“Cameras! Cameras! Cameras!”: Archives and Struggle in Contemporary Galician Cinema

Abstract

Historically, political struggle has often been portrayed as a male domain. The traditional space for women has been associated with care, reproduction and the household, which explains their stereotypical representation and their limited presence in images of protest that are defined by a masculine iconography of uprising and violence. However, the study of certain contemporary Galician documentaries that make use of archival material reveals the recurrence of a different gesture: the woman-as-barrier, confronting the police as they try to forcibly disperse the protestors. The aim of this study is to define a method that facilitates the analysis of this gesture in the films Nación (Margarita Ledo, 2020) and Os días afogados (César Souto Vilanova and Luís Avilés Baquero, 2015), but also of the invisible gesture of the filmmakers’ appropriation of archival footage of past struggles that brings it back into circulation.