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Tanya Goldman @tanyagoldman.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

My NYU pal Leticia Berrizbeitia Añez is doing important historiographic work on women in Latin American Cinema, inc. the late great Margot Benacerraf. To say I'm excited to read her "feminist obituary" of Benacerraf in @femmediahist.bsky.social is an understatement doi.org/10.1525/fmh....

Abstract of article

Author: LETICIA BERRIZBEITIA AÑEZ

Title: "100 Years of Margot Benacerraf: A Feminist Obituary"

Citation: Feminist Media Histories, Vol. 12, Number 4, pps. 114–134.

ABSTRACT: This article proposes the feminist obituary as a practice of historiographic inquiry through a reading of Venezuelan filmmaker Margot Benacerraf’s life and work. Taking the public remembrance prompted by her death and centenary as its point of departure, the article examines how the discourse surrounding her repeatedly returns to the refrain that she made “only two films.” I argue that this trope, even when celebratory, reproduces gendered measures of artistic value that privilege productivity, auteurist continuity, and completed works over interruption, institutional labor, and collective cultural work. Centering Benacerraf’s quehacer—a term that binds life, work, and desire—the essay reads Reverón (1952) and Araya (1959) alongside unfinished projects, archival traces, and decades of institution building. In doing so, it shows how changing the questions that frame a life can convert commemoration into inquiry and open feminist film history to less conclusive, more generative forms of remembrance.