Acceptance of proposals for the Notebook section: from April 1st 2021 to April 30th 2021
Publication: January 2022
Editors: Shaila García Catalán, Aarón Rodríguez Serrano, Marta Martín Núñez

Schoolgirls (Las niñas, Pilar Palomero, 2020) begins with a series of close-ups showing the girls gesticulating, pretending to sing. After the exercise, the nun asks a few of them to “sing for real”, and others only to move their lips. The teacher plays them the first notes on the piano, but just when the girls take a breath to sing or pretend to sing, the scene cuts to black and to a powerfully eloquent silence. This prologue is offered as a hushed hymn to introduce the story of a girl who cannot or does not know how to speak out and her personal journey towards the articulation of a voice. This girl (portrayed by Andrea Fandos), with her bright-eyed, attentive gaze, could be interpreted as an heir to Ana Torrent in The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena, Víctor Erice, 1973), the emblematic girl of Spanish cinema who stands as a symbol of the thirst for knowledge. She could also be interpreted as a metonym for a generation of female directors who years later were able to articulate a voice in cinema, to turn their vocation into their work.

In 2013, when the journal Caimán Cuadernos de Cine tried to introduce the label “Otro Nuevo Cine Español” (“Other New Spanish Cinema”) to refer to the group of new filmmakers who had emerged on the Spanish scene since the beginning of the millennium, that group included fewer than ten women. It was an insufficient number by any measure, but nevertheless a sign that a seed had been sown by film industry publications and institutions to support the gradual movement towards equality of opportunity in Spanish film production. In 2017, on its tenth anniversary, Caimán published a feature on the top 50 female directors of the 21^st century, eight of whom were Spanish. However, in the documentary series Women Make Film (Mark Cousins, 2018), the only Spanish woman included was Ana Mariscal.

In any case, the question of women in Spanish cinema has been a hot topic for many years now in all kinds of forums: publications, associations, and informal movements, as well as moves to recover and acknowledge major figures in Spanish film history such as Cecilia Bartolomé or Josefina Molina. What has been missing, of course, is recognition by the country’s chronically precarious film industry, and by extension, the acceptance and support of an audience that would embrace these new films as their own and as works of value.

The question of women’s voices in Spanish cinema should not be understood to refer solely to a group of filmmakers who have built on the positions gained by more recent creators like Mercedes Álvarez, Icíar Bollaín, or Isabel Coixet. Instead, it would seem reasonable to think of it as a new, quietly established position—neither homogeneous nor limited exclusively to fiction films—expressed in work of profound narrative precision that is intimate and biographical, personal yet profoundly generational. The work of filmmakers like Mar Coll, Virginia García del Pino, and Neus Ballús spearheaded an exciting, complex movement that in more recent years has also included the first films of Carla Simón, Pilar Palomero, Lucía Alemany, Celia Rico, and Elena Trapé. Also included among these women exploring the limits and edges of contemporary film and television are writers like María Cañas, Jaione Camborda, and Eva Vila.

For this issue of L´Atalante, we want to invite readers to ponder the key features of this new generation of Spanish female filmmakers who, through their writing and direction, are constructing a unique voice as auteurs. Their work, without laying claim to being feminist or empowered cinema, explores female identity more subtly and intelligently as a question that affects and interests both men and women. In the case of Schoolgirls, for example, critics and academics agree that it has produced a portrait of a generation in which both men and women have re-discovered themselves. Sexual difference is important on the symbolic level; it is not a question of anatomy or nature but of words, of subjective positions, and of playing with appearances. If for centuries people have tried to capture the feminine—to cage, imprison, eradicate, or silence it—with concepts like the madwoman, the witch, the whore, the saint, the dead woman, or the machine, it is because something about it escapes the logic of meaning and representation. And as the cinematic art continues to posit conceptualizations and versions of the feminine, we believe it important to listen to what it has to say.

With this in mind, for this issue we are calling for papers that explore female voices in Spanish cinema from the perspective of film analysis, focusing on films’ expressive, narrative, and stylistic features. Issues that could be considered include:

1. Thematic and formal elements of new films by Spanish women.
2. A study of a female filmmaker, her stylistic features and the unique vision of the world offered by her work.
3. Memory as a privileged narrative element.
4. Relationships with time, death, grief, and absence.
5. Films that refer to, borrow from, or rewrite Spanish film history.
6. Images of the family: motherhood, fatherhood, sisterhood.
7. The preeminence of sexual awakening and the treatment of the body, its passions and afflictions.
8. Dialogues and conversations with maleness.
9. New Spanish cinema in other fields outside traditional fiction (video art, documentary, essay film, audiovisual diary, etc.)
10. Production and distribution policy in relation to women.

L'Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos accepts submissions of unpublished essays on topics related to film theory and/or praxis that stand out for their innovative nature. Articles should focus on approaches to the cinematographic fact made preferably from the perspectives of historiography or audiovisual analysis. Those texts that approach novel objects of study with rigorous and well-evidenced methodologies will be appreciated. Articles that take as their main reference the processes of signification through the analysis of the audiovisual form and/or the narratological elements specific to our field, focusing on methodologies specifically related to the treatment of the image will be favoured in the selection process. Although we accept works with other methodologies that approach the filmic fact from transversal perspectives (Cultural Studies, philological approaches, etc.) we consider that the main interest of the journal is located on the studies that take the specifically cinematographic expressive tools as the main elements of discourse. Likewise, texts that are not limited to describing, enumerating or summarizing details of the plot, but that rigorously apply a specific and well-evidenced analysis methodology, reaching particular and novel results, will be given priority.

Below are a few aspects to keep in mind:

• Submissions must be original and must conform to the submission guidelines of the journal and to the standards and scientific rigour expected of an academic publication [see SUBMISSIONS section]
• Submissions will be evaluated for the originality of the topic explored, especially if it relates to an issue not previously addressed in the publication. Submissions dealing with topics previously addressed in the journal may be rejected. The content of the issues published to date can be consulted on the journal's website.
• All submissions will undergo an external peer review process that will respect the anonymity of both authors and reviewers (double blind peer review) in an effort to prevent any possibility of bias. In the event of a very high number of submissions, the Editorial Board will make a prior selection of the articles to be peer reviewed, choosing the articles deemed the most appropriate for the issue. Failure to observe the submission guidelines and/or standards of originality and academic rigour will result in rejection of the submission by the Editorial Board without external review.
• Authors of accepted submissions will be contacted within six months.
• Articles (which should be between 5,000 and 7,000 words including all sections) must be submitted via the website of the journal as .rtf, .odt or .docx files, using the template provided for this purpose. Files containing the author's statement (.pdf) and any images (.psd, .png, .jpg, .tiff) must be uploaded to the website as complementary files. A detailed version of the submission guidelines can be found at the SUBMISSIONS section. Any articles that fail to meet these requirements will be rejected automatically.
• The selected articles will be published in a bilingual edition (Spanish and English).
• If the original manuscript is in Spanish, the authors of the texts accepted for publication must pay the costs that result from the translation to English or revision—in the case of providing, along with the original, a translated version—of their article. In all cases, and in order to guarantee the quality of the translations and the unity of linguistic criteria, the text must be translated or reviewed by the translator recommended by the journal, a freelance professional specialised in Film Studies. His work will be paid in advance and via Paypal by the authors.
• If the original manuscript is in English*, the authors of the texts accepted for publication must provide a professional translation to Spanish. [*L'Atalante may also suggest a revision by the translator recommended by the journal for Non-English speaking authors.]
• L'Atalante does not offer any compensation for published articles. For more information: info@revistaatalante.com