Helena Cortesina

Helena Cortesina (also known as Elena Cortesina or Elena Manuela Dolores Cortés Altabas) was a Spanish film director, actor, producer, and theatrical entrepreneur.[1] She directed and produced the first known film by a Spanish woman, Flor de España o la leyenda de un torero (1921), which has since been lost.[2][3] She acted in the film alongside her sisters, Ofelia and Angélica, who were collectively referred to as the Hermanas Cortesina.[1][4]

Helena Cortesina
Born
Elena Manuela Dolores Cortés Altabas

July 17, 1903
Valencia, Spain
DiedMarch 7, 1984
Buenos Aires, Argentina
OccupationActress, film director

Early life and career

She began her career as a dancer, performing to songs by Spanish composers, with an aesthetic heavily influenced by Greek art.[1] Cortesina has been identified as one of the models for the 1917 painting Danzarinas griegas, by the painter Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida.[1] She later founded a production company, Cortesina Films, in Madrid in 1921.[3][1] The direction and screenwriting of Flor de España was long attributed to priest and playwright José María Granada, but this is contradicted by reviews that indicate that Cortesina directed while Granada only edited the script.[3]

Escape to Buenos Aires

In 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Cortesina joined the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture.[1] In order to escape fascism, she and her son Juan Manuel Fontanals, one of two children she had with stage designer Manuel Fontanals, escaped to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1937.[1] There, she established a theater company with Andrés Mejuto that produced a number of Spanish plays.[1] She continued to act in films, including 1945's La dama duende, based on a 17th-century play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca.[5]

Notes
  1. "Helena Cortesina – Women Film Pioneers Project". wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu. Retrieved 2019-03-10.
  2. Cordero-Hoyo, Elena; Soto-Vázquez, Begoña (May 2018). "Women and the Shift from Theatre to Cinema in Spain: The Case of Helena Cortesina (1903–84)". Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. 45 (1): 96–120. doi:10.1177/1748372718791996. ISSN 1748-3727.
  3. Martín-Marquez, Susan (1999). Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen. Oxford University Press. pp. 6–7. ISBN 9780198159797.
  4. Bentley, Bernard P.E. (2008). A Companion to Spanish Cinema. Tamesis. p. 30. ISBN 9781855661769.
  5. "La casa de los millones and La dama duende". UCLA School of TFT. Retrieved 2019-03-10.
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