The Spanish postmodern cinema : Icíar Bollaín : realism and commitment of an humanist film-maker : women's liberation by rising above sexual stigmas
Right from her first films, Icíar Bollaín succeeded in showing that social criticism and film success are not incompatible. This goal was reached thanks to her capacity, in most cases, to build her narrations around characters, situations and daily atmospheres which were easily recognizable by the general public. Due to this, her filmography opens a broad spectrum of studies in the field of film analysis, from a sociological perspective. However, there is another level of denunciation in Icíar Bollaín's films which we are going to particularly focus our work on. Another aspect we would like to focus on and which is explicitly revealed and denounced by Icíar Bollaín, concerns cultural, social and economic conflicts and tensions generated by specific structures of power and domination Icíar Bollaín does not indulge into moralizing or documentary films. She analyzes these specific relationships between men and women, explores gender relationships and her films provide food for thought on gender, women’s empowerment, personal and collective solidarities.For the film director, it is only by transcending these sexual stigmata that united relations between the men and the women could be created thus allowing them to meet on an equal footing as true human beings. Through a more in-depth analysis, we can discern from Icíar Bollaín, a criticism of the spectator's scopic activity and the narcissism of the artistic creator, brought respectively closer to masculinity and to femininity. The true meeting between the two will only be able to occur provided that the spectator abandons his position as a passive viewer and feels ready to act and the author/movie director focuses on sharing rather than exhibiting his work.