Venezuelan Film: Fina Torres

Fina Torres is a Venezuelan filmmaker who embodies all the characteristics of an author/auteur artist. Although her portfolio of work include several international awards, in addition to directing performers such as Penelope Cruz, her work has not been documented appropriately and extensively. Furthermore, finding scholarly resources that present this filmmaker in a more critical manner was not an easy task, which links to the issues that we have discussed in class about the difficulties that female artists have of obtaining the recognition that their male contra part benefit from.

According to the International Movie Database website, “Fina Torres is currently a director/producer who brings experience from all areas of filmmaking to the role. After studying design, photography and journalism in Venezuela, Torres moved to Paris, where she earned a Bachelor's degree in cinematography from the Institute de Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques, IDHEC. She worked as a film editor, camera operator, and script supervisor after graduating, making short films and documentaries on the side. In 1985, Torres won the Cannes Festival Camera d'Or, among other twelve international prices, for directing and producing her debut feature "Oriana". She co-wrote, produced and directed her second feature, a comedy, Celestial Clockwork, in 1993, winner of four international prices. Most recently, she directed for Fox Searchlight romantic comedy "Woman on Top", nominated for Best Director at the 2001 Alma Awards.” imdb.com

On all the films mentioned above, Fina Torres has played the roles of screenwriter and film director in collaboration with other female screenwriters. Her work talks about women’s experiences in several different contexts of life while challenging the stereotypical gender roles, as prescribed by the wealthy white male patriarchy. For instance, Maria Elena Soliño, of the University of Houston, writes in her essay that Celestial Clockwork is Torres’s feminist revision of the fairy tale produced by Disney. Soliño states that, “Torres not only re-writes the Cinderella tale at the level of dialogue, she also parodies and appropriates many of Disney’s most memorable visual techniques” (69). Thus, in doing so, Soliño continues, “Torres mimics Disney’s characteristic style in order to question its intent” (72), for “within the traditional framework, Cinderella must be blond and blue-eyed and have very soft features in order to be instantly recognized as the good character” (73), but “Torres highlights her inversions of Perrault’s and Disney’s values and aesthetics since now the bad girl is blond and all the good, struggling Hispanic women are brunettes who move to the rhythm of salsa, not classical music” (74). Thus, “an important shift takes place first of all through Torres’s point of view as the director, principal writer, and as a woman” (76). “Fina Torres joins this group of creative women in giving the Cinderella tale a new liberating narrative from the female artist’s point of view as she directs her own original story” (77). Thus, under the Soliño’s analysis of Celestial Clockwork, Torres is the incarnation of an author/auteur.

Fina Torres version of the Cinderella fairy tale, in her movie Celestial Clockwork (or Mecanicas Celestes, in Spanish), is a film that may apply the author/auteur theory of film studies. Torres is not only directing the movie, but also she is auteuring her own production. That is, she is directing a film, which means to having the artistic control of the film while, at the dame time, she is the auteur of a story telling, reflecting the uniqueness of her experiences about a specific group of ethnic women and their/her take on what a fairy tale may be under this particular circunstances. This take on her auteuring may seem subversive and defiant, troubling the white patriarchal system. Perhaps, this is the reason it is so difficult to find scholarly information about Fina Torres. It seems as though, her feminist muse, along with her gender condition, is causing a backlash on her creative work, and thus relegating her films to the world of undocumented art databases. Or, is it the fact that she is in a developing country that her work is overlooked and misunderstood? Whatever the answers to this questions are, the fact is that women in art – and overall those in developing countries – are still battling complex gender obstacles.

This is the trailer of her latest movie Liz en Septiember

This is an interview about one of her most recent productions.

In here, she reveals her genius:

Works cited

Soliño, María Elena “From Perrault Thought Disney to Fina Torres: Cinderella

Learns Spanish and Talks Back in Celestial Clockwork”. Letras Femeninas, Vol.

27, No. 2 (OTOÑO 2001), pp. 68-84. Published by: Asociacion Internacional de
              Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispanica. Web. November 22, 2014