to life again. Twenty-three years after the first performance, and 21 years after Evening Performance, Lola and Josefina Molina considered it apt to remember. The actress made a relevant confession to a Barcelona newspaper, La Vanguardia: ‘At that time I played a Carmen much pressed by Suárez Lafuente: Women in Pieces 403

Lola, by Lola’s painful experiences’ (La Vanguardia,18 September 2002), which validates the argument maintained in this paper. The director, Molina, stresses the common historical circumstances underlying women’s lives at that time; she says of this new performance: ‘Lola interprets Carmen now from her own serenity, not from the severe implication she felt then’ (La Vanguardia, 18 September 2002). Lo más natural (Most Natural), filmed in 1990, is a step ahead in the process of female reconstruction. The Spanish middle-aged women of 1990 had been raised a whole decade after Carmen and Lola’s own education, which meant not only that they had 10 years less of national- Catholic influence but also that they had entered the transition to democ- racy 10 years the older women’s junior. The influence of church and state was questioned radically in the 1970s and 1980s, and women’s access to their bodies and their voice became an easier task in individual terms, although society at large remained adamantly patriarchal. Josefina Molina concentrates here in the (de)construction of traditional family values in order to (re)construct new family concepts. The film opens, consequently, with an archetypal situation: middle-age husband announcing to his wife that he is leaving her for a younger woman; the wife says nothing but dives into one end of the family swimming-pool and emerges at the other end, a (more or less) determined woman. This is obviously a symbolic reaction, as the Bible proclaims, the old (wo)man has to die to allow the new one to emerge, and what can be more symbolic that being purified by water. Holding back her tears and her sense of failure, the woman, Clara, goes out of the house to find a job, and what she finds alongside is a young, good-looking lover. The new pairs are coupled like this: a 57-year- old rich ex-husband partnered with a 30-year-old woman computing expert, and a 45-year-old Clara with a 32-year-old ecologist; it goes without saying that while the first couple gets all the social benedictions, Clara and her partner are considered scandalous. Clara’s ex-husband feels somehow betrayed by his ex-wife’s outrageous behaviour, which detracts glamour from his own emotional ‘upgrading’. He tries to see more of Clara and takes to complaining to her about the inappropriate briskness of his young lover, while he spares no occasion of telling her that he still loves her. At this Clara often loses her temper, and when he pleads with her to be calm she gives a telling answer: ‘Clara dear has been calmed for the last 50 years.’ It is thus definitely stated that Clara is not going to remain seated and accept her lot. In contrast with Evening Performance, this film includes many characters, much action and varied settings. Whereas in the first film we were mere spectators, women feeling alongside with Lola and maybe sharing common experiences with her, in Most Natural we definitely interact with the plot, reacting to the tricks the director plays on us. Halfway through the film’s 90 minutes, the two couples and Clara and her husband’s two 404 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(4) children get together by chance in the family summer cottage and, against all improbability, a good relationship develops between the different individuals. While the elder members of each couple rest their bones in the sun, the younger ones play ball, dance and swim at the beach with the children. We spectators are as conditioned by society as anybody else, so Molina surprises us by making us believe that, naturally, the young man and the young woman will fall in love with each other and desert Clara and her ex-husband. When we become aware of how obvious and matter of fact our thoughts are, the first step towards plurality has finally been taken. At another point, Clara’s partner and her adolescent daughter are walking along the seaside against the backdrop of a glorious sunset, the girl is sad and brooding and he insists she tell him what is amiss with her. As it could not be otherwise we, the audience, think that the young woman has fallen hopelessly in love with her mother’s good-looking lover. However, Molina catches us unawares, for she gives the deconstructive process one more turn: the girl has a secret love, yes, but rather than her mother’s man, she is in love with her girlfriend from school. Her as yet, forbidden love makes her mother’s choice quite an easy one. The family group leaves the vacation with quite established relationships and a promise of ‘normalcy’. Molina keeps the trump card up her sleeve; in one of Clara’s ex- husband’s visits they embark in conversation and start reminiscing about past good times, which results in a sexual encounter. Back from their summer vacation, Clara realizes she is pregnant and calls her lover with the news. He is startled at first because he is sterile, a fact Clara was not aware of, and on hearing which Clara hangs up immediately. He is then forced to run after her to assure her that he is very happy to father her child. In a sequence that seems to belong to the ‘comedy of errors’ genre they meet the ex-husband and his partner, also on the run, at the airport (could there be a more neutral space?) and the four of them finally have a sit-down conversation. Clara’s ex-husband is horrified at the prospect of having another child and being tied down, and Clara sees no way out but to abort the baby. But Josefina Molina is clearly betting on a different set of family relationships and gives us a final scene in which the baby is being born inside the same pool Clara dived into at the beginning. She is being helped by her partner and comforted by her daughter and her husband’s partner, while her son and his father are fidgeting around in charge of the video camera. A baby girl is born, emerging out of the water as a renewed hope for other possibilities. She belongs a bit to everyone present and, therefore, cements the newly established familial relationships. The baby is given the emblematic name of Gaia, Mother Earth, cosmic unity and nature – Gaia is the clarion for change: a putative father that loves her, a father that fathered her genetically, a mother close to menopause, a young stepmother and a sister old enough to mother her. Suárez Lafuente: Women in Pieces 405

But what calls the audience’s attention in the final scene is the atmosphere of happy expectation and fulfilment at the birth. Most Natural was filmed at a time when families were being (re)defined in Spanish society. The traditional family had been decreed the pillar of society during Franco’s regime, and there was no questioning that marriage was, indeed, forever. The national-Catholic education that had conditioned Carmen and Lola’s lives, as examples of women in postwar times, persists now in preventing a non-traumatic transition to divorce, second marriages and abortion; as late as the spring of 2001 the Spanish synod complained publicly about the sexual mores in contemporary Spain. According to the bishops, society is ill because the traditional family is dying off, and sex is to blame: Spaniards practise sex out of wedlock, with no view to procreation and regardless of their being in love. Such a superficial and biased interpretation perpetuates tensions similar to those endured by Carmen/Lola, although Gaia has appeared to resolve them. However, there was no place at the end of the 20th century for monolithic thinking, and Molina opts for a deconstructive methodology. She puts the Derridian concept of différance into practice and offers us her particular view of meaning as being constantly in the making. Marriage and family are deconstructed both in Evening Performance and Most Natural to prove that it is impossible to reduce them to a mere archetype. Josefina Molina gives ample evidence of the social circumstances that produced the situations developing in her films: to witness, that it is possible to pin down a given situation at a given moment but also to depict social meanings in the making at the same time. Hence the title of this article: the film director deconstructs those situations in which women are entrapped, but does so in order to pave new paths to follow. The ‘women in the making’ that people Molina’s films are personal identities in their progress to improving their sense of themselves. Although the films show the pain and difficulties these women go through, their feeling of being victims dissolves towards the end, as they understand that life is long and theirs to live. Josefina Molina is only in her sixties – let us wish her a long life to inform and delight us.

APPENDIX

Details of the films by Josefina Molina discussed in this article are as follows: Función de noche (Evening Performance) (1981). Cast: Lola Herrera, Daniel Dicenta. Spanish production. Director: Josefina Molina. Lo más natural (Most natural) (1990) Cast: Charo López, Miguel Bosé, 406 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(4)

Patrick Bauchau, Viviane Vives. Spanish production. Director: Joseﬁna Molina.

Josefina Molina’s Work to Date Short films: 1967: Melodrama infernal. 1968: La metamorforsis. 1970: Mi tio Jules y Vera. Feature-length films: 1973: Vera, un cuento cruel. 1979: La Tilita. 1981: Función de noche. 1988: Esquilache. 1990: Lo más natural. 1993: La Lola se va a los puertos.

Television series: 1982–3: Teresa de Jesús.

Television screen adaptations (from 1970 onwards): Teatro Estudio Uno Cuentos y leyendas. Los libros. Paisaje con ﬁguras.

REFERENCES

Delibes, Miguel (1966) Cinco horas con Mario. Barcelona: Ediciones Destino. Donapetry, María (1998) La otra mirada. New Orleans, LA: University Press of the South. Donapetry, Maria (2001) Toda ojos. Oviedo: KRK Ediciones. Haskell, Molly (1987) From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. (Orig. pub. 1973.) Kuhn, Annette (1990) ‘Textual Politics’, pp. 250–67 in Patricia Erens (ed.) Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lesage, Julia (1990) ‘The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film’, pp. 222–37 in in Patricia Erens (ed.) Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Bloom- ington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

María Suárez Lafuente is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oviedo, northern Spain. She has published extensively on women’s literature written in English, German and Spanish. She has been president of the Spanish Association for Women’s Studies since 1999, and was co-founder in 1985 of the Seminar on Suárez Lafuente: Women in Pieces 407

Women and Literature in Oviedo. At present she coordinates the Doctorate Programme on Women’s Studies at the University of Oviedo. She is also a lifelong researcher of the Faustian tradition, in its male and female aspects. Address: Department of English Philology, Campus de Humanidades, University of Oviedo, 33007 Oviedo, Spain. [email: [email protected]]