Carlos Saura's Flamenco Trilogy

Laura del Sol and Antonio Gades

During the 1980s, Carlos Saura collaborated with dancer and choreographer Antonio Gades on three flamenco oriented films: Blood Wedding (1981), Carmen (1983), and El Amor Brujo (1986). The three films are now available in a new and spiffy blu ray set released by the Criterion Collection's Eclipse series. As with all Eclipse releases, the extras are nonexistent, but the films themselves are choice: dynamic detonations of movement cut exquisitely to stirring music. All the films celebrate Spanish culture, but also mock up the mythos underlying representations of Spain. The scenarios of the three ballets filmed are all based on material that stresses themes of reckless passion, infidelity, and murder. The dancers, singers, and musicians in these films perform as if conjuring the joys and torments of their ancestors. Saura escapes any high culture bugaboo and gives us the thrill of live performance.

Saura had been invited to witness a rehearsal of Gades and his troupe performing a dance adaptation of Lorca's Blood Wedding. This provided the impetus for a film that stays strictly within a rehearsal studio for its 71 minute entirety. The film is the most like a documentary of the three and the focus remains fixed on the artistic process. We never see a final performance of the piece. Indeed the first half of the film documents the dancers and players filing in, applying makeup, and warming up. Gades discloses a personal anecdote and we get a little insight into the performers by the talismans and gnomes they unpack from the fishing tackle boxes that carry their makeup. Despite the documentary facade, Blood Wedding is shot and cut more like Stop Making Sense or Shine A Light then Gimme Shelter. The three or four camera angles used in the rehearsal space maximize the kinetic impact of the dancers and the editing syncs it perfectly to the thunderous guitar and vocal accompaniment.

Carmen

Pretty much the same performers and their talents will leave viewers similarly agog in the followup, Carmen. The film is also primarily made up of rehearsals, but Carmen has more color, a bigger scope, and the semblance of a plot. Gades has to find a new dancer for his Carmen and, of course, he does so in the person of a young hoofer conveniently named Carmen played by Laura del Sol. Does life imitate art? Well, reality and artifice are so intertwined in the film that it is hard to say what came first. Gades and his fellow performers are not actors, so when he asks guitar great Paco de Lucia for romantic advice, the dramatic interchange comes off a little awkward. However, all my objections were swept by the bravura birthday celebration in which the cast performs a delightful burlesque of Prosper Mérimée's novel. 

El Amor Brujo makes the move to total artifice which Saura also employs in his subsequent musical films: Tango, Flamenco, Fados, Flamenco, Flamenco, and J: Beyond Flamenco. El Amor Brujo is based on Manuel de Falla's ballet and is centered amidst the Roma and Andalusian roots of flamenco. A stylized sound stage represent an expressively colored Granada slum in a lurid love saga with spectral emanations. There is no rehearsal footage this time. We finally get to see a show en toto. As before, there is a wedding, infidelity and a murder in a film that is an apt culmination to the series. This Eclipse set would make an ideal gift to dance and film lovers alike. 

El Amor Brujo