A Women’s Nation: Feminism, Class, and National Identity in Margarita Ledo Andión’s Nación (2020)

Abstract

Through her films, the Galician filmmaker Margarita Ledo Andión builds a singular benchmark on the margins of a peripheral cinema per se: the Novo Cinema Galego. Her performative and experimental narratives, in line with avant-garde films of other small European cinemas, her nationalist and feminist (political) discourse, and her condition as a woman filmmaker situate her filmography on the intersection of multiple peripheries. This paper analyzes her most recent film, Nación (2020), from the perspective of cinema made by women as minor cinema and an example of “fourth cinema” as an instrument to make visible the role of women in the class struggle and the construction of Galician national identity.

RESUMO

A través dos seus filmes, a cineasta galega Margarita Ledo Andión constrúe unha proposta cinematográfica singular que se sitúa nas marxes dun cinema xa periférico: o Novo Cinema Galego. O seu relato performativo e experimental, en liña con filmes vangardistas doutros pequenos cinemas europeos, o seu discurso marcadamente nacionalista e feminista (político), e a súa condición de cineasta muller identifican unha filmografía na intersección de multiples periferias. Este artigo analiza o seu filme máis recente, Nación (2020) dende a perspectiva do cinema realizado por mulleres como cinema menor e como “cuarto cinema” de cara a visibilizar o papel das obreiras na loita de clases e na construción da identidade nacional galega.

Keywords:

• minor cinema
• fourth cinema
• feminism
• class
• national identity

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• cinema menor
• cuarto cinema
• feminismo
• clase
• identidade nacional

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Margarita Ledo Andión, the production company Nós Productora Cinematográfica Galega, and the distribution company La Atalante for allowing us to use images from Nación in this publication.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The website is a collective project that wants to place value on the authors and films of the Novo Cinema Galego by compiling information and academic literature on diverse topics related to the movement.

2 [“XOANA: In that dark decade, from the eighties to the nineties, textiles, canneries, crockery… all the parts of the industrial work that women had access to were destroyed. Many factories, such as Regojo, were born before the Republic; others such as ODOSA, the oldest cannery in Galicia, had been active for 100 years … and Pontesa, today an imported grain warehouse.

MÓNICA: Thrown, they with their desires, from one hand to the other, through unviable formulas such as the joint-stock company, by deliberately useless managers, except to end with thousands of jobs and throw away what several generations have learned”].

3 [“WORKER 1: Here every day, holding on to us, and on top of us, as if… And yet, the group of men… there is no one in charge of the men in this company. The one in charge only for the female body. Men are free. And now we are here, fighting for our jobs, but men are apart; they do not join us. Why don’t they join us if we are all brothers, if we are the same person? Why aren’t they here in the middle of us?.

WORKER 2:They are always free and earn much more than us”].

4 [“Working with archives—and always in my films there are files of different registers and different categories—has to do with it, with recovering those elements and those bodies in action and locating them on a long road to self-awareness and occupation of public space, which is to which we are entitled as a nation”].

5 [“If I live and have a square full of sun that, in the end, brings the night; if I live, and you, somewhere, also dream of a brief flash turning off the darkness of my fingers”].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marta Pérez-Pereiro

Marta Pérez-Pereiro is a lecturer and researcher at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC). She holds a PhD from the same university where she teaches the courses on cinema production and contemporary audiovisual culture in the Department of Communication Studies. Pérez-Pereiro is a member of the Grupo de Estudos Audiovisuais (Audiovisual Studies Research Group [GEA]) of the USC. Her main research topics are small cinemas, particularly Galician cinema, humor in media and social media, and accountability in media. On these topics, Pérez-Pereiro has written papers including “Barriers and Opportunities for Cinema Distribution in European Minority Languages: The Case of O que arde in the Digital Single Market,” co-authored with Marijo Deogracias, published in Language & Communication, and “Flagship Films, Audiovisual Policies, and Circulation: The Cases of Pa negre, Handia, and O que arde,” with Marijo Deogracias and Soliña Barreiro, published in the journal Quaderns de CAC.

Silvia Roca-Baamonde

Silvia Roca-Baamonde holds a PhD in Contemporary Communication and Information from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Her research is in the fields of Cultural Studies and identity, thus evaluating stereotypes and discourses in the media—with a particular interest in gender and national representations—and analyzing media in non-hegemonic languages and small cinemas. Among her more recent works on these topics, it is worth mentioning the article “Key Challenges and Recommendations to Provide Europe With a Film-Subtitling Protocol in the Digital Era Through Three Case Studies” (2021), co-authored with Enrique Castelló-Mayo, Margarita Ledo-Andión, and Antía López-Gómez, published in Comunicação e sociedade, and the co-edition with Marta Pérez-Pereiro of the Issue K of the journal Galicia 21, entitled “Modos de ver e ser vistas. As mulleres que coñezo no cinema galego,” published in 2022.