This Is Who We Are: Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto

This Is Who We Are is a series featuring Columbia School of the Arts' professors, covering careers, pedagogy, and art-making. Here, we talk with Associate Professor Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto about the pleasures of the archive, what feminist film history can teach us about the present, and the value of spending time researching and understanding non-canonical works.

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Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, who joins the School of the Arts as an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, was a young Journalism student in Chile in 1999 when she attended FIDOCS, an international documentary festival. 

There, she saw images captured in 1974 by East German filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann in the concentration camps of Chacabuco and Pisagua in northern Chile. "For me, it was very important to see those images," Ramírez-Soto told me over coffee. "It felt like the festival was giving me back part of my history, part of my memory, things we hadn't been allowed to see until that moment."

The encounter kick-started a hunger to unearth and understand images that, due to systematic censorship or neglect, had been hidden or faded from view. "I started to realize the weight of documentary images, how relevant they were for reconstructing our past. And I think that's also where my fascination began. I realized that I could also be part of that recovery of memory."

Ramírez-Soto decided to pursue her budding passion abroad and won an Erasmus Mundus scholarship to study in two European universities. She then obtained a Ph.D. in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick in the UK. As an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University and the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, Ramírez-Soto developed a unique perspective on feminist film history, transnational cinema, and documentary.

"I think images give us back a certain tactility, a kind of lived experience that no other medium gives us," Ramírez-Soto explains. "A density that's different from literature and music. For me, that idea of tactility is fundamental."

As an educator, Ramírez-Soto is committed to bringing her research into the classroom and fostering a deep appreciation for diverse cinematic traditions. Her teaching involves sharing her discoveries with students, inviting them to participate in the process of uncovering and interpreting film history.

"The first thing I told my students was: 'This is a lecture, but it's not really a lecture. I'm going to share with you what I myself have been learning and recovering as a film historian over all these years,'" Ramírez-Soto said. 

For example, as a co-founder of RAMA, a network of researchers focused on unearthing overlooked audiovisual materials created by Latin American women, she has cataloged and studied several lesser-known films, which she now gets to share with her class. This process, she says, often involves finding, digitizing, restoring, and subtitling relegated works. In her class, Ramírez-Soto highlights the research effort and collaboration that was required to revalorize the material and put it in front of her students.

"That's what I care about the most," she said. "Moving what was relegated to a footnote, what's considered marginal, secondary, into the main body of the text. If there is a consistent line connecting my research and my teaching, that's it."

Ramírez-Soto's first monograph, (Un)veiling Bodies: A Trajectory of Chilean Post-Dictatorship Documentary, emerged from her doctoral thesis exploring Chilean cinema, which led her to investigate how those non-commercial documentaries were funded. Through extensive archival research, she discovered that European public television channels had been crucial financiers not only for Chilean films during the dictatorship era but also for experimental filmmakers across Latin America and the United States, including figures like Jim Jarmusch, Errol Morris, and members of the L.A. Rebellion movement such as Charles Burnett and Haile Gerima. This revelation about transnational funding networks forms the basis of her postdoctoral thesis and current book project, tentatively titled Transnational Experimental Television: The Global South on European Screens.

This discovery led Ramírez-Soto to start looking at experimental cinema as a trans-national phenomenon with recurring themes that appear across cultures.  One of Ramírez-Soto's goals as an educator is to expose her students—many of them aspiring filmmakers—to such non-canonical and experimental works. "I think it's very important that they learn from filmmakers like them, but also to introduce them to other traditions, because Hollywood cinema is only a small part of what's out there."

Her courses usually encourage students to look beyond conventional notions of cinematic polish and familiarize themselves with "other cinemas, other traditions, other methods, other modes of production that have nothing to do with creating a perfect, smooth, seamless end result." Instead, these alternative traditions emphasize imperfection, what Ramírez-Soto calls "the precarity of the image" to achieve equally wonderful effects.

As Ramírez-Soto challenges her students with unconventional or older works, she is often surprised by the way her research echoes forward into contemporary debates. In her ongoing course on Latin American feminist film history, she has found that the students "grapple with many of the same issues and struggles those film-makers were representing on screen. It's something that's close to their hearts."

Shocked by the case of Dominique Pelicot, a French woman drugged and raped systematically over a decade by her husband and dozens of men in her community, Ramírez-Soto put the news in discussion with A Man When He is a Man, a lesser-known 1982 documentary by Chilean filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento filmed in Costa Rica that interviews men about "Latin American Romanticism." The film is an ironic reflection on patriarchal violence and its consequences.

"Some students asked me at the end of class, 'But has anything changed in Costa Rica?' And I said, This is not simply a Costa Rican problem. No, look at what's happening in France. This is a global problem, right? I think it's very important to connect the materials with what's happening today so that it resonates with the students and they don't see it as something so distant, so alienating," she explains. 

This semester, Ramírez-Soto is teaching a course on Radical Film and Media, examining Latin American cinema as well as expressions of guerrilla or militant film-making from around the world, including fiction, non-fiction, and experimental works. The course aims to define the political purposes of cinema from historical and theoretical perspectives, as well as the meaning of "guerilla" and "third cinema" film practices, which emerged in the 1960s as a direct challenge of the typical Hollywood film.

Ultimately, Ramírez-Soto wants to instill in her students a sense of the effort it takes to go beyond the canon, and why that effort is worthy and rewarding. By centering narratives that were originally relegated, they are bound to find unexpected connections that help illuminate their own present struggles. "I want them to understand and reflect on why these works are not in the library. There's labor, there's work to be done in order to change that."

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Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto is Associate Professor of Film at Columbia University. She is a film and media historian whose areas of research include transnational cinema and television, feminist film histories, and documentary. Elizabeth is the author of (Un)veiling Bodies: A Trajectory of Chilean Post-Dictatorship Documentary (Legenda, 2019) and coeditor of Nomadías: El cine de Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento y Angelina Vázquez (Metales Pesados, 2016). She is also the coeditor of several special issues or sections which have been published in Jump Cut, Film Quarterly, and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas (forthcoming). Her work has appeared in journals like Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Feminist Media Histories and [in]Transition.