Introduction

In the previous chapters I dealt firstly with the Argentine political cinema of the 1960s as, to some extent, a predecessor of the cinema of the postdictatorship years and, then, with the political thriller as the ‘transitional’ genre through which the abuses of power were taken to the big screen. In my examination of political thrillers I explored gender issues primarily in terms of masculinity and its crisis; in contrast, my aim in this chapter is to appraise both the representations of femininity and certain aspects of female authorship. For this purpose, I shall concentrate on three Argentine films that, either because of their recourse to melodrama or because of their gendered point of view on history, can be studied in terms of what Charlotte Brunsdon has defined in a broad sense as ‘films for women’, a notion that functions as a means to ‘explain the genre conventions and pleasures with which most people are likely to be familiar’, regardless of their gender identity (1986, 3). The films that will be analysed in this chapter are Luis Puenzo's La historia oficial / The Official Story (1985), Jeanine Meerapfel's La amiga / Die Freundin / The Girlfriend (1989) and Lita Stantic's Un muro de silencio / Black Flowers (1993).

The fact that the films of María Luisa Bemberg – without doubt the best known and most well-respected female director of the decade – are not analysed here might come as a surprise to the reader. However, their absence from the corpus I examine is simply down to the fact that although some her films deal explicitly with tumultuous periods of Argentine history – for example, the tyranny of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829–1852) in Camila (1984) and the context from which Peronism emerged in the 1940s in Miss Mary (1986) – none of them has explicitly focused on the period covered in this study, namely the years of the last military dictatorship. Still, as the reader might have already noticed, there are several references to her work throughout this book, since it is practically impossible not to refer to Bemberg and her legacy when working on the cinema that followed the advent of democracy in 1983.

Before dealing with the films that form my corpus I shall submit a concise theoretical contextualisation regarding some of the most relevant concepts coined in the field of feminist film theory.