BARBARA
ZECCHI
BARBARA ZECCHI
COLLABORATIONS & RESEARCH PROJECTS
During my years at the University of Massachusetts, I have focused on studying the (still limited) corpus of Spanish women filmmakers. To move beyond the constraints of terms like “feminist cinema,” “cinema by women,” or “women’s cinema,” and to address the crisis of naming in feminist film criticism identified by Ruby Rich, I coined the term “gynocine.”
I argue that the term Gynocine is useful for several reasons:
1) Interpretive displacement: Unlike the label “feminist,” which carries implicit connotations, gynocine shifts the interpretive work to my analysis. In other words, I am the one engendering this corpus through a feminist lens. Gynocine itself is not necessarily feminist, but its interpretation is.
2) Beyond biological determinism: A film does not need to be directed by a cisgender woman to be considered gynocine; what matters is that its perspective is gynocentric and feminist in scope.
3) Inclusive of women’s experience: While not all cinema is gynocine, and not all gynocine is explicitly feminist, all films directed by women are included, because even those who distance themselves from feminism operate within a system of practices and institutions structured by sex-gender discrimination.
4) Expanded notion of authorship: Gynocine recognizes that filmmaking is collaborative. Screenwriters, actors, and other contributors can also be considered “authors” of gynocine, reflecting the collective nature of cinematic creation.
GYNOCINE
In my monographs I approach gynocine according to three different angles: Desenfocadas (Barcelona: Icaria, 2014) develops an analysis of the historical evolution of gynocine through four generations of Spanish women directors; La pantalla sexuada (Madrid: Cátedra, 2014) is a cross-sectional study of the major concepts that have been influential in feminist film theory and the shaping of gynocine; and, finally, El género del género (in progress) focuses on the most common genres of gynocine, such as melodrama, comedy, thriller, etc., by tackling the so called genre/gender debate.
Funded by a University of Massachusetts Digital Humanities Initiative seed grant, the Gynocine Project --that I have been directing since 2011-- develops an open access online database on gynocine's production. The original outcome of this project was to offer resources related to the production of women directors in the Spanish state, but its scope has recently expanded to other countries of Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
FOUNDER
&
PROJECT LEAD
CinemAGEnder
In 2017, in collaboration with Raquel Medina (Aston University, Birmingham, UK), I founded the international interdisciplinary research group CinemAGEnder.
This initiative is dedicated to the examination of the intersection of age with gender in visual cultures.
CO-FOUNDER & CO-DIRECTOR
The interdisciplinary character of CinemAGEnder transcends traditional academic boundaries, demonstrating a commitment to establishing a collaborative network with diverse social stakeholders, including associations, non-governmental entities, social groups, and the broader public. Among the key participants in this collaborative network are notable organizations such as the Association of Actresses "De 50 para arriba," CIMA (Asociación de mujeres en el audiovisual), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Spain, Lesgaicinemad, and others. The network underscores the imperative for synergies among the realms of artistic creation, academic research in visual culture, and gerontology/geriatrics. This concerted effort aims to collectively raise awareness regarding the discrimination faced by older individuals
REFRAMING THE ARGUMENT
CO-ORGANIZER
Video Essays as Communicative Research Practice:
With a focus on videographic criticism as a methodology of scholarly research and knowledge production, “Reframing the Argument” offers graduate students training in advanced audiovisual rhetoric, video-editing skills, developing a scholarly argument, and using videographic methods to express, enhance, and inform theses and dissertations. Students will gain useful training that will inform not only their individual research projects, but also their future career aspirations, whether they be academic, academic-adjacent, private industry, or in public scholarship. Together with mentors, students will explore how to convey complex research ideas and questions in ways that compliment the affordances of videographic methodologies.
What might a thesis or dissertation look like as a video essay? How can we communicate our written argumentation/ideas in an audiovisual form, without relying on explicitly explanatory crutches? How can we apply videographic tools as research methodologies that enable us to rethink our objects of study?
“Reframing the Argument” is a collaboration between the University of Notre Dame, Tel Aviv University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It is designed to establish and explore videographic practices for graduate students in support of building a globally and linguistically-diverse community of scholarly practice.
Organized by Colleen Laird, Ariel Avissar, Matthew Payne, and myself, and funded by a a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connections Grant (PI Colleen Laird) the project advances scholarly and pedagogical practice by connecting established videographic scholars with graduate students. With a focus on videographic criticism as a methodology of scholarly research and knowledge production, “Reframing the Argument” offers training in advanced audiovisual rhetoric, video-editing skills, developing a scholarly argument, and using videographic methods to enhance and inform graduate-student theses and dissertations. The project will consisted of an online event followed by an intensive five-day in-person workshop held at The University of Notre Dame that generated exercises, theoretical discussion, collaborative research, engagement and critique, and mentorship for each participant to produce a final video essay that expresses the central argument of their dissertation or thesis.
WOMEN FILM PIONEER IN SPAIN
PROJECT LEAD
Until very recently, the presence of a female gaze in the origins of “the moving image” in Spain was limited to little more than a speculation. Unlike what has happened to British, American, French and Italian histories of cinema, that have recovered the work of their first women directors, in Spain it is practically impossible to find a woman behind the camera during the silent era. Since the publication of Susan Martin-Márquez’s book Feminist Discourses in Spanish Cinema in 1999 a few female names have been rescued from oblivion –Helena Cortesina, Carmen Pisano, Isabel Roy and Elena Jordi. In a few publications, these names have been added to that of Rosario Pi Brujas, who for years was mentioned as the first woman director in the histories of Spanish cinema (if she was mentioned at all). However, as in the case with many films of this era, the work of these women pioneers, to date, has disappeared, and very little information has been gathered.
The goal of this project is to fill this void and to recover a female tradition of filmmakers. On this topic I am working on a long term project originally funded by a UMASS Faculty Research Grant/ Healey Endowment Grant (FRG/HEG) and on a videographic essay "Women Film Pioneers of the Camara: the Off Screen"
COLLABORATOR
I have been a member of the Research Goup Cos i Textualitad (Body and textuality) based at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, since its formation in 2005. The research group, directed by Meri Torras, studies the body as
a text that results out of the inscription and re-inscription of cultural
discourses, a place where debating and discussing are transformed constantly.
The body has been presented to us as natural, not cultural; prefixed and immediate, not constructed or mediated; anatomic, exterior, superficial, not psychological, not interior, nor deeep; set, not changing, especially concerning gender-sex categories. It is set under the label of normative discourses which act as a form of control. The body is a representation of the body itself, a place where identity remains.
Project Website: https://webs.uab.cat/cositextualitats/grup/
Imagologías: Imágenes del otro
TEAM MEMBER
“Images of the Other: Immigration on contemporary Spanish Literature and Film ” is a research project based at the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (2005-2009).
Directed by Montserrat Iglesias, the project focused on the representation of the immigrant "Other" through different artistic practices in contemporary Spain. Literature, drama and cinema, among others, have their particular way to react towards this new Spanish reality.
“Images of the Other” has planned different seminars, courses and supervises some doctoral thesis. The project is also collecting a catalogue of textbooks, films and images about the immigrant’s imaginaries in order to support its current research and similar ones in the future.
Adaptations, Transmedialities, Translations
PROJECT LEAD
Film Adaptation: Theory and Practice
On the topic of film adaptations, in addition to several articles in which I analyze specific case studies, I published an edited volume with the title Teoría y práctica de la adaptación fílmica (Madrid: Editorial Universidad Complutense, 2012). The idea of working on an edited book on film adaptations started in a graduate class, “From Paper to Celluloid,” that I taught in 2008, and continued with a Research Practicum. I wanted to equip my students with the necessary skills to be able to transform their papers into publishable material. This is how Teoría y práctica de la adaptación fílmica was born. The volume includes essays written by five UMass students, in addition to ten more articles by scholars in the field of Film Adaptations. The volume is introduced by my 44-page chapter “La adaptación multiplicada” with a chronological table that summarizes the major arguments of adaptation theories.
Teoría y práctica de la adaptación fílmica focuses on practical examples of Spanish film adaptations. The essays are arranged chronologically (from the adaptation of Golden Age classics to that of contemporary works) and thematically (memory, politics, gender, and so on). What’s more, the study is not limited to the adaptation of literary works, but includes that of “other” texts, such as comics, video games and the remakes. The common goal of the collected essays is to analyze the fundamental differences between the written word and the visual image by going beyond questions of fidelity. Instead of addressing “what” and “how” a text is transformed and translated into another text, my goal is to reflect upon the surprisingly little studied ideological implications of such operations (the “why” of adaptations) --including, of course, gender implications.
The interest on Adaptation Studies has grown considerably in the last years, and my book has become part of the reading lists for classes in Spain and beyond.