A Descent into the Atavistic Feminine: The Dances in Facing the Wind

Abstract

In the context of the discourse related to the Empty Spain, there is a clear trend in the so-called New Spanish Cinema of exploring the idea of a return to the deserted rural landscape, to repopulate it through images and, in this way, resurrect an ancestral memory that has all but disappeared. It seems more than a mere coincidence that since the release of Mercedes Álvarez’s The Sky Turns (El cielo gira, 2004), this movement has been led mainly by female filmmakers. In the early 1990s, Judith Mayne argued that contemporary feminism had become obsessed with the idea of excavating a space to uncover a world that existed prior to the realm of the patriarchal symbolic. This article is articulated around the analysis of a recent film, Meritxell Colell’s Facing the Wind (2018), which, through the director’s way of filming gestures, and specifically, dances, is able to evoke an atavistic time of the rural feminine.