Women in Transition

Crossing Boundaries, Crossing Borders

Maria-José Blanco, Claire Williams, Maria-José Blanco, Claire Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000383324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para escritoras

This volume brings together scholars, students and writers as well as artists from around the world. By choosing a thematic focus on "transition" in women's lives, we present research on women who have crossed biological, geopolitical and political borders as well as emotional, sexual, cultural and linguistic boundaries. The international approach brings together different cultures and genres in order to emphasize the links and connections that bind women together, rather than those which separate them. The chapters consider the ways in which the changes and transitions women undergo influence the world we live in. We are particularly interested in the idea of crossing borders and how this influences identity and belonging, and the theme of crossing boundaries in the context of motherhood as well as sexual orientation. The topic is timely given the waves of migration all around the world in recent times. The contributors deal with issues central to contemporary life, such as gender equality and women's empowerment, as well as understanding women's identities and being sensitive to fluid concepts of gender and sexuality.

Part I

Crossing Boundaries

Body and Mind

1The Making of To See a Woman¹

Mònica Rovira

My name is Mònica Rovira. I live in Barcelona. I am a filmmaker. As a child I dreamed of telling stories, made-up and real ones, but I never imagined it would be through cinema. I love the process of making films and constantly questioning language through filmmaking. I am passionate about exploring what happens during transitions, in the spaces in between, the cracks and drifts. I directed and co-starred in the film To See a Woman / Ver a Una Mujer.

When I was invited to the ‘Women in Transition: Crossing Borders, Crossing Boundaries’ conference, I enthusiastically accepted the proposal. At the time I was travelling from one film festival to another and I found the opportunity to make a foray into the academic field highly stimulating. At the conference, I accompanied the screening of To See a Woman with a talk on the still very recent creation process. Now, with distance and perspective, I am sharing the whole experience with you: writing about it for the first time. I find it difficult to feel comfortable and satisfied when trying to explain the film with words. I found it especially difficult to write a synopsis. I disliked every one of my attempts. When I read critic and festival curator Carlos Losilla’s summary of To See a Woman, I thought his text managed to capture it really accurately and effectively, so here it is, together with an excerpt from notes in my diary.

A couple’s relationship coming to an end, two women conversing about what happened and a past constantly coming back: these are the elements – minimal, yet bearing an overwhelming intensity – upon which filmmaker Mònica Rovira builds her first feature film, which was warmly received by both audiences and critics at the XIV Seville Film Festival. Through a succession of implacable, harsh scenes, the film, shot in stark black and white, manages to turn what could have been a simple melodrama into a formally innovative and daring piece, filming two faces and two bodies as though they were two continents undergoing a geological mutation. And maybe that is what To See A Woman is all about: a continually changing gaze, an emotional experience that elevates us as viewers.²

When you see someone who dazzles you, you suddenly fill yourself up with them and no longer see anything else. You just feel every moment intensely as it fades away. From the uncertainty, vulnerable, you look persistently for any hint of reality. As I try to see Sarai, I’m showing what emerges from the threshold of my gaze.

To See a Woman is the result of an intense film-writing process that has taken the last four years. A story intimately linked to what beats, breathes and fades away. Articulated from the inside, through images of fragmented nature, trapped in specific moments, in situations of fragility and confusion inherent to falling in love. A film that begins to weave itself as the experience is processed and put into perspective. I have constructed To See a Woman from the fractures, questions, gaps and shadows that emerge and grow when listening to the captured images. A subtle and precise architectural structure made of threads of emotion, containing a raw, naked and direct story that emerges from the experience, as true to it as I could be.

Mònica Rovira

Barcelona, 17 November 2017

Figure 1.1 and 1.2Stills from To See a Woman © Mònica Rovira.

The following story is told in the first person and proceeds in chronological order through the time arc of the film To See a Woman.

Characters

Sarai – co-protagonist

Mònica – co-protagonist and director

See You Soon – a film project in development

Ana – camera

Carlos – camera

Amanda – sound recordist

Laura – creative producer

Federico – editor and colourist

Xabi – camera

Pablo – editor

Gala – musician

Ale – sound engineer

What is the beginning? Where do I start? When the boundaries between life and creation are ambiguous and diffuse, defining the starting point is a difficult task. From the beginning, with Sarai the camera was an everyday presence. The decision to start making a movie came much later, with our separation. To See a Woman was a reaction, an act of resistance, to being in a state of crisis: after letting go of a project I’d been researching for years, after breaking ties with the producer who had supported me, and after abruptly leaving Sarai.

I feel like a desert, an arid landscape: no project, no producer, no lover. All the certainties which used to sustain me have fallen apart; only my own body remains. I need to make something happen. I need to get out of this state of bewilderment and despair. I move. It is the middle of August and in London I am welcomed, once again, by María-José. For many years now, her home has been a protective nest and the city a place of tranquillity and renewal. Eat, walk, read, sleep: days of repair. From there I fly to Reykjavik and stay with Yrsa, another good friend. The air is very fresh: water, ice, fire. We go on an adventure through the volcanic landscape; when the car gets stuck, there’s no trace of any other human being. I jump out of the car and run into that soft, dark, rough land and I feel something atavistic, earthly currents that cross and connect me.

That night, back home, after a long journey, I opened the hard drive that I’d been carrying in my bag. It’s the footage that Ana had taken when we were rehearsing See You Soon and contains everyday scenes between Sarai and me, seen by her. We had worked in a curious and fragile triangulation. My guts twist when I see fragments of what I had lived and until that moment had only existed as a hurtful, deeply moving, intimate experience, an experience I hadn’t yet filtered or digested. These images of my time with Sarai, filmed as a diary and by a third person, unsettle me, causing an uncontrollable dialectic: on the one hand the intangible, what I felt, what I perceived, what we never told ourselves… on the other, the implacable material that Ana recorded, the embodied phantasmagoria of what once was. What should I do?

In the midst of this crisis, suspended and disorientated on this island of ice, I feel a powerful impulse to use this state as the starting point for making a movie. I return home with a new goal, a desire and an escape route into the future: the urge to film.

Filming. What if it turns out to be an exploration of heartbreak? I want to summon Sarai and start filming. I speak first to Carlos, the cameraperson, and Amanda, the sound recordist, and Laura, who will manage the production. I trust them implicitly. We have collaborated on previous projects, we share a set of codes and complicity. With their support, I call Sarai and invite her to spend five days in the mountains and film our reunion. She accepts immediately.

Laura and I go to scout locations. I find a cottage in the woods next to the Llobregat river, looking up at the Pyrenees. It is in an ancient region where templars and troubadours once lived. Puig-Reig is a small village that expanded with industrialisation, had eight textile factories, all of which lie in ruins today. I feel a connection and a sense of protection in that environment that, although new to me, seems familiar. My grandfather knew this landscape very well and the stories he told still inhabit me.

What am I looking for? What would I like to be revealed? My intention is to generate a climate of intimacy, where we can look each other in the eye, and find, in Sarai’s gestures, some glimpse of truth, if there is such a thing.

The date is approaching and it’s not until the very last minute that I contemplate the possibility of her not showing up. She arrives on time and is ready for an adventure. Inside, I am a volcano. How do I proceed? Any script I had planned is taken over by my heartbeats and my breathing. On this first night, without preamble, I jump into the frame. Once again, living and filming become entangled; I act according to the fluctuations of my heartbeat when I’m with Sarai. The physical tension builds up and my unconscious pushes me to provoke an encounter using words, as if that were already the only place from where to grasp and understand, such is my helplessness and vulnerability. We begin a hard and difficult confrontation. We are unable to look each other directly in the eye and avoid each other’s gazes. I am invaded with emotion and have trouble talking. When I finally get up from the chair, my body feels weightless. The next day Sarai has relaxed a bit and approaches me playfully, I am baffled. It is time to return home. Before we go, I climb a hill to gain some perspective on what has happened in these last few days. Sarai follows me. Up there, silence and density in the air between us. The mountains, snowy. She leaves.

Hibernating, organising. Five days, seven hours of material on a hard drive and it feels like waking up after a deep sleep. It is the middle of winter, quiet everywhere, the only movements are underground. I break the bond with Sarai and grieve. I write.

At a party I meet Irene. She is studying documentary filmmaking. I see someone who’s enthusiastic, methodical and disciplined. She comes home with me and I show her some of the footage. She offers to help me organise and file them. It is perfect. I am unable to put into words what the movie is about, I don’t even have the tone, at the moment there is only an amorphous mass, this magma to work with. Watching the rushes with Irene beside me, I try to turn myself into a spectator: not intervening, not cutting, as if it were someone else’s story being told. We create a long sequence with each of the scenes arranged chronologically. Straight away, Irene wants to shape it into a story. I’m full of doubts. I need time: to let them mellow, rub my eyes and react anew. Above all, I feel that the soul of the film is not to be found in the images but in the critical dialogue with them. We have a different vision and move at a different speed. We separate.

When I’m ready and have a blueprint to follow, I meet Federico for a coffee and a chat. What he’s been up to, what I’ve been up to... and the desire to work together and the possibility of sitting down to do it arise spontaneously. He with his hands on the machine, me beside him, freed from the technical tasks, totally attentive, listening to the screen. I look through the images, I identify the essential moments and we crack the narrative arc. It starts with the falling in love and the first time I filmed her. We nail down sequences that evolve from that. Soon discussions arise around the characters: Mònica and Sarai. Who tells the story? From where is it told? Cartwheel moment. How crazy it must be for Federico to shut himself away every day to edit a movie in which one of the characters is the director, the director who is sitting next to him and whose heart is beating in the present. It feels a bit like I’m delirious when I start talking about Mònica in the third person. What are the limits of these images? How does the context and what’s going on outside the frame resignify them? How do you measure the overlap between what you feel and what you see? Is it possible to detach myself from the experience?

My head is going full speed. I have no logical answers to these concerns about the narrative. We argue, meaning we don’t get anywhere. What’s more, I believe that in the structure we have come up with there is still no ending. I need to get away from the screen, my notebook, leave the room, the city, this mess and take the camera with me. A year has passed since the last shoot and during all these months I have lived with those moving images, forging with them, day by day, the story of what was. Where to now?

Where to? I suggest to Carlos, Amanda and Laura that we get together and spend a weekend in the rugged landscape of Cap de Creus, the Natural Park almost on the border with France.

It is very cold and daylight hours are limited. Searching for clues, I throw myself into exploring the rocky terrain. I bound through the moss, uncontrollably, like a rabbit; I hide, I scan, I perceive. They know me, they aren’t worried, they’re with me. We find a hole that is a whale’s belly, I get inside. The tide rises and the waves break wild. I want to jump into the water, they won’t let me, I bolt like a runaway horse, running along by the jagged stones at the edge of the sea; I slip. I emerge soaked and excited, like there’s no tomorrow. Night falls. We go back to the house. We barely speak. We listen to music and toast each other with mulled wine. When we wake up the next morning, the wind is wild. On the radio we hear there’s a red alert, a warning not to go out. We get in the car and climb to the top of the cape. Today, there isn’t a soul here. We are alone and the North Wind wants to take us. I scramble over the rocks, I fall, the wind pushes me. Carlos has the camera and Laura is holding the tripod tightly so it doesn’t fly away. In the struggle, with the wind hitting my face, I resist; spontaneously, I stare into the lens and, for the first time in days, I smile.

Back in the studio, we capture the images and let them rest, settle themselves. Now, with fresh eyes, we go back to where we had left the edit: the scene that took place in a bar, the discussion between the two characters. I recognise that it is both nuclear and part of a backbone sequence, and hence essential but complex to handle. The arguments continue. To Federico, Sarai is clearer, stronger, she speaks more, and Mònica is more ambiguous, she hides, she is silent. I’m annoyed, we have different perspectives that make it very difficult to talk. What’s going wrong?

What’s missing? We pause the stormy discussions about the characters and concentrate on the screen. We keep it restrained and simple, distilling and solving each sequence with precise cuts, taking care to protect the soul of each moment and preserve the narrative arc in its original state. Full stop.

We ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: Women in Transition
• Part I Crossing Boundaries: Body and Mind
• Part II Crossing Borders: Exile and Diaspora
• Contributors
• Index