This lecture will focus on Spanish cinema and television to ask: what happens when we re-focus screen histories through the lens of gender and feminism? Taking the period of Spain’s Transition from dictatorship to democracy over the 1960s and 1970s as its focus, the lecture will open out our understanding of creative leadership by looking beyond the director to ‘below-the-line’ roles, often invisible to the viewer, but critical to creativity; it will focus on the editor in film, as well as wider leadership roles in television. Looking at new archives and looking aslant at known archives, as well as using interviews and close analysis of texts, the lecture proposes a new history of Spanish screen culture of the period, one where women are no longer only present as objects on screen, but active as creative leaders.

The lecture will be followed by a response by Professor Hilary Owen FBA and Professor Núria Triana Toribio, Professor Faulkner’s collaborators on the ‘Leading Women’ research project.