The pulse of a time. Affective and activist networks for women’s film (Argentine, 1988)

Abstract

In 1988, the city of Mar del Plata hosted the first edition of the “Women and Film” International Women’s Film Festival, a trailblazing space aimed at disseminating the work of female directors from around the world with the goal of encouraging women’s involvement in filmmaking. The festival opened up a zone of circulation and visibility for films made by women, giving rise to an environment of collaboration and work-related and affective support which proved central as a means to establish the realm of filmmaking, with its associated trades, as an area for women to work in. Based on a feminist strategy of re-writing history that enables new emphases and approaches to emerge, and assuming a premise which posits the need to think of cinema as an object crossed by formal and aesthetic tensions, but also institutional, social, and affective ones, this paper aims at historicizing the creation of the festival as a form of association born in the spaces of activism where women met, spaces that had gained momentum in the Argentine cultural field after the return of democracy in 1983, fostering an exchange of experiences –and the recognition of one’s own experience in the collective– as the foundation of feminist political action.