Clara Roquet's "El adiós": Visualizing Women in Film and Filmmaking in the Contemporary Catalan Curtmetratge

A 2015 video published by CIMA, the Asociación de Mujeres Cineastas y de Medios Audiovisuales, titled "Las mujeres invisibles del cine", highlights the roles of women in the Spanish film industry. The opening shots feature make-up artists at work, cinematic lighting conspicuously placed in the mise-en-scène, and a hand manipulating a clapperboard. These images call to mind the work of people in cinema including make-up artists and lighting designers that spectators do not consciously see in a completed film. Aside from promoting recognition of those working behind-the-scenes, the video also underscores the minority presence of women screenwriters, directors, and producers in Iberian cinema through statistics and personal stories. It cites, for instance, that women directed only 7% of films in Spain in 2015 and that, on average, the budget of films directed by women is half of that of films directed by men ("Las mujeres"). In the same year that "Las mujeres invisibles del cine" begins to circulate, the short film El adiós is released. Written and directed by the Catalan filmmaker Clara Roquet, El adiós tells the story of Rosana, a Latin American immigrant caregiver to an elderly Catalan woman, who has recently died. The opening shots show the work of Rosana as she completes an array of domestic labors in preparation for her mistress's funeral. Akin to the work of the women in the film industry illustrated in the CIMA clip, Rosana's labors also remain hidden from view. They make possible another type of final product—in this case, the mistress's funeral—yet garner comparably little recognition or reward.

This essay analyzes El adiós in order to draw a connection between the invisibility— or at least under-visibility—of women in the Spanish film industry and the invisibility of Latin American migrant women working in domestic service in Spain. It argues that the film functions to represent the work of women both on screen and off. In its telling of Rosana's story, the film draws attention to the invisibility of her labor and the challenges that immigrant domestic workers face in Catalan and, more broadly, Spanish contexts. Through an insistent focus on her actions, the camera takes a position of solidarity with Rosana and recognizes her humanity and the value of her work. Outside of its narrative world, the film—as a cultural product written, directed, produced, and acted by women—counterbalances the predominance of men in the Iberian film industry and serves to highlight the capable contributions of women in Spanish and Catalan cinema. Recognizing, as Brad Epps does, the limitations of concepts of gender and national origin, this article uses these categories to address the material, lived realities of those who self-identify as women in an industry that has unevenly recognized and privileged work on the basis of gender and origin (18).

Domestic Labor in Hispanic Film

With the striking success of Alfonso Cuarón's feature film Roma (2018), the filmic representation of the critical-yet-precarious role of Latin American women engaged in domestic service work has garnered a renewed global spotlight. Nonetheless, thematic interest in this figure has considerable precedent in the case of Latin American cinema. Film scholar Deborah Shaw distinguishes "Latin American films featuring maids" as its own genre, in which recent critically-acclaimed films such as Sebastián Silva's La nana (2009) and Anna Mulayert's Que horas ela volta? (2015) can be included (124). Shaw adds Lucrecia Martel's La mujer sin cabeza and Lucía Puenzo's El niño pez as representative examples (124). Shaw asserts that Latin American women filmmakers in particular have been at the forefront of featuring "the poor women who sustain [liberal bourgeois feminists'] work," which forms part of a larger project to correct, or perhaps atone for, prior generations' inattention to these women (128). Shaw correlates the filmmakers' cinematic interest with Latin America's extraordinary rates of employment of domestic servants—the highest in the world—in order to suggest that the inevitability...