It is an improbable script to which few film directors would give credence: Into the largely
male-dominanted world of moviemaking, an Argentine woman dares to enter. From the privileged
upper crust of Buenos Aires, she has no high school diploma, no college degree, only private
tutoring at the hands of a governess, an education sheltered from the tumult. She is divorced, raising
four children, but somehow has done a few scripts and directed two short documentaries. Otherwise, this self-taught upstart has no filmmaking experience. Most remarkably, she dives in at age fifth-six,
already a grandmother. But in the passage of twelve years, she directs six feature-length films, which in her own words, "propose images of women that are vertical, autonomous, independent,
thoughtful, courageous, spunky." In the critics' judgment, each film is better crafted and
conceptually more daring than the last. Two are featured at the Venice Film Festival, and one is
nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film. Admittedly, this scenario may seem far-fetched; yet all
of it is true. It is the story of Maria Luisa Bemberg and her efforts to portray women, especially
those with the courage to step out of line.

What gave Bemberg the impulse, the courage to make movies? After all, she grew up a member of
one of Argentina's wealthiest families, the beneficiary of frequent trips to Europe, a protected life on
estancias that stretched for miles. But with the "curse of wealth and the curse of an inquiring mind"
(a phrase American biographer Waldo Frank applied to Bemberg's famous aunt, Victoria Ocampo)
came severe limitations as to what was proper for upperclass women: suffocating propriety, empty
lives of appearance over substance, creativity and intellect permitted only within the narrowest of
bounds. "I entered film for ideological motives," Bemberg explains. "Since childhood I had felt a
sense of frustration, a double standard between my brothers and I. This was a rebellion I had had
since being a girl, and it manifested itself especially after reading Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex,
which was like an explosion in the minds of the majority of women of my age. I will never be able to adequately express my appreciation for that book. It was like a dam that burst.".

She admits she also was influenced by that man of action Andre Malraux, who visited her aunt's Villa Ocampo in 1959. The French writer long had espoused the idea that one must live what one believes. "I began a period of self-criticism and I said, 'What are you doing with your life apart from boring
everyone with all your anger and impatience? Since youth, I had been a very imaginative girl. I
decided, OK, I am going to try to tell 'that which to me hasn't been told (to quote another Bemberg
hero, cinematographer Robert Bresson). "I am going to tell it with the point of view of a woman,
with female protagonists, a bit like a promise to my own gender." When the public, that of
Argentina, the Americas, even Europe, reacted immediately to her early efforts, she said to herself,
"My dear friend, you're on the right track.".

Until that point the road had been rather rocky--not only her marriage at age twenty which ended in
divorce ten years later, but also her efforts to form feminist groups, which were effectively muffled
by the military regime that superseded Peron in the mid-1950s. After her children grew up, she
began to explore scriptwriting, then film production and direction on a limited scale. She made two
documentaries, El mundo de mujeres (1972) and Juguetes (1974). The latter film argued that toys
are not innocent, that trucks and dolls program children stereotypically so that boys want to be
firemen and executives, while girls aspire to be teachers, nuns, and housewives.

In 1972 she wrote her first feature-length script, Cronica de una Senora, which was directed by Raul de la Torre. Largely autobiographical (the quest of a rich and anguished wife), it was a huge success, due in part to the controversy it provoked, "I remember having tea with Victoria Ocampo not long
before she died and she liked very much my first script. She saw it four times. Earlier she had said,
'I want you to have tea with me at San Isidro because Graham Greene is coming. He's seen your
film. He wants to meet you. So I went. Those were pregnant days. I was just beginning as a
professional writer. Later, at the Film Festival in San Sebastian, Spain, when Graciela Borges won
the prize for the best actress, we were sitting on the bed awaiting news...Raul de la Torre and
Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, and I remember saying to myself, 'these are the people I'd like to be with:
people interested in creation. ".

Bemberg would have to struggle further. Her next film, Triangulo de cuatro (1974), directed by
Fernando Ayala, told the story of a man torn between a traditional wife and an independent mistress.
It won several scriptwriting awards for Bemberg, but she was unsatisfied with both it and its
predecessor. Believing that "no man could understand what was happening with the new awareness of women," she decided to go behind the camera herself.

In 1979 she wrote a script about a homemaker who goes on a personal protest strike against her
husband. But when she submitted Senora de nadie to the film board for approval, it was censored by
the military regime then in power. Undaunted by this setback, she went to New York to study acting
with Lee Strasberg. "I wanted to feel the needs and fears of the actors in order to understand and to
be able to make them trust me." In 1981, back in Argentina, she formed her own production
company with Lita Stantic and in that year wrote, directed, and produced her first film, Momentos.
Set by the sea in winter, it had a psychological theme dealing with role reversal and a depleted love
affair between two married people. As Bemberg says, "It was the beginning of a long-lasting
complicity between the female audience of Argentina and the first successful grandmother filmmaker in the country!".

The election of Raul Alfonsin in 1982 ushered in a renewed commitment to democracy in Argentina, and with it freedom of expression that had been impossible during years of military rule.
Immediately Bemberg dusted off the script for Senora de nadie and, as its director, finally brought
the story to the screen. As in the case of Momentos, she and Stantic invested considerable money of
their own to make the project happen. "There are both advantages and disadvantages coming from a
privileged background. In one sense I was able to produce my first two films. If I hadn't invested my own money I never would have made movies. No one would have believed in me. I was already quite an old woman with no training, no track record. But also one has to apologize for one's privileges
because sometimes they provoke envy. Sometimes I sensed (and I don't think this was paranoia) the
critics had their shotguns trained ready to shoot me down.".

In point of fact, among the critics who were predominately male and, in Bemberg's words, "tended
to be pushovers for breasts and bullets," she gained respect for her technical skills and willingness to
take on difficult material. Equally positive was the popular acclaim, such as in Taormina, Sicily,
where Senora de nadie was previewed at a film festival. "Afterwards, a group of ten women, all
dressed in black, these weather-beaten faces, very cross, they came over to me with a great bunch of
wildflowers and said 'Grazie in il nome di donne di Catania (Thanks in the name of the women of the province of Catania). These women had absolutely nothing to do with me. They were peasants from
a different social level. And yet there was still a great sense of solidarity that boiled from the caldera of feminism grown out of the fact that women from youth to old age for too long have served as
'private servants . That's when I realized that (more films) were what I had to do.".

Bemberg wasted little time. In 1984, at age sixty-two, she directed Camila, which earned her
international recognition, even an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. The true story, well
known to Argentines, is that of Camila O'Gorman, a high-born "Juliet of the Pampa" who eloped
with her confessor, Father Ladislao Gutierrez. The year was 1847, during the repressive dictatorship of General Juan Manuel de Rosas, and for this sacrilege, the pair was executed. A short film about
Camila and Ladislao had been made in 1912 but repressed. Thereafter every director since was
prohibited from retelling the tale until finally, in 1982, President Alfonsin outlawed firm censorship.
"Why did this love affair between a socialite and her priest threaten Argentine regimes for almost
140 years?" a reporter for the New York Times asked Bemberg in 1984. "Camila was a
transgressor, she broke the received pattern of Argentina, not to mention feminine decorum. Not
only did she enjoy a love affair with her priest, but her action fought the paternalistic order of
family, church, and state." The film, which at the time cost a mere US$370,000, seized the
imagination of the Argentine people, especially women. "Every day in Buenos Aires five or six
infant girls were named Camila," Bemberg recalls. It also represented a new direction for its
director: away from psychological themes in favor of something like opera. "I wanted a melodrama.
I don't think it's a bad word. I was breaking through my first attitude. I said to myself, 'If I don't,
I'll be repeating myself. ".

Repetition would hardly prove to be a problem for Bemberg, who next tackled the theme of sexual
repression and hypocrisy in a striking film, Miss Mary (1986). Set in the years just prior to the rise
of Peron, it is, according to Bemberg, "a fresco of an epoch I knew personally. There are many
parts in which I show, but it's not a story of my life." The success of Camila had eliminated some of
the financial concerns of earlier films, and thus she and her backers could afford an internationally
acclaimed star, Julie Christie, to play the title role.

Miss Mary is an unattached English governess imported to tutor, chaperon, and play surrogate
mother to the children of a domineering estanciero, who has affairs almost beneath the gaze of a
passive wife. A code of ghostly silence prevails regarding sex, marriage, politics, and thus only in
the most awkward way do the children, confront their maturing bodies, their father's infidelity, and
the reality of social unrest about to explode outside the manicured grounds of the country estate.
With Jorge Goldenberg, a writer based in Mar de Plata, Bemberg coauthored the well-paced script.
It skillfully documents the children's gradual awakening, as well as that of the starchy lady
contracted to look after them.

In 1991, for her most recent project specifically about women, Bemberg and the Uruguayan
playwright Antonio Larreta, adapted part of Octavio Paz's biography of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
for the film Yo la peor de todas (I, Worst of All). Bemberg likens the story to that of Virginia
Woolf, who three hundred years later would claim "a room for her own." Sor Juana, a
seventeenth-century Mexican nun, possessed of a great mind and heart, generated some of the most
exquisite poems and essays of all time, and yet she was destroyed by the misogyny and fanaticism of
the Inquisition. "Do you recall the scene in which Sor Juana is giving a class?" Bemberg asks. "She
says, 'Intelligence doesn't have a sex, and women too have the right to investigate the rights of the
universe. Eh? It's true. I believe that. If a woman chooses silence and solitude in order to create, she
should be able to do so. I'm sure she felt that dramatically. I have a little notebook I've kept over the
years in which I record what men have said about women. It's terrible--from Genesis to Ernesto
Sabato, Jose Ortega Gasset to Henry Miller.".

Yo la peor de todas, again produced by Stantic and starring Assumpta Serna as Sor Juana and
Dominique Sanda as her ally, the Marquesa de Mancera, was filmed at the studios of GEA
Cinematografica in Spain. The film was a challenge both technically and aesthetically because a way
had to be found to animate the stark setting of a nunnery in colonial Mexico, especially Sor Juana's
book-lined study and sparsely appointed cell. With the support of the Argentine costume designer
Graciela Galan, who already had brought her virtuosity to several Bemberg films, and Voytec, a
London-based stage design firm, the team eventually created a "convent in the abstract." Ornately
furnished interiors and opulent gowns and robes, even samplings of Sor Juana's comedias performed
for the nobility, suggest the prosperity of New Spain during the Counter-Reformation. Yo la peor de todas does justice to Paz's carefully researched Las trampas de la fe (The Traps of Faith), while
indirectly celebrating the ongoing struggle of today's women to redefine their own horizons.

Does Bemberg have filmmaking heroes? "I didn't go to the movies as a child. It wasn't allowed
except maybe once or twice a year. I had a horrible childhood: good manners, little affection, a very
powerful man for a father who always read stock quotations and spoke through a governess, my
mother a typical Spanish-Argentine matron, well mannered but alone. So when I became a
filmmaker, I tried to avenge her and not be like her. But anyway...my first film has the influence of
Michelangelo Antonioni in which very little things suddenly become very relevant, objects for
instance. The one who influenced me most, his words--Notes on Cinematography--that's Robert
Bresson. He's my master. His book is all torn because still I read it constantly when I start a film. I
think all my films are very different so I don't really have a predictable style. I think it's better to be able to say the opposite.

Recently, Bemberg has admired The Piano (known in South America as La leccion del piano) by
New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion. "In most films, eroticism for the most part is portrayed
from a masculine viewpoint. They speak of their sexual prowess, conquests but--excuse me, I'm
going to be very crude--rarely do they mention their inadequacies, problems with erections,
impotence. Of that they don't speak. On the other hand, it's my impression that if a woman doesn't
reach marriage as a virgin, well... But now it seems to me women are beginning to speak out beyond just talking to one another. It's very refreshing: observing events from a different angle. Maybe
we've been suffering from a kind of mental fatigue, saying the same things for too long. This film of Campion has a very erotic quality, but it's so different from eroticism told by a man, which is so
conventional because they copy each other, and it's as if we have a role, even in bed, on how to
behave. The man is the strongest, so he uses his force. Let's put it bluntly. With Campion you have
the sensuality of touching in a very refined manner, subtle, real. Many women have told me: 'That's
the way it is, you know, it's not like where you have these women gushing and panting. ".

In May 1993, after working for six months with a budget under three million dollars, Bemberg
completed De eso no se habla, starring Marcelo Mastroianni, Luisina Brando, and Alejandra Podesta. Feeling "a bit out of breath on the subject of feminism," she decided to avoid her own personal
agenda in favor of a short story written by Argentine poet and arts critic Julio Llinas. Her partner on earlier films, Lita Stantic, had embarked on her own directorial debut (a film about los
desaparecidos, Un muro de silencio (A Wall of Silence), starring Vanessa Redgrave), thus Bemberg
entered into a new partnership with another local producer, Oscar Kramer. De eso deals with risky
subject matter: that of a doomed love affair between an aging bachelor, Ludovico d'Andrea, and a
strong-minded, imaginative adolescent dwarf named Charlotte. "I approached several production
companies but without success," Bemberg recalls. "One English producer said, 'I love the script but
I'm a coward. I won't risk the money because it's a very audacious film. In the end, I involved
myself economically and naturally, I hope to recuperate the investment.".

Bemberg approached Mastroianni for the role of the bachelor, and he accepted. "I talked with him
from Paris. He was at one of those health spas. I told him I didn't want to talk much about his
character. He howled with joy. 'That's the way I like it, not as they do in the United States: three
weeks around a table in New York analyzing how was his youth, his mother, his first sexual
experience. " Jorge Goldenberg again coauthored the script with Bemberg. "We saw the story as a
fable, a fairy tale. If we got psychological, I knew we were dead. No one asks why the mother is
jealous of Snow White. Nobody cares!" As to doing a project with Mastroianni, "When you have the
privilege of working with great artists, it's such a short cut. You don't have to explain. He's such a
big, beautiful man in every sense of the word. He's generous, warm, fun, he smiles, he's a bit
melancholic. He's getting old, a bit tired. Sometimes he gets a bit cranky, but he's more endearing
for it because he was perfect for the role.".

De eso is set in the 1930s in an imaginary town called San Pedro de los Altares. "In his mind, Llinas
saw the town near Cordoba," Bemberg points out, "but when I read the twenty-page story, I felt a
need for big, wide horizons, the pampa, because it has a metaphysical dimensions." Power lines,
television antennas, and other modern conveniences of rural Argentina destroyed that illusion, and so Bemberg went to the historic town of Colonia, on the Uruguayan shore opposite Buenos Aires.

"We decided the river--the muddy waters--could serve just like the immense plain. That's where we
discovered the dramatic ending, which is not in Llinas's original story. I greatly enjoyed working in
Colonia. It's very Argentine, but at the same time it could be Czechoslovakia or Omaha, Nebraska.".

Bemberg's highly original and haunting film has enjoyed critical and popular acclaim, with several
critics (Nestor Tirri of Clarin, for example) calling it her best film. Shown at the Venice Film
Festival last September, De eso opened to audiences in South America last year and is scheduled for
release in the United States this summer.

Bemberg admits to feeling empty when she finishes a film. "It's like a drug. It's such a high. It's so
strong that when you finish, you ask, 'How do I live now? But you know, I don't really have much
time. I'm playing a battle with the clock. When you do period pieces you waste much more time. So
I think I'll do something contemporary. It's cheaper and faster.".

Bemberg has considered doing one of the ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges, for example El sur. But
because Carlos Saura already made a splendid film version of that famous story, she's looking at
another Borges tale, Emma Zunz, also Cavando un foso (Digging a Pit), a tale of guilt and duplicity
by Borges's longtime friend and collaborator, Adolfo Bioy Casares.

"I don't know. I would like to do a film about the problems of young people. We're leaving a
terrible world for them. Women aren't to blame, but they are accomplices. The bogeymen are the
men driven crazy with power, sex, money, status, publicity. You don't make a planet with violence,
guerrillas, Mafia, prostitution. It's horrible, a nightmare, misery, countries bursting with caviar and
others dying of hunger. I don't want to sound naive, but that's where I think we need women setting
around the table talking about disarmament. We have a different program. Maybe it's because we
know how difficult it is to bring up a child.".

Bemberg is particularly critical of the situation in her homeland. "I believe Argentine men suffer
from great insecurity. Argentina is one of the most machista countries in the world. Just watch
television. Almost everything is defined by male protagonists as is rock 'n roll, which has invaded
this country amidst great apathy. Just this week, a roquero from the United States exposed himself on stage and that's supposed to be funny. If we women don't react, get angry, respond to what's
happening, it demonstrates women's passivity and indifference. We get what we deserve. But it's
quite lonely because there are very few people who feel as I do. Some young, ungrateful women
don't recognize the doors were banged open by older, angrier women of my generation. Others
aren't interested. They prefer to go the secret, private, personal way through a kind lover or
husband and say we have no problems.".

In 1984, the New York Times described Bemberg as "improbably youthful," a phrase that remains as apt today as then. Now beginning her seventh decade and a great-grandmother at that ("I ought to be
in The Guinness Book of World Records"), she puts in long hours at her office on Calle Libertad
overseeing projects both current and pending. She is blessed with a particularly devoted partner,
Oscar Kramer, perhaps best known for his coproduction of La historia oficial (The Official Story).
His strong commitment to urgent social issues meshes well with Bemberg's brand of activism.
Buoyed by the local critical response to De eso, both of them are cautiously optimistic regarding the
film's potential worldwide.

Among all the female protagonists Bemberg has brought to the screen, one might expect her to
identify most strongly with Sor Juana, or Camila, or perhaps one of the daughters nurtured by Miss
Mary, and yet, with a bit of nudging, she confesses, "No, no, I'm Charlotte. Charlotte's a metaphor
for anybody that's different: a dwarf, black person, young homosexual, even a big, fat, ugly woman,
who like anyone else has the right to a place in the sun. I was different from my brothers and sister.
I was a subversive, a dreamer, and probably a filmmaker since I was a little girl. What surprised me
was that I never suspected I could have some artistic disposition. Well ... with each film, each film is
a formidable exercise in self-knowledge. That's what I've realized ... and after making Sor Juana,
after telling the dramatic story of this extraordinary woman--I don't think in all the world there's
been a woman with the competence and richness of mind of Sor Juana--I said to my own sex, to my
beloved sisters, here are five films each with questioning women. Here are examples by which to
model your own identities.
 
 
 
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