Leading Women in Spanish Film and Television

This lecture will focus on Spanish cinema and television to ask: what happens when we re-focus screen histories through the lens of gender and feminism? Taking the period of Spain’s Transition from dictatorship to democracy over the 1960s and 1970s as its focus, the lecture will open out our understanding of creative leadership by looking beyond the director to ‘below-the-line’ roles, often invisible to the viewer, but critical to creativity; it will focus on the editor in film, as well as wider leadership roles in television. Looking at new archives and looking aslant at known archives, as well as using interviews and close analysis of texts, the lecture proposes a new history of Spanish screen culture of the period, one where women are no longer only present as objects on screen, but active as creative leaders.

The lecture will be followed by a response by Professor Hilary Owen FBA and Professor Núria Triana Toribio, Professor Faulkner’s collaborators on the ‘Leading Women’ research project.

Sally Faulkner is a specialist in Spanish cinema, with significant interests also in Spanish television, European (especially Portuguese) film, and Latin American cinema. Her research and teaching focus on gender and feminism, politics and cinema production histories, and questions of cultural value, asking what is included, and what is excluded, and why, in national and transnational screen histories. She is the author of five monographs, including the one-hundred-year history A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society 1910-2010, and currently leads the five-year international research project, funded by the British government’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, Leading Women in Portuguese and Spanish Cinema and Television, 1970-1980. Following her first appointment as lecturer in Spanish at the University of Exeter in 2001, she was promoted to a personal chair in Hispanic Studies and Film Studies in 2015; in 2024 she was elected to the 1933 Professorship of Spanish at the University of Cambridge.