In Our Own Image: An Oral History of Mexican Women Filmmakers (1988-1994) Item Type Book Authors Arredondo, Isabel Citation Arredondo, Isabel. 2012. In Our Own Image: An Oral History of Mexican Female Filmmakers 1988-1994. Trans. Mark Schafer, Jim Heinrich, Elissa Rashkin, and Isabel Arredondo. Web. Download date 30/09/2021 07:20:02 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/1213 Copyright 2012 In Our Own Image: An Oral History of Mexican Women Filmmakers (1988-1994) Isabel Arredondo Translated by Mark Schafer, Jim Heinrich, Elissa Rashkin, and Isabel Arredondo To Gwen Kirkpatrick, who encouraged me to write this book. TABLE OF CONTENT Acknowledgements .....................................................................................................................................1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................1 Film Production and The State in Mexico.................................................................................................21 Juan José Bremer: “Cultural policy should not provide answers”..........................................................25 Ignacio Durán: “The challenge was to steal attention from the soaps” ..................................................33 Alfredo Joskowicz: “The Film School Graduates” ..................................................................................41 Busi Cortés: “Free Lunch” ......................................................................................................................51 2. Guita Schyfter..........................................................................................................................................61 “I would get so panicked . I had to take sedatives” ............................................................................66 3. Busi Cortés...............................................................................................................................................82 “We each must overcome something left us by our grandmother” ..........................................................87 4. Marisa Sistach .......................................................................................................................................118 “Not to have characters on the screen with whom women can identify is a real shortcoming” ............124 5. María Novaro.........................................................................................................................................137 “Master of Her Own Life” .....................................................................................................................143 6. Dana Rotberg.........................................................................................................................................190 “I Don’t Judge Malena” ........................................................................................................................195 7. Eva López-Sánchez................................................................................................................................218 “There are things I write just for myself” ..............................................................................................222 Epilogue......................................................................................................................................................248 List of Terms and Abbreviations .............................................................................................................256 Filmography...............................................................................................................................................260 Works Cited...............................................................................................................................................268 Acknowledgements This book would not have been completed without the help of many many people. I am grateful to Juan José Bremer, Busi Cortés, Ignacio Durán, Alfredo Joskowicz, Eva López- Sánchez, María Novaro, Dana Rotberg, and Guita Schyfter, who supported the project from the first time I arrived at their door, and all the other times that followed! They gave generously of their time, their intellectual and emotional assistance, and extremely valuable information. I would like to acknowledge the financial assistance provided by Plattsburgh State University through “Sponsored Research,” a specialized research center; their help allowed me to work on this book with students Dorothee Racette, Lola Gascón, Mercedes Hidalgo, Sandra García, and Tricia Stewart who transcribed and corrected the interviews. UUP, the faculty union at Plattsburgh State University, paid for my trip to New York City to interview Dana Rotberg and also awarded me the Drescher Fellowship to work on the manuscript, which was published in Spanish by Iberoamericana and the Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes in 2001. I am grateful to the Center for Research and Teaching on Women at McGill University, and especially to the Center’s director during 2000-2001, Shree Mulay, for having provided me with a place to grow intellectually and work comfortably during my sabbatical, as well as afterwards while pursuing my MA in film studies at Concordia University. I want to thank Roberto Ernesto Antillón Mena for obtaining a recording of Busi Cortés's presentation at the 1997 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in Guadalajara. A very special thanks goes to my colleague and friend Fernando Gaona, with whom I discussed for hours my ideas for this book. I also wish to thank. Erin Mitchell, who helped with revisions, Margarita de la Vega, who commented on the first drafts in English, and Jim Heinrich and Mark Schafer, who worked with me as a team to do the initial translation, with Schafer fine-tuning the translation. In rethinking the introduction, I was inspired by the approach that Rosanna Maule uses in her course on pioneer women filmmakers; I saw this approach at work at the conference on Women and the Silent Screen organized by Maule and Katie Russel at Concordia University in 2004, which I attended with a Winkel grant from Plattsburgh State University. My heartfelt thanks go to Elissa Rashkin, who played a crucial role that went beyond that of translator on the final version of the manuscript. Her extensive knowledge of Mexico and Mexican culture brought out the nuances in the translation and made the interviews intimate and alive; her meticulous editing has improved the text enormously. However, it is as a colleague and one of the leading scholars of contemporary Mexican women’s filmmaking that I appreciated Rashkin the most. Our discussions helped me to reflect on the reasons why I had chosen to approach the Mexican filmmakers from the perspective of state cinema. The help of my family has been indispensable during the different stages of the manuscript. Thanks to Doug Yu who over the years has cared for our children while I was interviewing filmmakers and working on the manuscript. Thanks also to my children, Javier and Isabel Yu, who traveled with me in my long stays in Mexico and Canada. To each of you my warmest thanks for helping me write “In Our Own Image.” Introduction In 1980, filmmaker Marisa Sistach said, “I believe that it is up to women to invent a new language for our field, nourished by the common experiences of our individual histories. Woman’s word should be inscribed in our culture. It is a matter of reappropriating our image and, in this way, to seek our identity.” 1 Sistach’s statement, especially the phrase in Spanish palabra de mujer , “woman’s word,” suggests to me a subversive appropriation of the respect that is normally given to the word of God in the Bible. Sistach urges women to create a specifically female perspective and inscribe it into culture. In this book, I take up Sistach’s proposal as my own, constructing a history of Mexican women filmmakers in their own words. I began my study of Mexican filmmakers in 1994, after completing a research project on contemporary Cuban filmmakers. 2 I was drawn to study Mexican filmmakers because of the high number of films they had produced (María Novaro, for instance, had already directed three 1 Lucrecia Martín and Cecilia Pérez-Grovas, “En tierras de machos: Encuesta a las estudiantes de cine” 34. Introduction 2 feature films), and my perspective was comparative. Why, I wondered, had capable women directors in Cuba not been able to direct feature films, while their Mexican counterparts had? In other words, what were the differences between the state-supported cinemas of Cuba and Mexico in terms of providing opportunities for women? My question required that I investigate the work of filmmakers making feature films within a state setting, and was primarily institutional. Assuming that many women wanted to direct feature films but only some were able to do so, I wanted to know what institution or institutions had helped them. Most of the interviews included in In Our Own Image took place between January 1995 and November 1998. 3 The interviews are held together by a number of common threads, the first of which is the aim of documenting the academic and professional lives of their subjects. Preliminary research made me think that film schools, which did not exist to any significant extent in Cuba, had played a crucial role. I wanted to check my hypothesis with the filmmakers