The Difficult Relationship between Female Agency and Desire: Aurora Bautista and Amparo Rivelles

Abstract

The essay will discuss four films produced in Spain between 1944 and 1951, two starring Aurora Bautista and two starring Amparo Rivelles. The two films by Bautista involve a move from the patriotic epic genre to melodrama; the two films by Rivelles, a move from melodrama to the patriotic epic. It will consider how their performance style in their earlier work spills over into the later film, producing a disturbance in generic expectations. Following Janet Staiger’s notion of «perverse spectatorship», the essay will consider how these four films may have allowed female spectators of the time pleasures that did not coincide with dominant ideology. In doing so, it will pay particular attention to the different, shifting relations between female agency and desire in each film.