The Becoming-Animal of Ana Belén, an Actress in Transition

Abstract

Ana Belén was one of the most representative actresses of Spanish cinema during the country’s transition to democracy. She embodied the prototype of the emancipated, modern, politically engaged woman, becoming the symbol of a new democratic society that needed to bury the moral codes of the Franco regime. In this context, women’s sexual freedom found a space for representation in the actress’s body, marked by impulses of rupture and dissent against the rigid heteropatriarchal logic of the dictatorship. This article investigates certain gestures and attitudes in Ana Belén’s acting work during the final years of the Franco regime and the period of the transition, drawing on the philosophy of becoming by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as the feminist theories of Teresa de Lauretis and Rosi Braidotti, with special emphasis on The Creature (La criatura, 1977), a film by Eloy de la Iglesia that has been largely overlooked by the academic literature. This film, which tells the story of love and desire between a housewife and her dog, serves as an emblematic example of the emergence of new female subjectivities in Spanish cinema during the transition, embodied in micropolitical gestures that challenged the hegemony of the phallocentric gaze.