No matter how they are named, whether they are called Rom
or Romanichal or Gypsy or Gitano,* they bring music
to mind. In Spain, they are credited with making significant
contributions to, if not out-and-out creating the flamenco
style. As a result, we have a good deal of film footage that
documents, illustrates, popularizes and, inevitably, puts
a spin on the legendary Gypsy element in flamenco. Gitano-centered
films such as Ciertos Reflejos: La Chunga (RTVE,
1978), An Andalusian Journey: Gypsies and Flamenco
(BBC, 1988), and Latcho Drom; Bonne Route (1994),
will occupy our attention here.
All three films narrate steps on a journey, charting change
and development by the mile. As films, they work like Easy
Rider or The Sheltering Sky with a narrative
line drawn from a sojourn rather than from characters whose
strengths and weaknesses mesh or clash. In the case of Latcho
Drom (1994, 103 minutes), the road stretches out ahead
of people who are persistently stylized as nomads. Clearly,
however, the camera does its own fair share of traveling,
wandering from India to Egypt, to Turkey, to Romania, to Slovakia,
to Germany, to France, and finally on into Spain. Even if
the people on the screen happen to be stable and sedentary
- they often are - the westward wanderings of film subtly
recast these people as mobile. A little less ambiguous, as
road films go, is An Andalusian Journey (1988, Part
I (50 minutes; Part II, 50 minutes). Like the series Rito
y Geografia del Cante (1971-73), this BBC production
steers its traveling camera around different cities and towns
of southern Spain, from Sevilla to Utrera, in part one, and
then from Jerez to Lebrija to Cádiz in part two. The
Andalusian Gitanos it visits are sedentary, but still in all,
the camera's sojourn keeps whispering travel in our ears.
Finally, Ciertos Reflejos: La Chunga (1978, 40 minutes)
is just as much a road trip as the other two, but here the
voyage is temporal rather than spatial. We leap from youth
to maturity, from dreams to reality, and from the poverty
of a little Gypsy waif to the bright and beautiful world of
La Chunga.
The filmmakers' reliance on travel imagery in all three films
is hardly accidental. The theme of the road befits the Rom.
It runs throughout these films as well as others beyond the
scope of discussion - I am thinking of The Time of the
Gypsies (1987) and Angelo, My Love (1983). Something
about the Rom just loves the road, and as a result, Gypsy
films seem to travel even when the Gypsies themselves do not.
Just as persistent in these films is the issue of intolerance.
It comes in two varieties, the mean-spirited intolerance of
the gadje, and the noble intolerance of the Gypsies themselves.
The racist variety is obvious and well explored in all three
films. In Latcho Drom, Gypsies are rousted out of
their camps and barred from their buildings. In An Andalusian
Journey, Moraito-on-the-road dramatizes the fact that
if you are hitchhiking and you look like a Gypsy, you might
as well give it up and walk. In Ciertos Reflejos,
the bartender ignores little Micaela, requesting a glass of
water, as if she were no more than a bug on his sleeve.
The second sort of intolerance, the Gypsy's own, is worth
a moment's reflection. I refer here to the claim, explicit
in Latcho Drom and implicit in the flamenco style,
that Gypsies do not tolerate the dominant world because it
reeks of moralism and for-display-only virtue. Gypsies, it
is suggested, may be wily, but they are also brutally honest.
They call a spade a spade, and they'll not brook the hypocrisy
from those who lack the guts to face life as it is. Better
to just pull up stakes and move on down the road.
Our films imply that this fabled honesty, this Rom candor,
this Gitano penchant for wearing hearts on sleeves is a born-and-bred
Gypsy trait. However, an increasing amount of historical research
makes it seem more likely that nineteenth-century Gypsies
exploited and co-opted a "cult of sincerity" that was then
sweeping across all of Europe, turning people towards matters
of the heart and away from the fatuous airs of the prior epoch...conceits
displayed so disturbingly in feature films such as Dangerous
Liasons (1988) and Ridicule (1996). From 1825
onward, Gypsies, travelers, and bohemians - the lumpen cast-offs
of the increasingly bourgeois society - found ways to survive
by playing honest and by riding the bandwagon of sincerity
through social doorways and economic portals that had been
previously closed to them. They played and sang and danced
with excessive joy and exaggerated sorrow, and went on to
become kings of hearts, the Gypsy kings. Their music may have
lacked the mathematical rigor of Bach's and Mozart's, but
it offered something that that elite music couldn't touch,
namely, soul.
Unfortunately, most films on the subject say nothing about
this Gypsy co-optation of sincerity, and leave us - even lead
us - to believe that the candor and passion of Gitanos is
timeless, having been carried down the long Gypsy road, and
having been preserved in pure form time immemorial, "pure
as the lemon" and "pure as the olive" as La Fernanda and El
Chocolate say in An Andalusian Journey. This Gypsy
candor is said to be a blood thing, rather than a class thing
or a money thing. To its credit, Ciertos Reflejos: La
Chunga sidesteps this linkage of blood and sincerity,
and instead acknowledges some hard economic realities of Gypsies
and music without flinching or apologizing. That is, song
and dance was, and is, one of the few avenues that poor Gitanos
could pursue if they wanted shoes on their feet and food in
their bellies.
One final word about all three films taken together. They
treat "Gitano" as if it simply meant a distinct ethnic group.
This interpretation makes good sense in the post-WWII era,
but not in the decades that preceded. When Antonio Machado
y Alvarez wrote in the 1880s and when Federico García
Lorca wrote in the 1920s, Gitanos were understood to be Andalusians
- wrongfully disparaged and musically adept, but Andalusian
nonetheless. They were "Gitanos-Andaluces". During the Franco
years, however, this term was prized apart - with Antonio
Mairena's hand wielding the lever - so that suddenly the term
"Gitano" stood for its own separate thing, for a distinct
Gitano identity. As a result, "flamenco Gitano" emerged as
a term for distinguishing a Gitano style from an Andalusian
style. This development, however much it helped to advance
social justice for contemporary Gitanos, had a double downside.
It masked the historical class struggles described above,
and, worse, it left us with an image of Gitanos as timeless
people living an immutable way of life. While such an image
may seem respectful from one angle, it demeans Gitanos from
another by making Gitano culture seem exceptional and exotic,
if not freaky. Every other cultural system changes with time.
Life is flux. Why should Gitanos to be any different?
Now to the films themselves. Ciertos Reflejos: La Chunga
is a one-hour musical biopic made for Spanish National television
in 1978 and directed by Mario Gómez Martín who
also directed the Rito y Geografía del Cante documentary
series. Donn Pohren may have been referring to this film in
his Lives and Legends when he wrote that "La Chunga's
performance on a Spanish TV benefit program showed clearly
that she has not lost a hard core of pure dance possessed
by few in baile flamenco today." But calling this
film a TV benefit program undersells its richness and subtlety.
It is a commentary on the social lives of flamencos depicting
La Chunga's rise from poverty to stardom by playing on moments
of mirror gazing...hence the title. As she gazes into her
mirror, preparing herself for the stage show that punctuates
the film, she is carried back in time to her childhood of
poverty, to her loving family, and to her fitful rise to stardom.
In witnessing this rise, we catch a glimpse of the social
fabric with its sharp creases and its disturbing division
between the wealthy business class and the poor Gitano class.
The film opens to a theatre being readied for a performance.
La Chunga (Micaela Flores Amaya, born 1938 and raised in Barcelona)
sits in her lavish dressing room adjusting her clothes, putting
on make-up, and finally changing her shoes, at which point
the camera closes in on her feet. The screen then flashes
back to her barefoot childhood. As a young adolescent girl,
she is wandering the streets in tatters, gazing wistfully
into display windows. She eventually sneaks into one shop
to dance in front of a mirror, and is apprehended by the proprietor
who recognizes her talent. His enthusiasm rekindles her own
eagerness, thereby touching off La Chunga's rise to stardom.
Along the way, the young La Chunga plays off life in her hovel
(chabola) with an increasingly intense schedule of
teachers, agents, and finally producers. At various moments
of flash-forward during this period of development, the mature
La Chunga dances a caña and soleá
to the cante of El Moro (José Silva Montañez,
whose oaken-barrel voice can be heard on Manolo Sanlucar's
disc "Tauromachia"), a long tango with El Moro singing,
an alegrías with María Vargas, a martinete
with El Moro, and a brief bulerías staged
amid the hovels of a Gitano settlement. Finally the film finds
the young La Chunga poised to make her very first professional
appearance. And she walks forward the screen turns again to
the mature La Chunga as she bounds out onto the stage to dance
the rumba, with María Vargas, that closes
out the film. Despite its simple and naive rags-to-riches
plot, this film is complex and satisfying because it extends
itself so generously to handle the social lives of Gitanos
and also because it presents lengthy segments of La Chunga's
performances, all filmed with long camera shots that make
it possible for the viewer to appreciate her barefoot technique
and her passionate style.
An
Andalusian Journey is also a television documentary,
produced by the BBC in 1988 and directed by Jana Bokova. José
Luis Ortiz Nuevo serves as on-screen commentator in portions
of part one, and then for the remainder of this two part project,
artists and aficionados respond to questions from off-screen
interviewers. Their questions and responses pivot around matters
of Gitano art and social life. The upshot is a film of Gitano
social advocacy.
The musical events consist of complete performances. In a
gathering of the Montoya family, El Farucco dances to the
cante of El Chocolate. La Fernanda performs with Paco del
Gastor in a resonant old estate hall in Utrera. Angelita Vargas
dances the escobilla section of a soleá
in a staged setting that seems to recapture the same haunting
atmosphere that we see in John Singer Sargent's "El Jaleo".
Pedro Bacán, whose recent loss has devastated all of
us who fell in love with his flamenco guitar, chats informally
with family and friends and eventually falls into a performance
of an astoundingly powerful tarantas as he sits the
steps of an old cortijo. Many of these scenes pulsate
with flamenco sensuousness. You can almost smell the wine-musk
of the old bodega where El Moraito plays bulerías
and soleares, his rich guitar sounds bouncing off
the stone walls and huge wine casks.
Latcho
Drom is a 1994 French project directed by Tony Gatlif
that leaps ahead of most previous efforts in both music and
cinematography. Musically, this film starts out well and just
keeps on getting better in presenting performances as if they
were spontaneous and candid events flowing from people as
water flows from a spring. The cinematography fixes the viewer's
attention by exploiting visual mini-plots, a boy searching
for spot from which to see a group of musicians, an elderly
woman (photo) singing a lament for loved ones lost in Auschwitz
- redone as a track on the CD Boheme by "Deep Forest,"
Eric Mouquet and Michel Sanchez, 1995) - a lively little boy
who pays Romanichal musicians in hopes of brightening his
sad mother's day, a boy wandering about after having been
expelled from his hovel. If the performances in themselves
can't hold the viewers, the visuals probably will. Either
way, the film will hang on to its viewers. My one hesitation
is that the footage of musical events is edited in short shots
that are distracting to viewers who are eager to attend to
the performances themselves. The section of flamenco consists
of about fifteeen minutes of street-danced tangos
and camaronista bulerías sung by La Caita
and Remedios Amaya and accompanied by David Silva Santos.
Their explicitly political lyrics add a new wrinkle to the
flamenco tradition: "From Isabella the Catholic...from Hitler
to Franco...we have been victims of their wars." But here,
with its distinctly modern focus on Gitano ethnicity, such
lyrics seem not only appropriate, but necessary.
NOTES
*
Back in 1982, at a hectic linguistics conference in Lawrence,
Kansas, I kicked back for an evening with Ian Hancock and
Anita Herzfeld. After some wonderful food and an inordinate
amount of wine, I confided to them both that I was planning
to step away from our then common interest in West Indian
Creole languages so as to refocus my energy on Spain, music,
and Gypsies. Ian advised me then - and continued to guide
me thereafter - particularly with regard to the issue of Gypsies.
It became immediately clear to me, even as we explored Gypsy
scholarship during that memorable Kansas evening, that I was
venturing into an intellectual minefield. The nature of Gypsy
ethnicity is controversial, but even more hotly contended
is the question of who has the right to comment on that Gypsy
ethnicity. The Rom themselves generally avoid these debates,
Hancock being a controversial exception. The Gypsy Lore Society,
with roots that stretch back to English romanticism in the
last century, claims its own kind of authority. And a variety
of other anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, all
with different angles on the matter, offer still other versions
of who Romanichals are and why they have pursued the practices
that they have.
Sometimes I been able to skirt these hotly contended debates,
but on other occasions, I've felt bound to enter the fray.
In 1992, I criticized a colleague for appearing on the Geraldo
Rivera show and for suggesting that Gypsies are thieves. I
lost a couple friends as a result. In 1995, at a conference
in Seville, I sat through a very unsettling presentation by
a prominent flamencologist in which he accused Antonio Mairena
and his cronies - including some Gitano flamencologists who
were present in the room - of fostering a genocidal racism
not unlike that wielded by Hitler against the Rom. Subsequently,
I wrote a strong rebuttal of that argument, and, as a result,
I probably lost backing for my own efforts to rewrite the
history of flamenco music. Finally - and on the other side
of the fence - in scanning recent postings on the flamenco
internet listserv regarding the writings of Gerhard Steingress,
I have been struck by the outpouring of venomous but ill-supported
comments from flamencos-cibernéticos who, without having
read his book, accuse Steingress of ignorance, bias, and sociological
naiveté in his handling the matter of Gitano ethnicity.
I've grumbled aloud across cyberspace about such lose cannoneering
- all the while reserving space to disagree with Steingress
- and, as a result, I've probably been tagged a Gitanophobe.
All things considered, I've learned through hard knocks that
this Gypsy issue is deeply divisive. Questions about Gitano
ethnicity cause the most violent disagreements among the most
well-intentioned people. Arguments over the matter will be
defused only when it is understood that to postulate an invention
or construction of Gypsy ethnicity does not necessarily discount
the worth of that ethnicity or of the people who claim it
as the foundation of their lives. By the same token, lives
built on invented identities - that is, all of our lives -
deserve respect, something that has often been absent from
discussions of Gitano ethnicity and flamenco music.
Introduction:
Reading Carmen (1983)
For American aficionados, Carlos Saura's film Carmen
is a mezmerizing model of flamenco artistry. Its hypnotic
powers emanate from the piercing eyes and the graceful but
oh-so-well-controlled bodies of the dancers. We cannot help
but be drawn into their web, more tightly, perhaps, with each
viewing. As a model, this film hints at the point and purpose
of flamenco, but always quietly if not subliminally. The master
artists glide through their art, working hard, but never laboring.
Antonio Gades, for one, has taken his dance inside himself
to the point that his simplest step can stop our hearts. And
as for Paco de Lucía, well, for many of us, Carmen
offered a first glimpse of his complete control of the style.
He slips in and out of his art with the nonchalance of a guy
slipping in and out of his shoes.
In the more than ten years since my first viewing of Carmen,
I've given it quite a few viewings and lot of thought, all
enhanced by some very helpful reading - John Hopewell, Marvin
D'Lugo, Marsha Kinder. I've come to the conclusion that it
is an extraordinarily complex film. Complex? Never mind the
choreography! And don't get hung up on the music! This film
is complex because it dares the viewer to step outside and
beyond all the obvious challenges. Carmen is complex
because it's a tough read.
"Reading"
is an activity most often associated with books and other
literary texts, but here I will use it to describe the handling
of the film text. As a term, "reading" may be singular, but
it always operates with a certain a doubleness. Let me explain.
One reads any text by deciphering expressions (words-on-a-page
or images-on-a-screen) and assigning the expressions a meaning.
In this way, I "read" the words on line 31 of my 1040 form,
ascribing a fairly specific and literal meaning to the strange
term "adjusted gross income." Similarly, Gracie Allen, in
George and Gracie's classic comedy routine, always did a literal
reading of George's sign-off phrase "say Goodnight Gracie."
She read those words literally and responded guilelessly but
inappropriately, saying "Goodnight Gracie." You can see, from
these examples, that literal reading is a fairly mechanical
process, one that assigns meanings without reference to anything
outside of the text and its language. However, in a second
moment of reading, we also pursue - all of us except Gracie
- critical reading. Nothing fancy or high fallootin' here:
critical reading is simply the task of interpreting expressions
according to their context. Let me offer a homespun example
of a critical read. My wife and I were strolling downtown
last week. As we walked, I pointed to a small red car parked
along the street. My wife looked at my pointed finger and
then looked at the car, and, in a stroke, she knew exactly
what I meant. She had done a quick critical read of my gesture.
Her critical reading process consisted of matching my gesture
to the surrounding physical context and simultaneously to
my persistent interests. It is likely that she began by considering
the possibility that I was pointing to the ticket on the windshield
of the car, and chuckling in my annoying way at the poor schnook
who would have to pay the parking fine. Then, chances are,
she considered the likelihood that I was fingering this zippy
red Miata as the car of my dreams. But in the end, she discarded
both meanings when she read the car's vanity plate FLMNCO.
Having rastered through her knowledge of my experiences and
interests and through her perceptions of the world beyond
my finger, she arrived at the properly critical interpretation
of my gesture. At that point she leaned over to me and said,
"Another aficionado, eh?" I confirmed her remark with a grunt
and a smile, and we went on our way. The moment passed in
the blink of an eye, and it only dawns on me now that her
simple street-side interpretation might help illustrate the
process critical reading.
Reading Carmen critically is no different from guessing
at the meaning of a pointed finger. Initially we work our
way along mechanically, recognizing sounds, identifying performers,
and following the plot. But even as this mechanical reading
is proceeding, we are cranking up our critical faculties,
asking ourselves, why all the mirrors? Why does Gades spend
so much time staring, not only staring at his dancers, but
at himself. What is the significance of the play-within-a
play structure? Such questions do and should come to mind
as part of a critical reading of this film. And as happened
with my wife and my pointed finger, one can only find answers
to these questions by examining the larger context in which
the film was conceived, produced, and presented.
In the case of Carmen, the critical reader needs
to refer to history, and not just Saura's personal history,
but to the larger and very public history of Spain during
the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. More pointedly, Spain's history made
its mark and put it stamp on Saura's films because of the
political regime of Francisco Franco (1939-75). Nothing in
Carmen, not the dance, not the guitar, not the mirrors,
not selection of Bizet's opera as a point of departure, not
even the theme of flamenco itself makes any sense if the Franco
regime is left aside. After Franco died in 1975, Saura said
as much: "I believe that when Franco was still alive, I had
a moral obligation - more for myself than for society - to
do everything that was possible within my form of work to
help change the political system as quickly as possible."
Why so? Why this passionate search to find an alternative
to Francoism? Because Franco's regime was much more than ham-fisted
police-tactics and clumsy censorship. It was a moral climate
of paranoia and a Manichean cultural politics of black hats
and white hats with nothing in between. It was an insistent
and often backward-looking program of unrefusable likes and
dislikes. And by the end, the regime generally succeeded in
narcotizing most dissenters and deadening most minds.
During the regime itself Saura and other were blocked in their
efforts to present open and public resistance. The censors
came down on them like Maxwell's silver hammer. Instead, he
created subtle symbolic subversions, strange, obscure, and
twisting moments of film that the censors accepted as art-for-art's-sake,
but which still transmitted their appointed political punch.
For example, in his 1970 film "The Garden of Delights", the
main character, who has lost his memory as a result of a head
injury in an auto crash mutters, "My head! My head! Do what
you want to my body, but don't touch my head!" Such powerful
but elusive moments in the films of Saura and others of his
day came to be known as the "franquista aesthetic."
This "aesthetic" lived on in Saura's films of the 80s including
Blood Wedding, Carmen and A Love Bewitched,
and because of the ambiguity and obliqueness associated with
these films, you and I find our abilities as critical readers
challenged in a special way. Reading my pointer toward the
little red car challenged my wife, even though I wasn't trying
to be obtuse. Reading the carefully concealed meanings of
Carmen is far harder because the relevant political
context, Franco's Spain, is more distant, and because Saura
intentionally cloaked his political meanings and pawned them
off as merely clever moments in an artful film.
So then, what of the stare? What, now, can we say about those
awful eyes: Antonio Gades scrutinizing his dancers in search
of a Carmen; Gades, visually dissecting the mirrored image
of his own dance with those same laser-like eyes; the eyes
of Laura del Sol breathing back fire to match each elevated
degree of heat in Gades's own? The eyes have it, to be sure.
But what exactly are these haunting eyes saying? The key may
lie in the mirrors which abound in these films (as they also
do in Saura's most recent work Flamenco). In the
mirrors, Carmen's actors scrutinize themselves in the very
same moment that we, the audience, scrutinize them from our
seats. And the lesson that hangs in the balance is self-scrutiny.
We, the viewers, find ourselves identifying with Antonio,
emulating his penetrating gaze, and imitating his self-scrutinizing
eyes. Like him, we are pushed to reflect back on ourselves,
using our eyes to weigh and test the very vision that serves
as the medium of the test. Let nothing be taken for granted.
Let nothing in ourselves pass without critical reflection.
We must live, as Antonio lives, with eyes wide, with head
alert, and with all bodily systems ready to confront the meretricious
agenda that comes down from the central office.
Self-scrutiny modeled by the intense gaze of the flamenco
dancer is a power political theme in Carmen. However,
curiously, it is paired here with another theme in which flamenco
dance operates less as a vehicle of resistance than a target.
Flamenco, the symbolic embodiment of critical scrutiny, is
also presented as a stand-in for all that is seductive and
oppressive in Franco's Spain. Paradoxically then, flamenco
dance symbolizes the problem at the same time that it is portrayed
as a solution. Viewers are brought face-to-face with the "problem"
of flamenco late in the film, when del Sol's Carmen appears
before Antonio in a stereotyped Andalusian outfit. He responds,
accepting both her and her guise, saying "Why not all the
trite commonplaces?". With this seemingly insignificant acquiescence,
Antonio reveals the disturbing result of his whole-body commitment
to discipline of flamenco performance, namely that his mind,
so fiercely independent and directorial in the early going,
has become submissive in the end to the artifice of the performance.
His downfall is brought on by a devotion to dance that is
so whole-hearted that he ends up confusing dance with reality.
His bodily discipline as a dancer has gotten in the way of
his good sense. With this, it becomes apparent that art, so
potent a symbol of self-scrutiny, can become a source of precisely
that sort of self-delusion that was endemic to the Franco
regime. Morever, with this symbolic treatment of flamenco-as-danger,
Saura revises the simplistic message of his earlier film ("Do
you want you want to my body, but don't touch my head"), and
forces us to ponder the disconcerting possibility that disciplining
the body may be tantamount to disciplining the head.
The mystery and the challenge of Carmen lies in its
paradoxical imaging of flamenco, in its symbolic treatment
flamenco dance as source of, and solution to, the political
problem of Francoism. In Saura's hands, flamenco is simultaneously
virus and vaccine. It plays on both sides of the fence, symbolizing
now, oppression and now, resistance. He neither wholly celebrates
it, nor completely condemns it. Instead, he tells us that
it is a promising danger and a dangerous promise. Like Clint
Eastwood's William Muni in The Unforgiven, its promise
and its danger are fused into one reality; it wears a white
hat and a black hat at the same time. As a study of flamenco,
Saura's film shows no inclination to simplify it, as do so
many literary studies of the 60s and 70s. For Saura, flamenco
is not just duende, nor wholly Gitano, nor consummately
Andalusian, nor entirely national, nor completely anything
else. For him, flamenco music harbors a multitude of voices,
often singing against one another. All the more reason for
us, like Antonio, to scrutinize it as we perform it.
xxx