9/3/23, 1:43 "Cocina de imágenes," text only https://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/ElenaOroz/text.html 1/9 JUMP CUT A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA copyright 2022, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media Jump Cut, No. 61, fall 2022 Cocina de imágenes, Primera Muestra de Cine y Video Realizado por Mujeres Latinas y Caribeñas (1987): a pioneer event for tasting the recipes of Latin American women's filmmaking during the 1970s and 1980s by Elena Oroz translated by David C. Williams Cocina de imágenes. Primera Muestra de Cine y Video Realizado por Mujeres Latinas y Caribeñas (Kitchen of Images, First Exhibition of Latin American and Caribbean Film and Video Made by Women) was held in Mexico City from October 1 to 11, 1987. According to its catalogue, 74 films in film format (16 or 35mm) and 46 videos were shown; in all, 120 productions from fifteen different countries. At the same time, the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City hosted a symposium on the nature of women’s cinema and the production and distribution difficulties faced by female film and video makers in the region. In addition, an informal meeting was held at the headquarters of the Zafra distribution company, with the participation of more than 50 women creators, programmers, distributors and scholars from various Latin American countries, the United States, Canada, and Spain. The exhibition was organized by Ángeles Necoechea, in close collaboration with Julia Barco and Guadalupe Lara, drawing on the considerable mobilization of women resulting from the Fourth Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encuentro held in Taxco, which brought together 1,500 participants.[1] Despite its one-off nature, Cocina de imágenes was a pioneering event in consolidating cinema made by women in Latin America and consequently in establishing transnational feminist film networks that originated in the region. Already in its day the exhibition was experienced and described as a crucial event. For example, Julianne Burton remarked on site the great opportunity it offered her to analyze women’s films: “I knew this was going to be a historic meeting and I think it is” (Encuentro 1987). Later, she endorsed this perception in The Women’s Companion to International Film when noting, “Cocina was the historical equivalent of the 1967 festival in Viña del Mar from which the history of the New Latin American Cinema is dated: that founding moment when what have previously seemed individual concerns and isolated pursuits come into focus as a movement, a concerted endeavor that spans geographical borders and cultural, material and political differences” (235). Having established the relevance of an exhibition that, nevertheless, has hardly had any academic repercussion beside a handful of scattered contributions (Burton 1990, Pick 1989, Vega 1998), my article has a twofold objective. First, I contextualize the origins of Cocina de imágenes, paying special attention to the background of its promoter, Ángeles Necoechea, and to the transnational feminist networks that enabled its existence. Second, I recover here the discussion topics present in the meetings held there, where important issues such as the role of film schools, collective work or the problems related to distribution and exhibition were addressed. In fact, the singularity of Cocina de imágenes also lies in the circumstances in Latin American media making in which it was set. It was a transitional moment marked by technological changes resulting from the nascent use of video and the redefinition of the thematic, aesthetic, and industrial concerns of women’s cinema in the region after an initial, more or less militant, impulse.[2] For this historical account, I draw from personal interviews, memoirs, and reviews published in the press or academic literature. The primary and crucial source is the sound recordings of Cocina de imágenes made by Julia Lesage, a participant and privileged eyewitness of the event, who generously shared them among various scholars and which I accessed thanks to the Latin American Women’s Audiovisual Research Network (RAMA). These audios are a rich body of documentation whose partial publication prevents, to paraphrase Isabel Seguí in her reflection on feminist methodologies, the disappearance of women “in the transit from oral records to written histories, which is to say, in the passage from unofficial to official history” (11). In keeping with this observation, the vividness and immediacy of these records also allows us to evoke the experiential side of the gathering, restoring, as Ruby Rich proposes in Chick Flicks, “a set of lived experiences long since forgotten, shelved, or denied by those who went through them” (1). Thus, when referring to the work of pioneering filmmakers or critics of the 1970s in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, Rich remarked that “it’s more important than ever to acknowledge their contributions and valorize the nerve and will that made their interventions possible” (5) This disappearance of women as originary figures is more flagrant in the case of Latin America and women’s history. Although, in recent years, notable contributions have been published aimed at reassessing the women’s contributions in the region during the 1970s and 1980s, we cannot forget that in the dominant historiographies,