Transferences of Affects: Viewing and Contemplating the Interval in Actresses’ Bodies

Abstract

This article posits a reconsideration of cinema from the perspective of actresses and editing, of what actresses transform in their bodies and how they reflect the aesthetic and political transformations of an era, with its tumults and upheavals. It thus explores how the interval is embodied in the actress’s work, generating changes of image, and highlights the role of women editors, who construct female characters to analyse the multiple possibilities that actresses invent and deploy in their performances. Associative montage is thus proposed as a way of learning to see and as a dialectical and political gesture that explores the tension between the real body and the imaginary body of the actress, conditioned by social and political norms. Actresses such as Lola Herrera, Amparo Soler Leal, Sandrine Battistella and Lina Romay turn their bodies into sites of resistance, liberation and aesthetic experimentation. In this way, their performances articulate socio-political conflicts and personal desires, manifesting affective excesses and gestures that verbal language cannot fully express, transforming them into a political and aesthetic site for resignifying womanhood and representation.