Boy Meets Girl

Boy Meets Girl (1978) is one of the milestones in the career of Eugènia Balcells. This film, with its normative title, seems to allude directly to Hollywood cinema, particularly to the romantic comedy genre, which expressly targets a largely female audience. Quite unlike any narrative undertaking, for this work Balcells imagines a screen split into two halves that move up and down, in the style of a slot machine. The section on the left is occupied by different representations of women, while the right is reserved for photos of men. The images stop alternately, creating combinations of fictitious and random couples. The artist herself states that in the process of putting together the more than one thousand images that make up the film, she noticed that most of the women who appear in the media are anonymous and are shown in artificial poses, while the images of men are usually well-known figures and they tend to be in more natural stances. The work thus makes a critique of how the sexes are portrayed in the mass media, and of the stereotyped and reified image of women that the media tend to present.



Lola Hinojosa