The female body as an instrument of visual pleasure and patriarchal submission in the documentaries of the Spanish, Italian and French Ministries of Agriculture

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the use made of the female figure, in general, and the female body, in particular, by documentaries produced by the Ministries of Agriculture of Spain, Italy and France from the thirties to the seventies of the twentieth century. In order to do so, first of all, the historical context of production of these documentaries will have to be established, briefly, as well as the compositional relationships that can be guessed between them. Then, as a theoretical-methodological approach, we will consider the contributions of the feminist film theory developed in Europe and the United States in the last third of the past century. Feminist theorists pursued, among other objectives, the charge of discursive practices at the service of a system where women fulfill the role of objects. The application of these approaches in a corpus of selected documentaries will demonstrate the effectiveness of audiovisual products whose compositional guidelines emphasize the pleasure of the male voyeur, who will be persuaded by the erotic charge with which the female figures are dressed on screen, while validating sexual difference and denying women the category of subject.