Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema 9781526141774

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Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema

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Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema Edited by Lisa Shaw and Rob Stone

Manchester University Press Manchester

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2012

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN

978 07190 8380 8 hardback

First published 2012 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10/12 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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Contents

List of figures Contributors Acknowledgements

page vii ix xvi

Introduction Lisa Shaw and Rob Stone 1 Singing of dubious desire: Imperio Argentina and Penélope Cruz as Nazi Germany’s exotic Other Ann Davies 2 Voicing gender: transgender performance and the national imaginary in the Spanish cinema of the democratic era Ian Biddle and Santiago Fouz-Hernández

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3 Bien pagá: popular song in the films of Pedro Almodóvar Eric M. Thau

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4 El otro lado de la cama: remixed Transition (1973–82) Nuria Triana Toribio

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5 On the function of punk aesthetics in Salto al vacío and Historias del Kronen María Pilar Rodríguez 6 Mobile soundscapes in the quinqui film Tom Whittaker 7 Song-shaped cinema: the performance of Gypsy and Basque songs in relation to film form Rob Stone

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8 Travelling song: music, iteration and translation in La leyenda del tiempo Parvati Nair

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9 Sound moves: immigration and music in Cosas que dejé en La Habana Isabel Santaolalla

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10 The Afro-Cuban soundscape of Mexico City: authenticating spaces of violence and immorality in Salón México and Víctimas del pecado David F. García 11 Blues traveller: Habana Blues and the framing of diasporic cubanía Susan Thomas

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12 Dancing in the dark: Saura’s Tango Peter William Evans

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13 Re-making Frida Kahlo through song in Frida Deborah Shaw

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14 ‘Silence! Fado is about to be sung’: fado and the comédia à portuguesa Anthony De Melo

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15 Sounds from Brazil: brasilidade and the rise of the music documentary 249 Tatiana Signorelli Heise 16 Soundtrack to roguery: music and malandragem in the city Lorraine Leu

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17 The Brazilian chanchada’s musical moments and the performance of identity Lisa Shaw

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18 Orpheus in Babylon: music, myth and realism in the films of Rio de Janeiro David Treece

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Index

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List of figures

1 Penélope Cruz as Macarena in La niña de tus ojos (1998), dir. Fernando Trueba, prod. Creativos Asociados de Radio y Televisión (CARTEL), Fernando Trueba Producciones Cinematográficas S.A., Lolafilms. page 26 2 Jesús Pérez Ocaña as himself in drag in Ocaña, Retrat intermitent (1978), dir. Ventura Pons, prod. Prozesa, Teide P.C. 35 3 Gael García Bernal as Zahara in La mala educación (2004), dir, Pedro Almodóvar, prod. Canal+ España, El Deseo S.A., Televisión Española (TVE). 39 4 Mónica Cervera as Marieta in 20 centímetros (2005), dir. Ramón Salazar, prod. Alligator Producciones, Divine Productions, Estudios Picasso. 43 5 Pedro (Guillermo Toledo) and Pilar (María Esteve) in El otro lado de la cama (2002), dir. Emilio Martínez Lázaro, prod. Impala, Telecinco, Telespan 2000, Vía Digital. 69 6 Javier (Ernesto Alterio) and Paula (Natalia Verbeke) in El otro lado de la cama (2002), dir. Emilio Martínez Lázaro, prod. Impala, Telecinco, Telespan 2000, Vía Digital. 73 7 Performing the self: real-life delinquents, José Antonio Valdelomar and Berta Socuéllamos, in Deprisa, deprisa (1981), dir. Carlos Saura, prod. Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas S.L., Les Films Molière. 100 8 The cantaor Agujeta sings ‘¡Qué locura!’ (What Madness!) in Flamenco (1995) dir. Carlos Saura, prod.

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Canal+ España, Juan Lebrón Producciones, Junta de Andalucía, RTVA Radio Television de Andalucia, Sociedad General de Autores, Sogepaq. Darkness of the dance in Tango: Elena (Mia Maestro) and Ernesto (Carlos Rivarola) rehearse a passionate tango (1998), dir. Carlos Saura, prod. Adela Pictures, Alma Ata International Pictures S.L., Argentina Sono Film S.A.C.I., Astrolabio Producciones S.L., Beco Films, Hollywood Partners, Pandora Cinema, Saura Films, Terraplen Producciones. Courtesy of Alma Ata International Pictures. Frida (Salma Hayek) sings ‘La bruja’ in a Mexican cantina (2002), dir. Julie Taymor, prod. Handprint Entertainment, Lions Gate Films (as Lions Gate Films), Miramax Films, Ventanarosa Productions. Frida (Salma Hayek) dances with Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd) (2002) dir. Julie Taymor, prod. Handprint Entertainment, Lions Gate Films (as Lions Gate Films), Miramax Films, Ventanarosa Productions. Oscarito as rumbeira in Aviso aos navegantes (1950), dir. Watson Macedo, prod. Atlântida Cinematográfica.

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Contributors

Ian Biddle is Senior Lecturer in Music and Cultural Theory at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University. His research covers the cultural history of music and masculinity, theorisation of music’s intervention in communities and subjectivities, sound, soundscapes and urban experience, and the politics of noise. He is editor of the journal Radical Musicology. He is co-editor of Between the Global and the Local: World Musics and National Identities (Ashgate, 2006) and Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (Ashgate, 2010), and author of Music, Masculinity and the Claims of History: The Austro-German Tradition from Hegel to Freud (Ashgate, 2011). Ann Davies is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at Newcastle University. She has written various articles on contemporary Spanish and Basque cinema, is the author of Pedro Almodóvar (Grant and Cutler (2007)) and Daniel Calparsoro (Manchester University Press (2009)), and is co-author of Carmen on Film: A Cultural History (Indiana University Press (2006)). She is editor of Spain on Screen: Contemporary Developments in Spanish Film (Palgrave Macmillan (2011)), and co-editor of The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Film (Wallflower Press, with Phil Powrie and Bruce Babington (2004)) and Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV (Rodopi, with Chris Perriam (2005)). Her book on landscape, space and place in contemporary Spanish culture was published by Liverpool University Press in 2012. She is currently writing a book on Penélope Cruz for the British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan. Anthony De Melo is completing a PhD in Film Studies at King’s College London. His research focuses on the representation of

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fado in Portuguese cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. He has previously researched and published on Cinema Novo Português (New Portuguese Cinema) of the 1960s. Peter William Evans is Professor of Film Studies in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary, University of London. His publications on Spanish cinema include The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire (Oxford University Press, 1995), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (British Film Institute, 1996) and Bigas Luna: Jamón jamón (Paidós, 2004). He is also the editor of Spanish Cinema: The Auteurist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1999), and co-editor of Luis Buñuel: New Readings (British Film Institute, 2004) and The Transnational in Iberian and Latin American Cinemas (Hispanic Research Journal, 2007). His latest book is Top Hat (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He is currently writing a BFI classic on Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956). Santiago Fouz-Hernández is Senior Lecturer in Spanish Cinema at the University of Durham. He is co-author of Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2007), editor of Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2009), co-editor of Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to her Cultural Transformations (Ashgate, 2004), and reviews editor of the journal Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (Intellect). He is currently completing a book on the representation of the male body in contemporary film and popular culture, entitled Cuerpos de cine. David F. García is Assistant Professor and holds degrees in music from California State University, Long Beach (BM in composition, 1995), the University of California, Santa Barbara (MA in ethnomusicology, 1997), and the City University of New York, Graduate Center (PhD in ethnomusicology, 2003). His research focuses on the music of Latin America and the United States with an emphasis on black music of the Americas. He is the author of Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music (Temple University Press, 2006), which was awarded a Certificate of Merit in the category Best Research in Folk, Ethnic or World Music by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in

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2007. He is currently conducting research for a monograph on the intersection of African American and Afro-Latino music in the mid twentieth century. Tatiana Signorelli Heise teaches Film Studies at the University of Manchester, England. She has published a number of articles on Brazilian cinema, and her monograph Remaking Brazil: Contested National Identities in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema is forthcoming with the University of Wales Press (2012). She holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Leeds and an MA in the Sociology of Contemporary Culture from the University of York. Lorraine Leu is Associate Professor in the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. She is one of the editors of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and is the author of Brazilian Popular Music: Caetano Veloso and the Regeneration of Tradition (Ashgate, 2006). She has also published on representations of criminals in the Brazilian press and in cinema, and on the criminalisation of subaltern subjects through urbanisation projects and in public discourse in Brazil. Parvati Nair is Professor of Hispanic Cultural Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, where she is director of the Centre for the Study of Migration. She writes on migration, ethnicity and gender in photography, music and film. Her books include Configuring Community: Theories, Narratives and Practices of Community Identities in Contemporary Spain (MHRA, 2004), Rumbo al norte: inmigración y movimientos culturales entre el Magreb y España (Edicions Bellaterra, 2006) and A Different Light: The Photography of Sebastião Salgado (Duke University Press, 2011). She edits Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture and is currently writing a book on flamenco in local and global contexts, Flamenco Rhythms: People, Place, Performance, to be published by Liverpool University Press. María Pilar Rodríguez obtained her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Until 2002 she was a professor at Columbia University, and she currently teaches at Deusto University in San Sebastian, where she leads the research

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group in Communication Studies. She is the author of Mundos en conflicto: aproximaciones al cine vasco de los noventa (Deusto University Press, 2002) and Cultura audiovisual: el cine europeo como espacio para la reflexión social (Gobierno Vasco, 2010), and co-author of the books Tratamiento de la violencia de género en la prensa vasca (2006) and Dirigir en femenino (2009). She also edited Cultural and Media Studies: Basque/European Perspectives (Nevada University Press, 2009) and Estudios culturales y de los medios de comunicación (Deusto University Press, 2009). Isabel Santaolalla is Professor of Spanish and Film Studies at Roehampton University, London. She has published on postcolonial literature, cultural studies and film, with special emphasis on questions of migration, ethnicity and gender in the cinema. She is editor of “New” Exoticisms: Changing Patterns in the Construction of Otherness (Rodopi, 2000), and co-editor of Luis Buñuel: New Readings (BFI, 2004), Buñuel, siglo XXI (Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2004) and The Transnational in Iberian and Latin American Cinemas (Hispanic Research Journal, 2007). She is the author of Los ‘Otros’: Etnicidad y ‘raza’ en el cine español contemporáneo (Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza & Ocho y Medio, 2005) and The Cinema of Iciar Bollaín (Manchester University Press, 2011). She is currently involved in a project on cinema and the Saharawi people, in connection with which she has published (with S. Simanowitz) ‘A Cinematic Refuge in the Desert: The Sahara International Film Festival’, in Iordanova and Cheung (eds), Film Festival Yearbook 2 (St Andrews Film Studies, 2010). Deborah Shaw is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Portsmouth. She has published numerous articles in the fields of Latin American women’s writing, contemporary Latin American film, and representations of Latinos and Latin Americans in Hollywood film. She is the author of Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Ten Key Films (Continuum, 2003) and the editor of Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). She also co-edited, with Ruth Doughty, Film: The Essential Study Guide (Routledge, 2008). She is currently completing The Three Amigos: Three Transnational Mexican Filmmakers for Manchester University Press and is founding co-editor of the journal Transnational Cinemas (Intellect).

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Lisa Shaw is Reader in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at the University of Liverpool. She is author of The Social History of the Brazilian Samba (Ashgate, 1999), and co-author (with Stephanie Dennison) of Popular Cinema in Brazil, 1930–2001 (Manchester University Press, 2004) and Brazilian National Cinema (Routledge, 2007). She is currently working on a book on Carmen Miranda for the BFI/Palgrave Macmillan’s ‘Film Stars’ series, and has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship for 2012 to complete a monograph entitled Tropical Travels and Transatlantic Dialogues: Brazilian Popular Culture Abroad, 1870–1945. Rob Stone is Professor of European Film in the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Spanish Cinema (Longman, 2001), The Wounded Throat: Flamenco in the Works of Federico García Lorca and Carlos Saura (Edwin Mellen, 2004), Julio Medem (Manchester University Press, 2007) and Walk, Don’t Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (Columbia University Press/Wallflower, 2012). He is also co-editor (with Graeme Harper) of The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (Wallflower, 2007) and (with Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla) of the forthcoming Companion to Luis Buñuel (Blackwell, 2012). Eric M. Thau is Associate Professor of Contemporary Spanish Film, Literature and Culture at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He is the organiser of the University’s ‘International Conferences on Latin American and Iberian Cinemas’. He is currently completing a monograph entitled En Obras: The Construction and Deconstruction of Spanish Identity through Cinema. Susan Thomas is Associate Professor of Musicology and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia. Her research interests are Cuban and Latin American Music, early twentieth-century musical theatre and film, gendered performance practices, and transnationalism and diaspora. She is the author of Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana’s Lyric Stage (University of Illinois Press, 2008), and her work has appeared in a number of journals and books including, The Journal of Popular Music Studies and Latin American Music Review, Cuba Transnational

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(University of Florida, 2004) and La voz marginal: Projecciones de grupos marginales en los medios de comunicación populares (Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2010), and the soon to be released Musics of Latin America (W.W. Norton, 2011). David Treece is Camoens Professor of Portuguese in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King’s College, London, where he directed the Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture and Society from 1996 to 2010. He is the author of Exiles, Allies, Rebels: Brazil’s Indianist Movement, Indigenist Politics, and the Imperial Nation-State (Greenwood, 2000), the coauthor of The Gathering of Voices: The Twentieth-century Poetry of Latin America (Verso, 1992), and his translations of Brazilian fiction and poetry include João Guimarães Rosa’s The Jaguar and Other Stories (2001). He was co-founder/editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies until 2004, and is a co-editor of the journal Portuguese Studies. Brazilian Jive, his forthcoming collection of essays on songwriting, society and culture in Brazil, will be published by Reaktion. Nuria Triana Toribio is Senior Lecturer in Spanish Cinema at the University of Manchester. Her main research areas are Spanish cinema as a national cinema, transnational strategies in Spanish cinema and new perspectives on auteurism. She is author of Spanish National Cinema (Routledge, 2003) and co-author (with Buse and Willis) of The Cinema of Alex de la Iglesia (Manchester University Press, 2007), as well as numerous articles. She co-edits the series of monographs ‘Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers’ for Manchester University Press. Her current projects are on the role of film festivals and new production and distribution conditions for cinema in Spanish. Tom Whittaker is a lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of The Films of Elías Querejeta: A Producer of Landscapes (University of Wales Press, 2011). His research has mainly focussed on the relationship between film and geography in Spanish cinema, and his publications have appeared in journals such as Jump Cut, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of British Cinema and Television and Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. He has published chapters in the forthcoming

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volumes Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Critical Discourses and Cinematic Practices, edited by Parvati Nair and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (Manchester University Press) and A Companion to Luis Buñuel, edited by Rob Stone and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (Wiley-Blackwell). His current research centres on questions of movement in Latin American cinema and soundscapes in Spanish cinema.

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Acknowledgements

This edited volume originates in ‘Cinema and History: The Sixth Forum for Iberian Studies’ held at the University of Oxford in May 2001, when we the editors first met and shared our enthusiasm for the samba and cante jondo as the subjects of our respective doctoral theses. Ten years later we are proud and grateful to have been able to channel the reciprocal passion and commitment of our collaborators into this book. Our thanks to them all. Thanks are also due Matthew Frost and the illustrious team at Manchester University Press, whose support and guidance have been invaluable. We would also like to extend our personal gratitude to those who contributed to the book in otherwise uncredited ways. Thanks, in particular, to Esther Santamaría Iglesias, Leonardo Barbosa Anesio, João Luiz Vieira, and Elena Boschi. Lisa Shaw and Rob Stone May 2012

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Introduction Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lisa Shaw and Rob Stone

It is clearly not true to say that film is essentially a visual medium. Silent films, perhaps; but these are flat, hermetic spectacles in which characters move like fish in a soundproof aquarium. There is no realism here. It was the advent of sound that made film real; the invention of colour film stock only made it more so. Of course, few films were ever truly silent.1 Accompaniment was needed in order to fill the otherworldly gap between the audience and the screen, because images that played on a white sheet or wall could not unpeel themselves and touch their audience in the way that sound reached out and mingled with the crowd. Thus the earliest films were accompanied by music, which provided emotive commentary, or a narrator, whose job was to explain the images and their connections, thereby making up for in voice what the moving pictures lacked in their muteness. Imagery was only ever one- or twodimensional, whereas, after it made the belated leap to stereo with the advent of Dolby, sound quickly evolved to the point where a 5.1 sound system became usual for home entertainment, far exceeding the three dimensions conjured by recent fantasy and horror films. Nevertheless, sound always served the image to the extent that it was subject to ‘the hierarchical placement of the visible above the audible’ (Doane, 2004: 377). This hierarchy was due to the fact that, as Metz explains, ‘we claim that we are talking about sound, but we are actually thinking of the visual image of the sound’s source’ (2004: 367). Thus it is the body from whence the voice came that is the visual signifier of the voice, ‘a point of identification for the subject addressed by the film’ (Doane, 2004: 374). When that body is not visible, sound may be described as being ‘off-screen’, although it is only the source of the sound that is ‘off’. Sound is only ever ‘off-screen’ in the sense that

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‘the nature of sounds is to diffuse themselves more or less into the entire surrounding space: sound is simultaneously “in” the screen, in front, behind, around, and throughout the entire movie theatre’ (Metz, 2004: 367). The voice therefore exists within the fictional space of the film and the real space of the audience in a way that images cannot. In The Knee Plays, David Byrne observes that the sound ‘builds up because it can’t get out of the theatre. The actors talk. We can still hear what they said a minute ago. (2007); but when the film ends, the doors are opened and the sound floods out, leading Byrne to conclude that ‘the film is a gift to the surrounding community’ (2007). Nevertheless, according to Doane, the audience insists that ‘the voice must be anchored by a given body [which] must be anchored in a given space’ (2004: 375), with the result that it is perceived as being socially constructed and its effect circumscribed by this enslavement of the sound to the visual, this imprisonment of the voice within the localised body. But what if the voice were to sing? The presence of pre-existing popular songs in so-called ‘compiled scores’ has been a feature of Hollywood cinema since the 1960s, as identified in Jeff Smith’s study, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (1998). In spite of this, as Anahid Kassabian, author of the influential Hearing Film: Tracking Identification in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (2001) has stated, most work on film music, with a few notable exceptions, ‘has accepted the received notion that pre-existing songs do not play significant roles in the film that houses them’ (Lannin and Caley, 2005: 5). Among these notable exceptions, Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the ’50s (Romney, 1995), Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema (Lannin and Caley, 2005) and In the Space of A Song: The Uses of Song in Film (Dyer, 2011) help dispel this myth. The first of these explores the intertextual significance of popular music in film by considering the spectators’ familiarity with related social histories and cultural signs, and the second brings together a selection of essays, each of which analyses the central role played by a single song in a given film, while Dyer explores the space and time of songs in order to assess expressions of feeling and their perception. ‘What does it mean to place a popular song into a cinematic situation?’ ask Lannin and Caley in their introduction (2005: 9), before providing the following response: ‘The pop song adds its own suite

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of meanings to a film’s, and how this heady mix is managed is of primary importance to whether the film succeeds in its endeavours – be they commercial, creative or political’ (2005: 10). The ‘suite of meanings’ arises from the myriad functions of popular songs, which have been helpfully identified by Vanessa Knights in her study of the works of Pedro Almodóvar.2 As she writes: Songs can indicate mood and heighten emotion, aid characterization and forward plot with remarkable economy of narration as well as performing a commentary function. Pre-existing musical pieces would seem to be chosen for a variety of reasons including their cultural and intertextual allusions, as well as their sound quality or tone. (2006: 92)

This allusive quality, with its sentimental, emotional and haptic impact, originates in the primary response of infants; for one of the first sounds to provide us with cohesion, comfort and identity is the lullaby. Separated from any hubbub by its tone, rhythm, lilt and timbre, the lullaby is the first indicator of unity between a parent and child. Before the baby can even enter into the mirror stage described by Jacques Lacan, the newborn is engaged in an aural reflective process that establishes identity through song. For an adult, therefore, following Lacan, the voice in music ‘makes appeal to the nostalgic for such an imaginary cohesion’ (Doane, 2004: 381) because it is in the auditory pleasure of hearing songs that identity resides. Such an equation is at the heart of the deployment of many songs in the cinema, which are not only there to provide audiences with pleasure. As Knights contends, songs often comment on the narrative or provide a means of expression for characters. They may establish location or period and might indicate attitude, change the tone or exaggerate the emotions of a film. Songs can even transcend the overpowering force of the narrative. In relation to the film musical, which is only one of many genres in which songs are deployed, Jane Feuer suggests that ‘in becoming song, language is in a sense transfigured, lifted up into a higher, more expressive realm’ (1982: 52). This distinction between the spoken word and the one that is sung is crucial to any debate about the use of songs on film. As Rick Altman has explained, unlike speech, which mostly has to compete with other sounds, songs prompt the erasure of all other diegetic sound (1987: 64). Songs can

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therefore upset the hierarchy of the visual over the aural in many subtle, intellectual, philosophical and political ways. Used wisely, songs implicate the spectator/listener in complex and problematic strategies that complicate the relationship of the audience to the film. In commenting on the coming of sound, Sergei Eisenstein et al. remarked that sound should indeed be ‘treated as a new element of montage (as an independent variable combined with the visual image)’ (2004: 371). As such, it cannot ‘fail to provide new and enormously powerful means of expressing and resolving the most complex problems, which have been depressing us with their insurmountability, using the imperfect methods of a cinema operating only in visual images’ (2004: 371). This powerful means of expression for the human voice arguably realises its potential through the act of singing. As Heather Laing contends: Music and words together can give the most apparently confusing emotions a clear voice, suggesting that there is nothing which cannot be expressed, no matter how intimate, difficult or even painful, so that all our feelings can be heard and understood by others, an essential precursor to their return or balance, and, in narrative terms at least, to some kind of happy closure. (2000: 12)

However, songs on film can do much more than underline or provide a happy ending. As Phil Powrie explains in his analysis of the use of Paolo Conte’s song ‘Sparring Partner’ in the film 5x2 (François Ozon, 2004), songs can form a ‘haptic metaspace [that] acts as a frame for productively unstable embodiments, marked by nomadic transitions and volatilities’ (2008: 206). Within these volatile metaspaces songs can negotiate memory, identity, time and history, and illustrate notions of inclusion and exclusion that can redefine racial, sexual and national boundaries. Recent studies by Tim Bergfelder (2000), of musical genres in 1950s German cinema, and by Steve Cannon (2000), of the uses of hip-hop and reggae in contemporary French films, have opened up the field of enquiry into the use of songs in national cinemas, where, as Bergfelder has surmised, ‘culturally contained generic histories pose further problems in categorising non-Hollywood musical genres’ (2000: 80). In Hispanic and Lusophone countries, where song styles ranging from the fado to the tango, from the samba to flamenco, have immense cultural significance and can illustrate

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Introduction

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complex, multifaceted traditions and their evolution, songs on film have been used as vehicles for psychological, philosophical, political, racial, sexual and inter-generational discourse. When invited to explore the use of songs in films from the Spanish- and Portuguesespeaking worlds, the contributors to this volume turned a critical eye – and ear – to varied musical and cinematic genres, and to many different types of performance, both diegetic and non-diegetic. Their contributions illustrate how, in addition to the often obvious pleasure of their audition, which can disarm critical faculties and disguise subversive intent, songs within films demand careful consideration of issues such as the quality of the reproduction and its relationship to the visual signifiers that supposedly bind the song to the screen; the role of the body that anchors the voice, whether it be onscreen or off; and the immediacy of reception and – its counterpoint – the nostalgic response to the memory-triggers of a song, its music and verse. Consequently, a number of analyses focus on lyrics, while others note dichotomies at work between the words and the music and, at times, even between the performer and the song, to say nothing of the overriding concern for the connections and disconnections between the aural and the visual. Several chapters interrogate the way that songs evoke notions of time and space, while others relate the presence of songs to film form. All demand that the audience should look and especially listen much more closely. The volume begins with an investigation by Ann Davies into how the famous Spanish singer and actress Imperio Argentina starred in a film – Carmen, la de Triana (Carmen, the Girl from Triana, Florián Rey, 1938) – that was made in Berlin under the auspices of the Third Reich. Jumping forward six decades, the chapter then examines La niña de tus ojos (The Girl of Your Dreams, Fernando Trueba, 1998), in which the comic tale of Spanish actors making a folkloric musical in Berlin is distinguished by Argentina’s role being taken by Penélope Cruz. Both films inscribe Argentina/Cruz as Nazi Germany’s exotic ‘Other’, although Cruz in her role displays a resistance to Nazism that contrasts with Argentina’s rumoured sympathy for the Third Reich. In a rich comparative analysis, this chapter considers the unease that arises over Argentina as a reminder of the Nazi taste for Spanish folksong, and how this in turn impels a rewriting of the earlier dubious relationship of desire between Germany and Spain through Cruz. Most pointedly, the infamous rumour that Argentina was Hitler’s lover inspires Trueba

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to indulge the notion while simultaneously repudiating it in a manner that is underscored by the performances in German and Spanish of a key song – ‘Los piconeros’ – that appears in both films. Davies argues that both Argentina and Cruz negate the fetishistic investment in the song by approaching it as an explicit performance that indulges desire at the same time as it disavows the latter’s sinister provenance. Following this comparison of films from the dictatorship and the democratic era, Ian Biddle and Santiago Fouz-Hernández examine the Transition between these two periods in four films featuring performances in which transgendered protagonists lip-synch to songs from the Hispanic diaspora. In successive readings of Ocaña: retrat intermitent (Ocaña, An Intermittent Portrait, Ventura Pons, 1978), Tacones lejanos (High Heels, Pedro Almodóvar, 1991), La mala educación (Bad Education, Pedro Almodóvar, 2004) and 20 centímetros (20 Centimetres, Ramón Salazar, 2005), the authors reveal the close interaction of blasphemy and irony, arguing that the former cannot exist without an initial commitment to the iconography involved in the performance of the song. In each case, the performances underline the camp, virtuosic intensification of the films’ ideological frame, invoking well-known iconic figures from Spain’s vernacular traditions and juxtaposing them with globalising popular musics that de-territorialise any nostalgic claims to an uncritical notion of ‘Spanishness’. The gendered discourses that characterise these films also deal explicitly and positively with gender nostalgia in which the characteristically hyperbolic performances of the feminine in drag shows draw on a fictive imagination of women that mourns the passing of a putatively stable gender binarism. The force of this nostalgia is such that both gender and ‘Spanishness’ are de-territorialised by the deliberate strategy of using songs to reframe discourses of the national in a global context without losing either iconic or ironic potential. As Biddle and Fouz-Hernández explain, it is through his musical choices that Pedro Almodóvar shows both a nostalgic embrace of the Spanish past, which helped form him as a creative force, and a parodic critique of the hackneyed clichés that many of these songs evoke. Through this subversion/espousal he creates a unique perspective on Spanish cultural development in his cinema, which has itself become a touchstone for those seeking new definitions of ‘Spanishness’. In Chapter 3, Eric Thau extends the examination of

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the cinema of Pedro Almodóvar to a compelling overview of the use of songs from his earliest films to Volver (To Return, 2006). His appreciation of Almodóvar’s selection of popular songs and their impact (both diegetic and non-diegetic) on the plot, characters and mood of his films includes analysis of punk, folksong, boleros and world music, and prompts an analysis of how these songs offer the filmmaker an opportunity to advance the romantic ironies inherent in his films. In building his argument, Thau demonstrates how these songs illustrate and underpin the evolution of Almodóvar’s attitudes toward gender, relationships and Spanish identity over the course of his extensive career. Staying with popular Spanish song, Nuria Triana Toribio focuses on one of the most financially successful Spanish films of the last ten years: El otro lado de la cama (The Other Side of the Bed, Emilio Martínez-Lázaro, 2002). This provides her with a case study of the type of film that, in spite of the efforts of highbrow critics to promote a national cinema of cultural value and prestige that promotes Spanish culture abroad, connects only with domestic audiences by continuing the popular and populist Spanish genre of the musical comedy. By exploring connections to earlier traditions of this genre (that does not travel well except to Latin America), Triana Toribio examines this film’s links with the Spanish musical comedies of the 1960s and persuasively contends that this apparently innocuous musical comedy, in which the young, attractive cast frequently break into song, is a cultural object that recycles the rebellious political, sexual and subcultural discourses of Spain’s Transition from dictatorship to democracy. Most specifically, Triana Toribio analyses how the incorporation of original versions of songs by the Spanish/Argentine group Tequila break through the film’s thick conservative veneer to act as ghosts of the Transition that contain and express traces of dictatorship and repression in the recent history of both Spain and Argentina. Subsequently, and now firmly in the post-dictatorship era, María Pilar Rodríguez considers how punk music and its attendant sensibility and cultural practices were profoundly influential in Spain throughout the early years of democracy, when the Spanish version of British punk’s irreverence, playful and disrespectful attitude toward art, bad taste, and corrosive humour nevertheless failed to capitalise on the political overtones of the original movement. However, Rodríguez demonstrates that the noise, aesthetics and

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sensibility of punk rock re-emerges in the cinema of the 1990s with a new centrality that expresses a kind of subversive nihilism on the part of the protagonists and is explicitly linked to their irresponsible and negative attitudes and behaviour. In close readings of Historias del Kronen (Stories from the Kronen, Pedro Armendáriz, 1995) and Salto al vacío (Jump into the Void, Daniel Calparsoro, 1995), she provides interpretations of the deployment of songs in both films by such bands as El Inquilino Comunista, Smashing Pumpkins, Stiltskin, Australian Blonde, M.C.D., and Reincidentes. In exploring the aural landscapes of urban Madrid in Historias del Kronen and post-industrial Bilbao in Salto al vacío, Rodríguez contrasts two evocative projections of very dissimilar portrayals of Spanish/Basque youth. Chapter 6 maintains the emphasis on music as an indicator of the attitudes, social hierarchies and demarcations of youth but marks a shift in focus towards flamenco, which inevitably features prominently in Spanish cinema. Tom Whittaker’s analysis of the quinqui genre and Deprisa, deprisa (Faster, Faster, Carlos Saura, 1980) in particular is inspired by its director’s comment that music in his films ‘functions not only as a catalyst for something, but can turn into the protagonist itself’. Indeed, Whittaker’s analysis of Deprisa, deprisa bears this out via analysis of the soundtrack of flamenco-tinged disco music that can be heard in almost every scene. Although the disco-flamenco may be deemed inauthentic, Deprisa, deprisa is a social realist film that centres on the lives of migrant delinquents who live on the outskirts of Madrid. Moreover, because they are neither rural nor urban, neither adults nor children, their in-between, marginal identities are expressed through the songs of the Gypsy group Los Chunguitos, who, like the protagonists of the film, were also migrants to Madrid. Whittaker ably explores the lyrics of songs that combined the traditional themes of Andalusian flamenco, such as unrequited love and death, with issues of contemporary relevance, such as drug-taking and delinquency. In so doing, he persuasively demonstrates that this hybrid resonates with the experiences of the rural migrants surviving in the metropolis to the extent that the songs mark their territory, thereby filling and transforming the geographical space with meaning. Staying with Carlos Saura and flamenco, Rob Stone interrogates film form in relation to Sevillanas (Carlos Saura, 1992) and Flamenco (Carlos Saura, 1995), in which narrative is dismissed in

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order to present a collage of songs that influence and determine not just the rhythm and tone of the films but their shape. Most specifically, Stone analyses the influence of the performance system of the cantaor, the singer of cante jondo or flamenco deep song, on the structure of the films and explores the affined relationship between film and music as art forms that, perhaps uniquely, have the ability and potential to express a sense of time, its duration and evolution. Developing a comparative study, Stone then shifts to an analysis of the influence of the bertsolari, the improvising Basque poet, on the unique montage of the key and controversial Basque documentaries Ama Lur (Motherland, Néstor Basterretxea and Fernando Larruquert, 1968) and Pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra (Basque Ball, Julio Medem, 2004). By centring these theoretical considerations of time and film form within a contextual analysis, Stone posits an appreciation of how those who see themselves as marginalised and disenfranchised might exist, at least in the realm of these films, in a different time and space from that of the country, Spain, that has arguably oppressed them. The very particular context of flamenco is also the subject of Chapter 8, in which Parvati Nair examines La leyenda del tiempo (The Legend of Time, Isaki Lacuesta, 2006), a film that entwines the tale of two very different youths around the memory of the legendary flamenco singer, Camarón de la Isla. The backdrop to the film is the cult of Camarón that has turned his birthplace of La Isla de San Fernando, an islet off the coast of Cádiz, into a shrine to his memory, while Camarón’s structuring of his album La leyenda del tiempo (1979) around the work of another great and globally acknowledged Andalusian, the poet Federico García Lorca, inspires a multi-layered examination of questions of cultural appropriation in terms of music, myth and memory. Nair examines how Camarón’s album marked an important milestone in its overt hybridisation of flamenco with jazz and rock, thereby disrupting traditional notions of authenticity in flamenco, before proceeding to a finely nuanced reading of the film, in which a young Gypsy singer from La Isla, who stops performing after the death of his father, interacts with a young Japanese woman whose own father is dying and who has come to La Isla in order to learn to sing like Camarón. By focusing on the voice of Camarón, its meaning and its appropriation, twinned as it is with the very idea of flamenco as elusive and unreachable, Nair argues that the film decentres and

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uproots ideas of authenticity and origin through its portrayal of flamenco as a mode of travel, as a form in ceaseless flow. This notion that music, myth and memory all offer cultural narratives that trace a shifting global topography of flamenco contributes to a profound reflection on the functioning of songs in films. Continuing the interwoven themes of rootlessness and evolution, Isabel Santaolalla then examines the diegetic and non-diegetic contribution of songs to representative films of the so-called ‘immigration cinema’ genre within Spanish cinema and detects significant recurrent patterns and strategies. Basing her chapter on an analysis of Cosas que dejé en La Habana (Things I Left in Havana, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, 1997), Santaolalla explores questions of immigration and cultural allegiance and examines how music is often considered a forceful means of expression of/by migrant and diasporic communities. Her reflections on the role of music in this film look beyond its mere performance to posit an awareness of music’s impact as a key element of form that contributes to the overall audio-visual structure of the film. Although Cosas points specifically to the ambivalent relations between Cuba and Spain, two countries bound together by historic ties, Santaolalla’s careful analysis provides a template for the study of other films where music underscores the subject of immigration. In its story of immigrants, Cosas finds poignant ways of articulating their collective hopes and anxieties through music and explores the possibility of advanced forms of cultural syncretism. Indeed, as Santaolalla contends, this process is often elucidated through hybrid music, even though the desired fusion may not always be satisfactorily achieved in the narrative. David F. García furthers this exploration of transnationalism, migration and hybridity by exploring the role of Afro-Cuban song, music and dance in two films from Mexican cinema’s golden age, namely Salón México (Cabaret Mexico, Emilio Fernández, 1949) and Víctimas del pecado (Victims of Sin, Emilio Fernández, 1951), arguing that they were used as devices to authenticate the narratives and the spaces of performance within the films. Through detailed analysis of the films’ soundtracks, their marketing, and their reception in the press, García illustrates how Cuban music, ranging from the danzón style introduced to Mexico in the late nineteenth century, to stylised versions of the drumming patterns of the Afro-Cuban religion, Santería, was represented on screen as synonymous with nocturnal spaces of immorality and violence in

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contemporary Mexico City. He concludes that these two emblematic films evoked Afro-Cuban music, song and dance as paradigms of racial otherness, indexing black musicians and dancers as racially ‘Other’ and therefore non-Mexican, and that they encoded male anxiety towards women’s new societal roles in the sounds and movements of Afro-Cuban music and dance, thus reinforcing normative Mexican conceptions of gender and race. Remaining with the Cuban influence, in Chapter 11 Susan Thomas explores the soundtrack of the film Habana Blues (Havana Blues, 2005), by Spanish director Benito Zambrano, in the context of the increasingly transnational nature of Cuban culture provoked by the exodus of young émigrés in the 1990s and early 2000s. She focuses on how the film uses song to contribute to current debates about diasporic Cuban identity, further emphasising the issues of identity raised in the plot, as well as in the casting and technical aspects of the film. Against a socio-cultural reality of a diaspora of émigrés, including many musicians, born in the 1970s and 1980s, who remain in close but complex contact with their island homeland, Thomas illustrates how the lyrics of songs that feature in the film recount the difficulties experienced by this community. She concludes that in their lyrics and their musical cosmopolitanism, as well as via the choice of performers and composers, the songs on the film’s soundtrack document, at least for an audience with some insider knowledge, the increasingly transnational state of Cuban music-making. Staying with this trend of films about Latin American music directed by Spanish filmmakers, Peter William Evans provides an insightful reading of Tango (Carlos Saura, 1998). Noting Saura’s characteristic attention both to the rudiments of a musical tradition (as evidenced by his treatment of flamenco in other films analysed in this volume), Evans examines the aligning of aesthetic pleasure and experimentation with wider cultural and socio-political considerations, specifically the bloody history of the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970s. This close reading of Tango demonstrates that, while honouring the heritage of tango and iconic stars like Carlos Gardel, the film continues Saura’s endless preoccupation with the wellsprings of film art. It also refocuses his abiding themes of individual identity, relationships between the sexes, and the political compromises of a country still coming to terms with its past. By teasing out the subtleties of Saura’s multi-layered and self-reflexive film, which typically makes no distinction between characters and

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spectators, Evans concludes that the songs in Tango provide the occasion for performative distillations of identity and desire. Chapter 13 shifts the focus to Mexico with Deborah Shaw’s exploration of the role of popular song in the film Frida (Julie Taymor, 2000), based on the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and co-produced by, and starring, Salma Hayek. Shaw argues that through the original score composed by Elliot Goldenthal, and the incorporation of well-known traditional Mexican songs, the film attempts to fashion both an ‘authentic’ and an accessible Mexico for international consumption. This chapter considers the type of Mexican identity that music and song are used to create for both the eponymous protagonist and the country as a whole within the film, and it draws out the links between these romanticised and exoticised visions of Kahlo/Mexico and the commercial ambitions of Frida. In addition, it considers the film’s use of well-known singers, the Mexican Chavela Vargas and Mexican-American Lila Downs, to generate a sense of authenticity, and interrogates the reasons behind the choice of these two singers, and their respective relationships to target audiences. In a linguistic shift, Anthony De Melo studies the presence of what is often referred to as Portugal’s ‘national song’, the fado, in Portuguese musical comedy films (known collectively as the comédia à portuguesa) from the 1930s and 1940s. Given that the fado is closely associated with the intrinsically national notion of saudade (nostalgia or longing), not least owing to its melancholy lyrics and dramatic vocal delivery, De Melo seeks to explain the seemingly incongruous appearance of such songs in this comic cinematic tradition. He illustrates how fado is integrated into the narrative of these films, albeit loosely, and is employed as a key signifier of community and tradition, emphasising the important links between the cinema, popular song and Portugal’s teatro de revista (music-hall or vaudeville tradition) in this era. Remaining in the Portuguese-speaking world, Tatiana Signorelli Heise examines the emergence of the music documentary in Brazil in recent years, focusing on four films among over forty of this type released since 2000: Vinicius (Miguel Faria Jr, 2005), about the poet turned songwriter Vinicius de Moraes; A casa do Tom: mundo, monde, mondo (The House of Tom, Ana Jobim, 2009), which deals with the life of bossa nova legend Tom Jobim; Cartola, música para os olhos (Cartola, The Samba Legend, Lírio Ferreira and Hilton

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Lacerda, 2007), inspired by the eponymous Afro-Brazilian samba composer; and Coração vagabundo (Wandering Heart, Fernando Grostein Andrade, 2009), part biopic of singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso and part concert movie based on his 2003 tour of Brazil, North America and Japan. Heise explores how the life stories of these four popular musicians are conveyed cinematically, dissecting the varying strategies employed to represent popular music on screen. She illustrates how, in spite of their diverse aesthetic and thematic approaches, all four films share a concern with the issue of Brazilian national identity, and the role played by popular music in its conceptualisation. The notion of brasilidade or ‘Brazilianness’, which since the 1920s has been inextricably linked, in the national imaginary, to popular musical creativity, not least due to the latter’s strong associations with African cultural influences, surfaces in all four films, inviting the audience to reflect on the relationship between national identity and popular song. Maintaining the focus on Brazil, in Chapter 16 Lorraine Leu examines the symbolic economies of space created by soundtracks in films set in Rio de Janeiro, and more specifically how certain sub-genres of samba songs are used in two very different films, in order to express a deviant geographical knowledge of the city. She focuses on the cinematic representation of the counter-cultural ethos of malandragem, synonymous with a lifestyle of idleness and pleasure-seeking, and involvement in crime, illustrating how the associations between the malandro hustler and the world of samba in the 1920s are alluded to in the soundtrack of both a low-budget carnival musical comedy from the 1940s (Berlim na batucada [Berlin Samba-Style, Luiz de Barros, 1944]), and the avant-garde Cinema Novo film A grande cidade (The Big City, 1966), directed by the acclaimed Carlos Diegues. She argues that in these two films, which would appear to have little in common on the surface, the performance of popular music reflects the socio-spatial stratification of the city of Rio, expressing dissent on the part of marginalised social groups, challenging the dominant scopic regimes of the city, and transforming it into a lived land- and soundscape where state control is contested. Lisa Shaw then examines the performance of song in the musical comedy films, known as chanchadas, which dominated film production in Brazil from the late 1930s to the beginning of the 1960s. Chanchadas were initially a vehicle for the promotion of carnival

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music, particularly samba and marchinha (the carnival march), but by the 1950s these musical genres were performed on screen alongside an increasingly heterogeneous mix of both national and foreign rhythms. Considering various examples chiefly from the 1950s, Shaw argues that when the chanchada’s musical interludes draw on the Afro-Brazilian samba tradition, it is a stylised, ‘whitened’ performance which in many instances has been mediated by Hollywood representations of Latin American/Brazilian identity. In contrast, when Afro-Brazilian musicians occasionally appear on screen, they are depicted as ‘primitive’, ‘exotic’, ‘othered’ elements, who perform the socially stigmatised, percussion-based samba-demorro (literally, samba from the hillside slum), as if giving a folkloric show for the benefit of elite and/or foreign diegetic audiences. Shaw then examines the soundtrack of an emblematic example of the chanchada, Aviso aos navegantes (The Nutty Stowaway/All Aboard, Watson Macedo, 1950), to illustrate the aural eclecticism of the tradition and to interrogate its relationship with imported cinematic paradigms, not least those of Hollywood. She concludes that the performance of song in these low-budget Brazilian films can sometimes be read as an ironic wink to an extra-diegetic audience all too familiar with the essentialising clichés of imported musical films. Finally, David Treece considers the role of music, both symbolic and material, in screen representations of Rio de Janeiro since the 1950s. Not surprisingly, the music of Rio’s streets and hillsides has played more than a mere supporting role in the cinematic representations of the city across the last half-century. Embracing samba, bossa nova, MPB (an eclectic post-bossa nova style of vocal-andguitar based songwriting), soul, funk carioca (a local variant of Miami bass) and rap, the heterogeneous voices of Rio’s soundscape have arguably shaped audiences’ understanding and imagination of its cultural geography and social dynamic as much as the films’ visual narratives and dramas. Treece discusses some key examples spanning the last fifty years, from Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Rio, Zona Norte (Rio, North Zone, 1957) and Marcel Camus’s Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus, 1959), to Carlos Diegues’s remake Orfeu (Orpheus, 1999) and Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002). Taking as his point of departure the mythical narrative of Orpheus, Treece explores the representation of popular music as a force for social redemption, regeneration and reconciliation. He interrogates the interplay of different musical

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styles and idioms, such as samba and bossa nova, on screen, and challenges one of the common assumptions about shifts in style and sound: the idea that the ‘harder’ soundtracks of most recent films (centring on rap and funk carioca) correspond to a necessarily more realistic and truthful representation of the city, as opposed to the allegedly sentimentalised depictions associated with the bossa nova-influenced scores of Orfeu negro and Rio, Zona Norte. He concludes that in cinematic representations of the city, Rio’s musical identity continues to be performed in a dialogue between tradition and innovation, the local and the diasporic, with no song style being more ‘real’ than any other. This volume could have had double the number of contributors with chapters on songs in films from other regions of Latin America and the Caribbean, but the range, as it stands, is already indicative of the rich seam of enquiry to be mined in the future. All the contributors to this volume have attempted to extend the claim put forward by Russell Lack that ‘film music is one of the most powerful aids we have in entering into the diegesis of a filmed story’ (1997: 69). As they each discovered, rather than simply helping to tell the story, the privileged and powerful, multi-layered meanings of songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema commonly upset the hierarchy of the visual over the aural, thereby rendering their hearing a complex subject for analysis. It is the aim of the volume to celebrate this aural revolution. Notes 1 See, for example, the studies by Tim Anderson (2003), Martin Miller Marks (1997), and Gillian B. Anderson (1988). 2 See Chapters 2 and 3 of this volume for more on Almodóvar’s use of song in his films.

References Altman, Rick (1987), The American Film Musical, London: British Film Institute. Anderson, Gillian B. (1988), Music for Silent Films 1894–1929: A Guide, Washington DC: Library of Congress. Anderson, Tim (2003), ‘Reforming “jackass” music: the problematic aesthetics of early American film music accompaniment’, in Kay Dickinson (ed.), Movie Music: The Film Reader, London: Routledge, 49–60.

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Bergfelder, Tim (2000), ‘Between nostalgia and amnesia: musical genres in 1950s German cinema’, in Bill Marshall and Robyn Stillwell (eds), Musicals: Hollywood and Beyond, Exeter: Intellect, 80–8. Byrne, David (2007), ‘Gift of sound’, in The Knee Plays. Online: www. kneeplays.com/album/tracks/track5–giftofsound.shtml#top (accessed 17 May 2011). Cannon, Steve (2000), ‘ “Let’s film to the sound of the underground”: the uses of hip hop and reggae in recent French films’, in Bill Marshall and Robyn Stillwell (eds), Musicals: Hollywood and Beyond, Exeter: Intellect, 163–70. Doane, Mary Ann (2004), ‘The voice in the cinema: the articulation of body and space’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 373–85. Dyer, Richard (2011), In the Space of a Song: The Uses of Song in Film, London: Routledge. Eisenstein, Sergei, Pudovkin, Vsevolod and Alexandrov, Grigori (2004), ‘Statement on sound’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 370–2. Feuer, Jane (1982), The Hollywood Musical, London: Macmillan. Lack, Russell (1997), Twenty Four Frames Under: A Buried History of Film Music, London: Quartet Books. Laing, Heather (2000), ‘Emotion by numbers: music, song and the musical’ in Bill Marshall and Robyn Stillwell (eds), Musicals: Hollywood and Beyond, Exeter: Intellect, 5–13. Lannin, Steve and Caley, Matthew (eds) (2005), Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema, Bristol and Portland, OR: Intellect. Kassabian, Anahid (2001), Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music, New York: Routledge. Knights, Vanessa (2006),‘Queer pleasures: the bolero, camp, and Almodóvar’, in Phil Powrie and Robyn Stilwell (eds), Changing Tunes: The Use of Preexisting Music in Film, Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 91–104. Metz, Christian (2004), ‘Aural objects’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 366–72. Miller Marks, Martin (1997), Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895–1924, New York: Oxford University Press. Powrie, Phil (2008), ‘The haptic moment: sparring with Paolo Conte in Ozon’s 5x2’, Paragraph, 31, 206–22. Romney, Jonathan (1995), Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s, London: BFI. Smith, Jeff (1998), The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Singing of dubious desire: Imperio Argentina and Penélope Cruz as Nazi Germany’s exotic Other Ann Davies As a result of her success as a singer, and subsequently as a leading actress in Spanish folkloric films of the 1930s and 1940s, Imperio Argentina became a grande dame of Spanish cinema. She was noted particularly for a film career that emphasised her singing talents, given that the genre of folkloric film was a form of Spanish musical, often centring on the romance between a lower-class Spanish woman and an upper-class Spanish man, in which the female lead sang all the songs and thus dominated the film. Even though her heyday was long gone, Argentina could still be mobbed by fans in the street in the 1980s (‘Imperio Argentina’, 1982: 21), and was the subject of gala tributes as well as the award of a Goya (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscar) for her lifetime achievement in 1989. Her prime years of stardom overlapped with Spain’s most traumatic historical and political period, the years leading up to and including the Spanish Civil War, yet her fan base bridged the great political rifts in Spanish society. Argentina was known to support Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, but her films were equally popular with Republicans. While her stardom should be understood in the context of early Francoism, these reminders of her past tend to be brushed over in interviews and articles, arising partly from a pervasive difficulty in Spain over the last thirty years to come to terms with its dictatorship under Franco (only in 2007 was a law passed to facilitate the remembrance of those who perished fighting for, or supporting, the Republicans or those who suffered under his regime) but also from a valorisation of stars that does not prioritise the political. But while her political preferences in Spain receive a muted treatment at best, a more overt blot on her cinematic résumé resurfaces time and again. This is the period she

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spent making films in Berlin at the invitation of the Third Reich, when she is rumoured to have become Hitler’s lover. Argentina always denied that she and Hitler were romantically involved, but she did indeed meet Hitler and has described him as generally a sympathetic character (Moreno, 1986: 124), although she condemned certain elements of life in Berlin under the Third Reich, such as the Kristallnacht. Hitler and Goebbels invited Argentina and her then husband, film director Florián Rey, to Berlin to make films as part of the Hispano-Film Produktion company, in Germany’s well-known Ufa studios. Both Hitler and Goebbels found Argentina attractive – it is alleged that Hitler watched Argentina’s earlier film Nobleza baturra (Aragonese Virtue, Florián Rey, 1935) at least fourteen times (Ruiz and Fiestas 1981, 46) although Terenci Moix, in his overview of Argentina, has the figure as twenty-four times (1993: 74). The invitation from Hitler and Goebbels resulted in two films directed by Rey and starring Argentina, Carmen, la de Triana (Carmen, the Girl from Triana, 1938) and La canción de Aixa (Aixa’s Song, 1939). It is the first of these films that is the focus of this chapter, and more particularly the use made of one of the key songs from the film, ‘Los piconeros’ (The Coal Men). Carmen, la de Triana is a reworking of the Carmen narrative familiar from the novella by Prosper Mérimée and, more particularly the opera by Bizet. It contains a few twists that suited the Francoist ideology of the time. Don José does not kill Carmen in a jealous rage, as is usually the case, but dies in the service of his country, while Carmen survives only to weep remorsefully at the sight of his coffin draped in the Spanish flag. This rewritten ending stresses the masculine dedication to a noble Spanish patria above all things and was an essential component of Franco’s vision of Spain (Franco’s own scripted film, Raza [Race, José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, 1941], similarly emphasises patriotic military glory). The studios made two versions of the film: Rey directed the Spanish version, but there was also a German version, titled Andalusische Nächte (Andalusian Nights, Herbert Maisch, 1938). This follows the same trajectory as the Spanish version: it also stars Argentina, speaking and singing in German (which she learnt especially for the film), but was otherwise cast with German actors and was directed by a German. Sixty years later, the director Fernando Trueba used the making of Carmen, la de Triana as the basis for his own

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homage to the folkloric film, La niña de tus ojos (which translates as The Apple of Your Eye, but is more usually known in English as The Girl of Your Dreams), which deals with Spanish actors making a folkloric film in Berlin. Trueba denied using Rey’s film as a basis for La niña (Díaz Prieto, 1998: 67) but, given that so many of the details of the film reflect both Carmen, la de Triana and its production context, his denial is not convincing. Argentina herself certainly thought the earlier film acted as a basis for the latter (see Martín-Lunas, 1998). It is not only the general storyline that reminds us of Argentina’s earlier film, but also plot details such as the fact that a German version of the film was made alongside the Spanish one, with German actors and directed by a character called Maisch (the name of the director who in real life directed the German version of Carmen). La niña also features the song ‘Los piconeros’, in both Spanish and German: the same song that formed a centrepiece of Carmen, la de Triana.1 If in order to perform her part as Carmen in both films Argentina learned German especially for the occasion, in La niña her fictional counterpart Macarena Granada (played by Penélope Cruz) demonstrates her own skills with her German dialogue and lyrics, which she learnt phonetically. Trueba even picks up on small details in his mise-en-scène to emphasise the resemblance between the two women, such as the film magazine featuring Macarena that she carries about the film set, which is copied from an actual edition of the magazine Radiocinema (as can be deduced from the pose of the actress in the magazine and the circular cut-out on the preceding page, framing her face underneath). Most obviously, Trueba replays the rumour about Argentina’s past through the presence of the character Goebbels (Johannes Silberschneider), who pursues Macarena throughout the film. The role of Goebbels is played for laughs, but his presence harks back to the persistent rumour of Hitler’s affair with Argentina as well as the real Goebbels’ own desire for the Spanish star. Both films offer Argentina/Macarena as a form of Spanish exotica for the upper echelons of Nazi Germany, symbolised by Goebbels, with Argentina/Macarena inspiring a desire for the exotic Other that relates to the original Carmen story written by Prosper Mérimée as part of the French Romantic enthusiasm for all things Spanish. Where Trueba does stray from both Florián Rey’s earlier film and the history that surrounds its making, is in the

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sub-plot of Macarena’s growing love for a Russian prisoner, Leo, who participates as an extra in the film she is making. Eventually, she decides to abandon the film – and, consequently, her film career – in order to flee Germany with Leo. There is perhaps an ironic reflection here in that Argentina herself probably reached the peak of her career with Carmen, la de Triana and then began a gentle but definite decline in cinema profile (even though she continued to make films for many years), but the notion of running away with a Russian prisoner is very far removed from both the actual events and the popular rumours. In the original film Argentina came to serve as a form of exotic Other that appealed not only to Nazi leaders but many others in the Third Reich. In an interview given in 1960, Argentina remarked that some Berliners still knew and sang the principal song from the film, ‘Los piconeros’ (Fiestas, 1959). A review of the German version published in 12-Uhr-Blatt, reprinted in Spanish in the Spanish magazine Radiocinema, lamented that Argentina sang her songs in German and wished that they could be heard in Spanish instead, since the German language was supposedly alien to such rhythms (‘Crítica de prensa’,1938), and an indication of the need for exoticism over comprehension. As Manuel Nicolás Meseguer comments: What really drew the attention of the German critic was the way in which in Spain films with folkloric song and dance were successful, unlike in Germany, despite national socialism’s continual allusion to the roots of the German people, the purity of their race and the power of their traditional forms of expression. He envied the popularity in Spain of music and dance whose origins went back to medieval times. On the other hand it was thought inappropriate that Imperio Argentina sang in German for Maisch’s version, since the Spanish language was the best for expressing the feelings of those passionate southern characters. (Meseguer, 2004: 140)

The director of the German version, Maisch, worked to give an authentically southern European touch to the film, according to the review cited in 12-Uhr-Blatt. Marta Muñoz Aunión comments that the publicity for the German version insisted on the film’s realism, leading German spectators to think that Spain was composed entirely of Gypsies, with the army there to keep order (2004: 45). A poster for the German version carried a quote from a review that, nonetheless, illustrates the desire for both authenticity and

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exoticism: ‘The racial authenticity and the lively sparkle of Imperio Argentina’s songs and dances compels the audience time and again to spontaneous applause’ (see illustration in Meseguer, 2004: 143). Authenticity thus is exoticism – and is the main attraction (as is Argentina herself). Indeed, the German title, Andalusische Nächte or Andalusian Nights suggests an emphasis on the Spanish exotic rather than the familiar name of ‘Carmen’. José Colmeiro observes of Rey’s film that: In the same manner that Gypsies frequently are valued as exotic performers while marginalized as real life people, Rey’s Carmen further proves that the language of exoticism – safely removed from reality – did not pose any real threat to Fascist ideology. In fact, it could be employed to reinforce the sense of cultural and racial superiority. [. . .] the figure of the Gypsy is constructed as an internal other, a symbolic mirror where the cultural and political dominant forces project their own particular representations of the nation according to the rules of the new order. (Colmeiro, 2005: 94)

The Nazi regime was thus able to appreciate the spectacle of low-life ‘Spanishness’ while nonetheless contemplating the extermination of Gypsies closer to home. The implication of ‘Spanishness’ as the exotic Other was also picked up on, and disparaged, by Spanish critics such as J. RomeroMarchent, who complained that Carmen, la de Triana did not offer an authentic picture of Spain, but instead a portrait of a dark and delinquent Andalusia as featured in French horror stories. The reference to French culture indicates Carmen’s origins as part of a French Romantic orientalism, a notion of the primitive exotic that appeared to attract Germans as well (Romero-Marchent, 1939). Agustín Sánchez Vidal observes that the blame for dismissing Carmen, la de Triana as an example of the españolada or clichéd folkloric film – an accusation levelled at the film by the Spanish press of the time – should be laid at the door of the German crew, who had ‘the idea of an Andalusia of black houses peopled by the lame, the mutilated and the one-eyed’ (Imperio Argentina, quoted in Sánchez Vidal, 1991: 231). Much of the reaction on the part of the Spanish critics of the time derived from the Francoist ideology that sought to frame Spain as a noble race (see Powrie et al., 2007: 167–8), but it can also be perceived as a resistance to an ‘othering’ process. Although some Spanish critics thus rejected the Carmen

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story and Rey’s version of it for its false depiction of Spain as earthy and primitive, clearly some Germans were drawn to the story for precisely this reason, for its representation of Spain as orientalist exotica. The role that Argentina played in this identification with the exotic Other was pivotal: since Carmen was primarily a star vehicle for her and, as Hitler and Goebbels intended, she provided the focus for much of this exoticism. But for Spanish audiences Argentina served a different purpose. Jo Labanyi has commented on folkloric film heroines as follows: ‘The extreme fetishization in these films of the female star, whose name routinely appears in the credits before the title, leads to almost total audience identification with the other. [. . .] The audience is . . . seduced by the female protagonist not because it sees her through the desiring male’s gaze, but because it identifies with her position as seductress’ (Labanyi, 1997: 225). Spanish audiences could, then, if they wished, figure themselves as exotic Other just as Argentina did. The role of the chorus in folkloric films underscores Labanyi’s hypothesis, since they not only stand for the ordinary Spanish people, but bestow approval on the heroine/female star by joining her in the chorus for musical numbers, acting much as a sort of fan club. Often this symbiosis between star and chorus is presented in a naturalistic manner as here in Carmen, la de Triana, where the chorus is literally the diegetic audience for Carmen’s performance of ‘Los piconeros’. In other folkloric films the chorus trails behind the heroine as she roams the countryside, willing to join with her in a musical number as the spirit moves her. In this process the song ‘Los piconeros’ is crucial to both films. It is the only song that Trueba carries over from Carmen, la de Triana to La niña; and while Argentina has other numbers to sing in the earlier film, this song represents a highlight. It is not insignificant that in Carmen Argentina is offering a performance of Gypsy Otherness to a military man who has, in one sense, invaded her territory and, in another, is indulging in a spot of bourgeois slumming, enjoying the delights of a bohemia he has no desire actually to belong to (as his subsequent unhappiness at his reduction to a member of a bandit troupe, and his betrayal of the troupe, later confirms). In both the earlier and the later film, the song serves as an opportunity for the heroine to unify her community with herself as a sort of figurehead, together celebrating a performance of Gypsy

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Otherness for Spaniards. Rey effects this by frequent cuts from Carmen to her diegetic audience as they enthusiastically sing along (including the cut to the paunchy man who drops his cigar in his beer in his excitement), and of course by the tumultuous applause that greets her at the end of the song as she descends from the stage and greets audience members. This is clearly community singing of a special sort. In La niña Macarena must actively instruct her audience of extras – the prisoners among whom Leo features – in the art of clapping along to the song, thus leading them into an act of (comm)unity that is underscored by her acts elsewhere, such as ensuring that a special paella is distributed to the prisoners as well as to the actors, and her protection of Leo. Her developing relationship with Leo is the culmination of her attempt to ensure a coherent contribution from the extras in the performance of ‘Los piconeros’, since she grabs Leo’s hands and forces him to clap the correct rhythm, the first physical contact between the couple. Again, however, the result is a communal performance of Otherness. The emphasis on the star within the song also marks her out as an object of desire for the audience (both onscreen and off) as well as exotically Spanish through the flaunting of folkloric trappings (castanets, shawl, flounced dresses). At one point during the performance of ‘Los piconeros’ in Carmen, la de Triana the camera cuts to a close-up of Argentina’s legs clad in stockings and ribbons as she dances in circles on the stage, her skirt whirling up seductively to allow us to peek underneath; while Cruz flirtatiously wiggles her shoulders as part of her come-hither performance. Both the Spanish and the German version of ‘Los piconeros’ emphasise sexual desire as a tease and a state of permanent anticipation.2 The Spanish chorus starts with the refrain ‘Ay, que me diga que sí / Ay, que me diga que no’ (Oh, will he say yes / will he say no), while the German lyrics often resort to a future tense, ‘wird es dir sagen, wieder mich frage’ (it will tell you, he will ask me again). But there are significant differences between the two sets of lyrics. The Spanish version describes the love of a young girl for her lover, a piconero or coal man, and includes a play on words on negro or black: when in the chorus the woman sings ‘Por tu culpa culpita yo tengo / negro, negrito, mi corazón’ (It’s your fault, all your fault, that my heart is black, very black), she is suggesting both the darkness and melancholy of love, and the opportunity for sexual pleasure (her lover gets close enough to place his dirty fingers over her

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heart). It is a bittersweet song to low-life love, which celebrates the pleasures of Otherness through the references to darkness. The German version, however, celebrates Spanish love as precisely a component part of a folkloric performance. In Andalusische Nächte Carmen sings of a woman’s performance in a tavern, dancing boleros with mantilla and castanets, as she waits for her torero (bullfighter) lover so as to perform for him. This coincides, of course, with the traditional Carmen plot much popularised through Bizet’s opera. The German version, however, reproduces what is clearly a Germanic vision of Andalusia, such as the ‘Schänke dort in der Grüne’ (the tavern in the greenery) that speaks more to German rurality than the rather parched terrain of southern Spain. Likewise, the lyrics refer to ‘Geigen und Mandolinen’ (violins and mandolins), which do not feature strongly in the music of southern Spain, and to a black-haired woman who has a lover but is not averse to flirtation with other men. The Spanish version thus encourages identification with a primitive Other through the participation of the diegetic audience when singing along with Carmen in the chorus, and celebrating for itself the love of darkness. The German version, however, fosters a distancing through not only the reproduction of a stereotypical Andalusia that highlights its difference from Germany (including a need to resort to Spanish loan words such as torero) but also, and more particularly, an emphasis on Spanish identity as performance, and sexual desire as a part of that performance. If at the time Spanish audiences were encouraged to identify with Argentina as seductress and as exotic Other through the song and more widely through folkloric conventions, this causes problems for audiences today, for, given Argentina’s past history, it is problematic to identify with an object of Nazi desire. But La niña facilitates not only a recuperation of Argentina as a focus of audience identification but also a rewriting of the audience’s own seductive cultural status as Nazi Germany’s exotic Other. This is done in part through ‘Los piconeros’, the only song from the original film that appears in Trueba’s production; but it appears in both Spanish and German versions because Trueba is making a film about making a film, and thus what he highlights is precisely the element of performance. During the filming of the Spanish version the director calls ‘Cut!’ and an argument ensues while the song continues in the background: clearly Macarena is miming to the

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playback. The diegetic audience do not identify with Macarena, as they are themselves bewildered performers who do not understand the Spanish lyrics (and, being hungry prisoners, have other things on their minds, in any case). And while the Spanish are the experts at being Spanish, it is nonetheless a performance that anyone can adopt, as the ensuing master-class in clapping las palmas (complete with hapless translator) duly demonstrates. This is underscored further through the repeat performance in German, suggesting that the lyrics themselves are simply a performance, adopted for the occasion, which lacks meaning. After all, since she has to learn German phonetically, Macarena does not understand what she is singing about. Thus in La niña ‘Los piconeros’ is now exclusively about performance rather than identification. Via the agency of Cruz as Macarena, Trueba’s film allows an indulgence in the retrospective charm of Argentina while simultaneously exercising a form of desmemoria (dis-remembering or purposeful forgetting) over her dubious past, by rewriting the story’s final outcome. What should not be elided here either is Cruz’s rising star profile at the time of the film’s production, and her own association with matters of Spanish identity through her debut film Jamón, jamón (see, for instance, Evans, 2004: 54), which confirmed her as a stereotype of Spanish femininity. Her presence does much to sanitise the role of the heroine while nonetheless retaining a specifically Spanish desirability that has since, itself, come to figure as a form of Spanish exoticism for outside audiences. As Rob Stone puts it, Cruz ‘was a star not just in the making but stamped “Made in Spain” and ready to be passed on to Hollywood’ (Stone, 2002: 200), suggesting both her iconic status in Spanish cinema and the attraction for foreign audiences. For Peter Evans, Cruz in La niña becomes ‘the girl [. . .] of all the audience, of the whole of Spain, the girl who they often refer to as “our Penélope” ’ (Evans, 2004: 54–5). Argentina herself was described by her husband as quintessentially Spanish (quoted in Moix, 1993: 75). Núria Triana Toribio comments: Argentina’s appeal resides, among other things, in her genuine Spanishness which was demonstrated in a versatility in representing images of Spanishness from different regions that, according to critics, would only seem possible in an actor born in Spain [. . .] [C] ritics disavow her exoticism, her ‘foreign’ origins. (Triana Toribio, 2003: 31)

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1 Penélope Cruz as Macarena in La niña de tus ojos (1998), dir. Fernando Trueba, prod. Creativos Asociados de Radio y Televisión (CARTEL), Fernando Trueba Producciones Cinematográficas S.A., Lolafilms.

As Triana Toribio also notes, the fact that Argentina was actually born in the country her stage name celebrates, and that her father was English, must be hidden within her iconic ‘Spanishness’. Both Cruz and Argentina, then, represent an avowed ‘Spanishness’ tied in to their star personae which is under threat from the foreign gaze (particularly in the case of the latter). But the rumoured love affair between Argentina and Hitler nonetheless carries an illicit attraction, which Trueba also incorporates into La niña, allowing the audience to indulge in the notion of Argentina as the object of a dubious desire while simultaneously repudiating it. Argentina, as previously noted, has repeatedly denied ever being Hitler’s lover, but the constant resurfacing of the rumour, and questions about it, suggest an implicit desire that the rumours were true – for perhaps it would at least be more interesting than the denial. Trueba plays with this idea in the scenes where Macarena goes (reluctantly) to be seduced by Goebbels. These scenes are often played for laughs, in particular the restaurant scene where the long-suffering interpreter must translate Goebbels’s flirtation for Macarena to understand, dancing alongside the couple and translating Goebbels’s endearments as well as softening Macarena’s sarcastic responses. The scene, however, displaces but retains at one remove, the possibility of what might really have happened between Argentina and Hitler. Trueba further plays with the implications of this scenario later in the film, with his last-minute substitution of Leo for Goebbels as the actual lover in the culminating sex scene. Macarena hides Leo in Goebbels’s house: Goebbels duly arrives and Macarena offers

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herself to him for seduction. The attraction of the exotic is brought to the fore in this scene, as Goebbels tells Macarena not to speak in German because he is aroused by the Spanish language. As he undresses her, Leo creeps up behind and hits Goebbels over the head. With Goebbels now unconscious, Leo and Macarena finally make love. Leo thus serves as a more acceptable substitute for Goebbels. His role as replacement lover is clearly indicated by what happens to Goebbels’s gun, which the latter lays on the bed as he makes his moves on the actress. Leo seizes the gun in an appropriate act of phallic symbolism. But our preference for him over Goebbels is highlighted through the tender way in which he attempts to repair Macarena’s dignity by covering up her naked body, offering her back her underclothes. (In an ironic comic touch, at this point Macarena herself indulges in a desire for the exotic, when she confesses that she cannot understand Leo’s Russian, but it sounds very beautiful). Thus in the triangular relationship between Macarena, Goebbels and Leo, Trueba succeeds in presenting Argentina as an object of a dubious desire with which the audience can identify, only to fudge it. This in turn allows audiences to indulge vicariously in the guilty pleasure of witnessing the exotic seductress while simultaneously denying it as a historical possibility. By raising the issue, of course, Trueba threatens the return of the repressed memory hidden away through desmemoria. Indeed, he deliberately reminds his audience of just how unpleasant the reality underscoring the Nazi taste for the exotic was, through the ultimate fate of Macarena’s leading man Julián (Jorge Sanz). After Leo’s escape, the Germans mistake Julián for their missing prisoner, and he is subsequently imprisoned. When his friends retrieve him at the end of the film he has been shaved and beaten, and his pathetic figure – far removed from the stereotypical 1930s galán (leading man) – implies a hidden cost for Spain as the object of Nazi desire. The Nazis may have desired the exotic Other but they also feared it – a contradiction inherent in the generic Carmen narrative. Also significant in this respect is the rewritten history of the Spanish director, here called Blas Fontiveros (Antonio Resines). While his real-life counterpart Florián Rey continued to support Franco as the Civil War drew to a close, Blas Fontiveros ends La niña awaiting the attention of Goebbels, his fate unresolved but likely to be grim. A further uncomfortable note is the implicit equation of ‘Spanishness’ with Jewish identity. The Spanish cast, desperate for

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some home cooking, find what they want in a Jewish restaurant, and promptly become caught up in the events of Kristallnacht as Nazi thugs attack the establishment. Nonetheless, Macarena herself suffers no consequences for functioning as the exotic Other, the object of Nazi Germany’s gaze. La niña de tus ojos becomes in the end an ironically apposite title – Trueba has rewritten Argentina’s story so that she can remain the ‘apple’ of the cinemagoer’s eye that she was during the Franco and Nazi era, while the dubious elements of her past are displaced onto other characters. Spaniards who watch La niña are thus able to acknowledge the less pleasant aspects of the era’s history while retaining Argentina for fetishistic identification, as Labanyi suggests. Argentina herself did not like La niña (Guimón, 2000) and this might perhaps be because she saw no need to rewrite her past. As she herself said in another context: ‘I don’t know why people repent of their past. Perhaps it’s through cowardice. I try to amend it by enhancing it’ (Moreno, 1986: 126). For others, Trueba facilitates a rewriting of dubious desires that cleanses Argentina while simultaneously and surreptitiously retaining the dirt. Argentina sees no need to repent of her past as Nazi Germany’s exotic Other, but in La niña we can both repent of and wallow in the sin of such desire. Colmeiro comments of Carmen, la de Triana: ‘this . . . version offers proof of the basic ambiguity and adaptability of the myth to different temporal, political and historical circumstances’ (2005: 94). La niña de tus ojos likewise demonstrates to us how the same old desires can nonetheless change with the times; while its key song ‘Los piconeros’ suggests that song lyrics can take on new meanings even as the frisson of older and more dubious meanings is retained. Notes 1 To say nothing of a later Carmen remake, Tulio Demicheli’s Carmen, la de Ronda (Carmen, the Girl from Ronda, 1959) starring Sara Montiel. The audience’s first sight of Montiel is as she starts to sing ‘Los piconeros’. 2 I am very grateful to Drs Beate Müller and Ian Biddle for their help and advice with the German lyrics.

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References Colmeiro, José (2005), ‘Rehispanicizing Carmen: cultural reappropriations in Spanish cinema’, in Chris Perriam and Ann Davies (eds), Carmen: from Silent Film to MTV, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 91–105. Crítica de prensa del diario alemán 12-Uhr-Blatt’, Radiocinema 1: 10 (15 August 1938). Díaz Prieto, Manuel (1998), ‘Canciones para dos guerras’, La Vanguardia Magazine (25 October), 66–8. Evans, Peter (2004), Bigas Luna: Jamón jamón, Barcelona: Paidós. Fiestas, Jorge (1959), ‘Cara a cara con Imperio Argentina: regreso de una reina’, Imágenes XV/183 (December). Guimón, Pablo (2000), ‘ “Mi único y verdadero amor siempre fue un escenario. Por eso estoy tan sola” ’, El País (11 September). ‘Imperio Argentina’ (1982), Revista de Cine, 21 (November–December). Labanyi, Jo (1997), ‘Race, gender and disavowal in Spanish cinema of the early Franco period: the missionary film and the folkloric musical’, Screen 38: 3, 215–31. Martín-Lunas, Milagros (1998), ‘ “Fernando Trueba me ha engañado” ’, El Mundo (9 July). Meseguer, Manuel Nicolás (2004), La intervención velada: el apoyo cinematográfico alemán al bando franquista (1936–1939), Murcia/Lorca: Universidad de Murcia/Primavera Cinematográfica de Lorca. Moix, Terenci (1993), Suspiros de España: la copla y el cine de nuestro recuerdo, Barcelona: Plaza y Janés. Moreno, Sebastián (1986), ‘Imperio Argentina: “Hitler y yo” ’, Cambio, 16, 775 (6 October), 122–7. Muñoz Aunión, Marta (2004), ‘El cine español según Goebbels: apuntes sobre la versión alemana de Carmen, la de Triana’, Secuencias, 20, 25–46. Powrie, Phil, et al. (2007), Carmen on Film: A Cultural History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Romero-Marchent, J. (1939), ‘Imperio Argentina y el cinema español’, Radiocinema II/21 (30 January). Ruiz, José and Jorge Fiestas (1981), Imperio Argentina: ayer, hoy y siempre, Seville: Argantonio. Sánchez Vidal, Agustín (1991), El Cine de Florián Rey, Zaragoza: Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada Aragón. Stone, Rob (2002), Spanish Cinema, Harlow: Longman. Triana Toribio, Núria (2003), Spanish National Cinema, London: Routledge.

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2

Voicing gender: transgender performance and the national imaginary in the Spanish cinema of the democratic era Ian Biddle and Santiago Fouz-Hernández This chapter examines some of the ways in which the use of popular and traditional songs by transgendered performers in a selection of iconic post-Franco Spanish films impacts on cinematic, narrative and identificatory structures in those films. In particular, the chapter asks how the work of song and the reworking of gendered stereotypes are played out in relation to each other. It sets out both to elaborate some of the specific mechanisms of what might be termed ‘song work’ in these films and to re-examine the oftmade assertion that, in Spanish culture after Franco, transgender performative camp comes to stand for the Spanish Transition to democracy itself.1 Inevitably, one approach will follow the other in that they both question the nature of the performative. Hence, this chapter seeks to place the figure and acousmêtre2 of the cross-dressing, transgendering and transsexual performing body at the centre of an analysis of the ambiguating effects of gender work in a number of key song moments in which the visual flow of a film is briefly suspended. In this context, the transgendered protagonists that perform or lip-synch to traditional, popular and global-commercial songs in the three key examples chosen for our study – Ocaña: retrat intermittent (Ocaña: An Intermitent Portrait, Ventura Pons, 1978), La mala educación (Bad Education, Pedro Almodóvar, 2004) and 20 centímetros (20 Centimetres, Ramón Salazar, 2005) – belong to a matrix of transformative agents, acousmêtres and actors that, far from reducing to a simple and uniform ‘critique’ of the Franco era, take up a highly contested and antagonistic relation both with the

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regime and with late modernity more broadly. Clearly, then, it is not enough to simply equate gender transformations with a coherent political identification with the Transition to democracy and the abandoning of tradition: performance, by its very nature, refuses that kind of reduction and is prone to ambiguation. At this point it is worth noting also that, whereas Pons’s Ocaña was produced during the Transition proper (it was released in 1978, the year in which censorship was abolished), the two other films were produced in the 2000s but are linked to the Franco years through the narrative (flashbacks in Almodóvar’s film) or the songs themselves, which is the case with all three films but of particular importance in Salazar’s film. To question the relationship between transformative gender performances and the Spanish Transition to democracy in these films requires a theoretical frame that can take account both of the ideological ambiguity of the political attachment to change and transition at the most general level and the semantic ambiguity of performance (and musical performance) itself. Indeed, the effectiveness of most of these transformative moments is reliant in no small part on musical performance and if, as suggested below, it is the music that specifically helps to mark or herald narrative moments of transition from one world to another, then some sense of how these processes work should also cast light on the processes by which gender transformation and political transformation come to be read together, however precariously. This precariousness must be addressed head on without the analysis seeking to foreclose prematurely the complexity of the relationship between the Transition to democracy and transgenderism. In short, the numerous examples of performative transgenderism unleashed into Spanish cinema after Franco cannot be reduced to an ‘either/or’ in their relation to the Transition to democracy. As this chapter shows, transgenderism must take up its place within the ideological machinery of the dominant gender binarism before it can attend to its own radical potential. Most of the songs used in these films are from so-called ‘traditional’ or popular repertories. Indeed, from a musical perspective, what is interesting in these films is precisely the extent to which they blur the distinction between mass-produced popular song and so-called ‘traditional’ song forms (Ocaña uses flamenco, copla and zarzuela;3 La mala educación juxtaposes the bolero, popular Anglo-American song and, incidentally, uses Western art music to mark out the space of the church/boarding school; 20 centímetros

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features French-, English- and Spanish-language music from the second half of the twentieth century). Perhaps the best way to make sense of this field of musical reference is as a vernacular field. In architecture this term has tended to mean buildings that draw on local informal traditions, but in music scholarship, where it draws on Hegel’s (1977) master/slave dialectic, it refers to those cultural forms that take up, initially at least, a position of subservience to a master culture (the term ‘vernacular’ itself referencing the ‘culture of the slaves’, from the Latin verna). According to this usage, and the one adhered to here, vernacular song traditions are, by their very nature, both convention-bound and open to contradictory political appropriations. As Richard Middleton has suggested, popular song must take up a space, ‘know its place’, as he puts it, vis-à-vis the machinery that put it in place in the first instance: ‘the [people’s] voice’s identity is defined in relation to its position in a broader field, within which its starting place . . . is also one of subservience, its mode of existence one of dialogue’ (2006: 23). Middleton’s point here is decidedly not that vernacular song is doomed to play out the role of underdog without exercising any radical potential, but that its status as ‘counterculture of modernity’4 is set in motion only after it has laid down its convention-bound limits and has circumscribed its material form as song. Hence, in order to understand the cultural work of vernacular song, we need to understand more precisely how song forms are constructed in order to evoke personal and public narratives, and histories, and to speak of/for the hybridised and hybridising subject location of ‘the people’. This notion of having to ‘know one’s place’ is also applicable here to the gender work of the films in question: just as vernacular musical forms must take up a relation with the master culture, so transgenderism must take up a place within the gender matrix. Indeed, the musical moments are all highly volatile with regard to their relationship with traditional/progressive gender ideologies. The musical transgenderism of Almodóvar’s La mala educación, for example, by no means guarantees a uniformly progressive gender politics, any more than the musical collages of 20 centímetros speak coherently of a new gender/sex order. In each case, the musical interlude serves to underline a camp virtuosic intensification of both folkloric and popular commercial musical forms, invoking well-known iconic female figures from Spain’s vernacular traditions and, in the later films in particular, juxtaposing them

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with globalising popular musics that deterritorialise any nostalgic claims to an uncritical ‘Spanishness’.5 In all three films, to a lesser or greater extent, the flow of the narrative is interrupted in these musical moments and the audience is invited to luxuriate in the visual and aural spectacle of an open-ended and playful gender performativity. The role of music in these momentary suspensions is to structure the scenes apart from the rest of the film: drawing on both Hollywood and homegrown traditions, musical opening-out conventions such as harp arpeggiation (the strumming of the fingers across the harp strings to produce, in succession, all the notes of the chord across several octaves), sexualised saxophone figures, fanfares, drum rolls, guitar chords or other ‘calls to attention’ are used to mark the transition from one filmic reality to another. In these moments of transition it is, specifically, the acoustic medium that effects the shift from one visual convention to another, from one world to another. What is interesting in these explicit markings out of one convention from another is their structural play with the idea of transition itself. The move from one world, one convention or subject location to another, is played out in ways that, when read against the background of the Transition to democracy, come to seem like a ritualised repetition of transformation for its own sake, operating as a kind of cathectic action in which the putative mourning for the lost world is juxtaposed with a celebration of the new (the transgressive in its most general sense, as having value in and of itself). Hence, at the heart of these ritualised structurings of transformation, one notes a deeply ambivalent political programme and a complex set of attachments to, and detachments from, the idea of tradition, a process that Heelas (1996) has termed ‘detraditionalisation’. Ocaña: Retrat intermitent In Ventura Pons’s Ocaña: Retrat intermitent (1978), an extended interview with Andalusian painter and performance artist Jesús Pérez Ocaña is juxtaposed with footage of the artist performing, dressed as a woman, sometimes decked out in all the accoutrements of traditional Andalusian dress – the peineta (Spanish traditional ornamental comb), the mantilla (traditional Spanish shawl), the fan and so on. In one scene, s/he is seen walking into the famous Café de l’Opera in Barcelona wearing a floral knee-length dress,

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a wide-brimmed hat dressed with feathers, and a feather boa, on the arm of a friend dressed as a fin-de-siècle flâneur (the exemplary cosmopolitan pedestrian negotiator of the city). To a spellbound audience, s/he sings ‘Yo soy esa’ (I am the One), the copla by the grandees of copla composition, Quintero, León and Quiroga – later made newly famous to 1990s audiences by folklórica (singer of copla) celebrity Isabel Pantoja in the film of the same title directed by Luis Sanz in 1990. The reference here to copla, which, like its more globalising and mobile counterpart, the bolero, deals with what Alberto Mira has described as ‘self-pity, the ready tear, naked feeling’ (1999: 125), enacts the work of nostalgia. The queer recuperation of a ‘liberational’ aesthetic out of that nostalgia is by no means guaranteed – there is something profoundly vulnerable in this dangerous gender play here, emphasised by the unaccompanied voice, the crowds pressing in from the street and the character’s dramatic telling, that follows the performance, of the beating she has suffered at the hands of a ‘chulo’ (pimp) the night before. There is also a more specific gender-bending here, since the song lyrics insist on gender ‘yo soy esa’ (I am that woman). This contrasts with the exposing of Ocaña’s penis to passers-by on the busy central boulevard Las Ramblas minutes later in the film. Although it has its origins in the late nineteenth century, the copla dominated popular radio playlists during the dictatorship of General Franco (1939–75), especially until the 1960s. Here, then, it has a double significance: on the one hand, it refers explicitly to an emotionality based on sentimental song narratives so beloved of the Franco era; on the other, it plays out in its hyperbolic emotionality a certain gender nostalgia which has a destabilising force – the vulnerability of the performer points also to a vulnerability in the fragile gender work of nostalgia. Judith Butler sees cross-dressing as a form of gender nostalgia in so far as the hyperbolic performances of the feminine (characteristic of drag shows) also draw on fictive imaginations of women, mourning the passing of a putatively stable gender binarism and reworking them as always already unstable (1993: 121–40). If, as Ocaña’s performance seems to want to suggest, the markers of femininity and, as implied in the androgynous flâneur figure, the markers of masculinity, can be shown to be fragile, always already nostalgic, then the conservative work of gender is also always already susceptible to the radical reworking of nostalgia and camp.

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2 Jesús Pérez Ocaña as himself in drag in Ocaña, Retrat intermitent (1978), dir. Ventura Pons, prod. Prozesa, Teide P.C.

Ocaña’s performances also intermittently thematise the multiple histories of long-established cultural forms in Spain, playing with traditional forms of dress and musical forms. When s/he takes on the persona of an Andalusian beata (an obsessively pious woman), in black dress, mantilla and peineta, we are also implicated in the spectacle of a putative España profunda (deep Spain) that is ironised, parodied and mocked. But this ironisation is also in some sense true to that world: the scene at the cemetery serves as an example here, where Ocaña, in drag, sings a mournful version, in the style of a flamenco siguiriya,6 of ‘Zorongo gitano’ (Gypsy zorongo),7 first recorded in 1933 by Federico García Lorca and Encarnación López (known as ‘La Argentinita’). Cross-dressing, sentimentalisation and the recuperation of a history of homosexuality before Franco operate in a kind of ‘blasphemous’ discourse, which requires that one both remain in some sense true to something and yet, having accepted that truth, nonetheless transgress against it.8 This duality renders the cross-dressing here profoundly poignant. As if to underline the blasphemous terms of this transgression, there is one moment in the film that, perhaps more than any other, explores the complexity of the tradition/modernity dialectic at work in the transition. The staging of a cross-dressing

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travesty of the procession of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción (Our Lady of the Assumption), traditionally taken out onto the streets of Seville on 15 August, is particularly interesting both in terms of its engagement of Andalusian piety and traditional cultural forms. Ocaña, dressed in traditional feminine garb, proclaims the virtues of the Señora, throws carnations down to her and, when the procession stops at her/his balcony, s/he sings a saeta, a declamatory unaccompanied song form, traditionally sung in Holy Week, but often sung at all such processions. It is a highly melismatic form, a palo seco (a style of flamenco, with no guitar or clapping accompaniment), and belongs to the so-called cante jondo or deep song of (putatively) older flamenco forms. It is interesting that Ocaña attempts a performance that sticks to the musical structures of the saeta: her/his melismatic rendition is remarkable also for its competence. This is no gratuitous parody, but a complex homage to the form. The cross-dressing here is parodic, certainly (the banter with his cross-dressing friend on the balcony would suggest as much), but the music tells a radically different story. There is an interesting mismatch here: on the one hand the performative camp of this transvestite moment is playful, hyperbolic and parodic, and yet, on the other, the attachment to the cultural forms under erasure lends the moment a mournful air. If this kind of complex doubled effect is constitutive of the performative more broadly, then what do these cross-dressing moments bring to that ‘doubled-ness’ here? La mala educación Pedro Almodóvar’s La mala educación (2004) provides some useful answers to this question. In this film, narratives about the Transition and transvestism are played out quite explicitly in a manner arguably indebted to Pons’s Ocaña. As will be seen, the ‘doubled-ness’ identified in Ocaña is worked through in Almodóvar’s film via the musical play of curtailed or partial forms in the play of incomplete performances. This is further evidenced in the manner in which these performances are cut across by a heavily layered and complex film narrative in which the main transgender character enacts a triple performance by impersonating another character in the main story (her/himself a female singer impersonator) but also on the stage in a film-within-a-film.9 And yet, even here, there is no

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coherent mapping to be made of Transition/transgenderism. Quite the contrary, in fact: the musical moments in Almodóvar’s film are, perhaps even more acutely than in Ocaña, profoundly ambivalent, and densely so. The traditionally transformative role of music seems radically maligned here – rather than transporting headmaster Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez Camacho) to the realms of spiritual ecstasy, the solo by the boy Ignacio (Nacho Pérez), accompanied by the boys’ choir during mass at his old school, draws attention to a different kind of flight of fancy, Father Manolo’s flight to the flesh of the boy. Indeed, at almost every occasion at which the boy Ignacio is singled out by Father Manolo, music marks the transgression (the guitar, the choir, the solo in front of the other priests at the school). Here, then, music stands for an innocence fallen, for a moment of terrible transgression. There is a distinction to be drawn between these twisted angelic moments of transgression and the one scene in which drag queen Zahara/Ángel/Juan/Ignacio (Gael García Bernal) – who, in turn, impersonates Ignacio – lip-synchs to Sara Montiel’s recording of Oswaldo Farrés’s highly popular bolero ‘Quizás quizás, quizás’ (Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps). Clearly, the easy cosmopolitanism of the bolero contrasts with the ‘churchy’ piety of the boys’ music.10 And yet, it may be suggested, both sharply drawn musical styles stand here for a certain fidelity to the past, no matter how traumatic. That both musics are in some sense compromised is clear: the ‘angelic’ boys’ choir is marker both of the terrible transgression and Ignacio’s sadness at the leaving of his close friend – and experimental lover – Enrique. Ángel’s perfectly lip-synched performance of ‘Quizás . . .’ is cut short part way through and lasts just over one minute. Nonetheless, as D’Lugo (2009) has argued, both musics are resolutely attached to a repeating of the past, to ritually reworking the trauma of that past. Once again, music shows itself as an essentially cathectic resource. Ultimately, however, just as in Ocaña, it is vernacular song that does the work here. The angelic trope of boys’ voices is absorbed slowly and accumulatively into Alberto Iglesias’s soundtrack and the sudden curtailment of the ‘Quizás . . .’ performance, just before Zahara’s meeting with the young, drunk biker (the fictionalised version of Enrique), is mirrored in the curtailment of the boy Ignacio’s performance of ‘Moon River’,11 when Father Manolo molests him behind the reeds on the river bank. In both cases, sex

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cuts the performance short and in both cases the world from which the music comes is transformed by the sexual act. Music and sex, it might be said, work on each other here.12 The transgenderism of the ‘Quizás . . .’ moment opens out a territory in the film that is structurally both at odds with, and in play with, the world of the boarding school. The ‘doubled-ness’ identified in Ocaña’s performances is here evident in the acoustic structure of the narrative. The kinds of dangerous liaisons with transgenderism witnessed in Ocaña are absorbed in La mala educación into the narrative structure of the film as a trope, a kind of curtailed citation: it is as if transgenderism here were being played out not as a kind of liberational gender politics, but as a historically located visual economy that is meant to refer to (and is therefore by no means ‘true’ to) the gender politics of the Transition. Where Ocaña was fully identified with, and cognisant of, the dangerous politics of gender play, the narrative of La mala educación seems to pose gender transformation as a historicised visual fetish. The radical ‘doubled-ness’ identified in Ocaña, then, is transformed here into a kind of citational play. It is worth thinking about this transformation here in terms of a distinction in film soundtracks made by Anahid Kassabian between what she terms ‘assimilating’ and ‘affiliating’ identifications (2001: 13). Her contention is that orchestrated scores of the Hollywood idiom tend to effect identifications which are absorbing and uniform, producing homogenous identificatory effects (her ‘assimilating’ identification), whereas soundtracks that sample more widely from a range of popular/vernacular musical forms tend to produce more diverse and complex sets of identifications (her ‘affiliational’ identifications). In Almodóvar’s La mala educación, the distinction between assimilational and affiliational processes is marked precisely by the performative moment where, as already suggested, performance always constitutes an ambiguation and pluralisation. Camp, travesty, tragedy, trauma and pathos all mix in the performative register. As Kassabian has suggested, the citing of vernacular musical forms can offer a way of opening out and pluralising identificatory structures. Hence the performative/vernacular matrix in Almodóvar would seem to point to the pluralisation of audience identifications precisely because of the structuring of the film according to a number of binary affiliations such as real/fake performed/curtailed, open/ closed, and so on (Kassabian, 2001: 13–17).

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3 Gael García Bernal as Zahara in La mala educación (2004), dir, Pedro Almodóvar, prod. Canal+ España, El Deseo S.A., Televisión Española (TVE).

Indeed, in La mala educación, the veiled ‘Moon River’ performance and the visually fetishistic investment in Ángel/Zahara’s performance of ‘Quizás . . .’ (the dallying of the camera on the artificial vagina-like triangle made out of glitter on her leggings, or on the nipples on the breasts, for example) suggest radically different modes of identification – the hidden and the unveiled, the silent abuse versus the visual investment in sexual intercourse between Ángel and the biker. Yet the song form of each, curtailed and compromised in both cases, points to the incompleteness of each performative moment. They must, as it were, be completed. It is precisely their status as partial sonic objects that helps them mark out the territory of their fidelity to the past and is what causes the audience to want to complete them. The nostalgia effect of these two moments, then, is intensified by their partial status. What is striking is that, in this regard at least, the transgenderism of the drag show does not work, as some might seek to suggest, as a structural homology to Transition. It coheres, rather, around the transgression/identification relation, refusing its completion as mere spectacle or coherent political programme. 20 centímetros Almost contemporary with Almodóvar’s film, Ramón Salazar’s 20 centímetros deals with the performative field of gender and

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sex by drawing quite sharply the distinction between two filmic conventions – the visual world of cinematic realism and the playful visual world of the film musical. The transgender protagonist Marieta, played by Mónica Cervera, desperately wants to lose her penis, the ‘20 centimetres’ of the title. In a clear reference also to Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), the character suffers from narcolepsy, the structural conceit of the film that allows for constant shifts between the two worlds: the outer world of the putatively ‘real’ or outer narrative of the film, on the one hand, and the inner world of the character, her dreams and fears, her hopes and fantasies, marked always by musical accompaniment – in ways that are reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) – on the other. Unlike Ocaña, where traditional song forms serve as the ground for a dangerous gender play, or in La mala educación, in which both popular song and transgenderism are curtailed to a kind of citationality, the musical structure of 20 centímetros is explicitly aligned with a pre-existing musical/filmic structure and the film takes up a relation with those traditions. Salazar’s film would appear to be the most affiliational in its structuring of identification, since it is packed with songs (some fifteen in total) made famous by iconic performers associated with troubled, controversial or excessive femininity and/or sexuality, some Spanish – including 1960s child star Marisol (Josefa ‘Pepa’ Flores) – but also Mexican-born 1980s movida13 icon Alaska (Olvido Gara), as well as more global figures ranging from 1960s English female pop legend Dusty Springfield to 1980s Italian one-hit-wonder Sabrina (mainly famous for her hugely augmented breasts – hence the epitome of excessive femininity), and to the queen of reinvented identities par excellence, Madonna. And yet the generic expectations of the film musical work against the fragmentary nature of the affiliational structures outlined by Kassabian: film musicals seek to represent song forms as open, as beholden to a larger narrative structure that nonetheless serves, in turn, the musical play of songs. In short, the classic film musical is a complex aggregate genre that has been consistently characterised, with a few notable exceptions, by conservative gender designations centred around at least one love interest, a swinging of narrative speed back and forth between ‘action’ and ‘song’, and an idealising, usually exotic, setting. In this film, this dualistic structure is

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intensified and yet remains faithful (structurally at least) to the film musical genre. In particular, we are invited, by the film’s smoothing over of distinct musical forms and genres, to hear the songs presented as part of a coherent musical narrative that runs parallel with the filmic-realist narrative. The opening dream medley of the film includes the songs ‘Tómbola’ (Raffle Drum) and ‘Muchachitas’ (Little Girls), both by the star songwriting duo of the Franco era, Augusto Algueró and Antonio Guijarro and both performed originally by Marisol. In Salazar’s film, the songs are performed by Mónica Cervera who, like Marisol, hails from Malaga. That these two songs (and ‘La máscara’ [The Mask] from later in the film as well) should all be Marisol classics is significant. As Nuria Triana Toribio has pointed out, Marisol’s image was often linked in the 1960s to the Pygmalion theme (2003: 88) – this was a girl transforming herself into a woman just as Spain was starting to open itself up to Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, the film is itself also a play on the Pygmalion theme in that its narrative is structured as the quest to lose the 20 centimetres of the title and become a woman. Both Peter William Evans and Triana Toribio have usefully discussed the complexity of Marisol’s ‘Spanishness’. Drawing on Deleyto, Evans notes that Marisol’s ‘Spanishness’ starts with her name (Mar y sol: ‘sea and sun’) (2004: 130). She was, ‘alongside the bullfighter El Cordobés, and Spain’s premier football club Real Madrid, the cultural measure of the times’ (Barreiro quoted in Evans, 2004: 133). Yet, continues Evans, the ‘quintessential’ ‘Spanishness’ that she embodied was a mix of ‘Andalusian ethnicity of voice and gesture’ (2004: 140) and Nordic blonde hair and appearance that, for Triana Toribio, ‘was equally shorthand for “contemporary”, “affluent” and “cosmopolitan” ’ (2003: 88). This mix, as Triana Toribio argues, was also reflected in her singing styles, from ‘folkloric singing and dance’ to ‘commercial pop music with Anglo-Saxon influence’ (2003: 91), making her iconic persona an ideal transitionary figure for Marieta in Salazar’s film. Moreover, like Marieta, Marisol had to refine her voice and accent and to physically transform her appearance by dyeing her hair blonde, undergoing surgery on her nose (Evans, 2004: 131) and even tightly bandaging her body ‘in order to prolong her wholesome image well into adolescence’ (Stone, 2002: 86).

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Musically, the opening songs are not remarkable: they are studiedly generic, purged of the specifics of copla and generically indistinguishable from popular music from all over Europe, and North America in the early 1960s.14 Strongly strophic in form, with a highly repetitive chorus, and a clearly cyclical harmonic structure, the songs belong to a musical style that has its roots in cabaret and variety, borrows musical textures from global genres such as merengue, salsa, dance music from North America and film musicals of the late 1950s and 1960s, and is characterised both by a strong pronominal relation (‘I only wanna be with you’, for example) and a clear structural opening and closing. Generically, then, this music ‘takes up its place’ as vernacular music, to use Middleton’s phrase again, very clearly and without ambiguation. And yet, this kind of music, far less complex and challenging than, for example, most flamenco forms, is resolutely connected to transformative processes in Spain in the 1960s. This opening dream medley in Salazar’s film explicitly references Marisol’s new fresh 1960s modernity: Mónica Cervera appears from behind a garish umbrella in the bright morning sunshine of the Gran Vía in Madrid. With Marisol-like long blonde ‘Nordic’ hair, she is wearing an avowedly ‘mod’ 1960s dress with a strong orange geometric pattern on a dark brown background. The dance sequence is reminiscent of standard film musical fare – large open spaces captured in the establishing shot, stylised gender functions (colourful dresses contrasted with monochrome police uniforms, for example), symmetrical synchronised dance, and so on.15 The most remarkable moment in this and many other dream sequences in the film is, like the curtailment of the musical performative moments in La mala educación, the end (the transition), which is rudely interrupted on two levels. First, the musical flow is slowed right down to draw focus onto Marieta. Second, the lyric pronominal structure shifts from ‘tu’ (you) to ‘yo’ (I) when the final line ‘yo soy toda una mujer’ (I am all woman) is interrupted and Marieta faints and shifts to the ‘real’ world before she is able to sing ‘una mujer’ (a woman) just as, in a clear reference to other classic icons of femininity and of classic comedy film, respectively (namely Marilyn Monroe, and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch [1955]), a ventilation shaft reveals her male genitalia to the passers-by-turnedimprovised back-up dancers.16 The transition here from Marisol’s naive vernacular world of the

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4 Mónica Cervera as Marieta in 20 centímetros (2005), dir. Ramón Salazar, prod. Alligator Producciones, Divine Productions, Estudios Picasso.

emerging ‘cosmopolitan’ 1960s Spain to the tough ‘real’ presentday world in which she has been abandoned 40 kilometres outside Madrid, waking with her face in the dust, bruised and confused, is rapid and sharply drawn. It almost clumsily contrasts the apparent openness of the 1960s to the realities of life as a transgender prostitute in twenty-first-century Spain. Indeed, all the key protagonists (Marieta, Tomás [Miguel O’Doherty], Raúl ‘El Reponedor’ [the shelf stacker] [Pablo Puyol]), are in some sense counter-hegemonic, all refugees from hetero-, gendered, or body shape normativity (Marieta wants to get rid of her penis, Tomás is a dwarf and Raúl, who appears to be the epitome of the Alpha male, enjoys being penetrated by Marieta). In this sense, they represent a community under pressure from the outside world and the film, among other things, plots the disintegration of that community of outsiders as Marieta nears her ‘normalisation’ as a woman. Yet, the choice and editing of music would seem to tell a different story in that they consistently make space for counter-hegemonic identifications. Not only were many of the songs made famous by icons of non-normative or troubled sexual identities, but, in some cases, songs and song aesthetics are mixed and matched in ways that intensify the counter-hegemonic song work. For example: the aesthetic of the late Michael Jackson’s famous ‘zombies’ pop video for ‘Thriller’ (John Landis, 1983) is used to illustrate the blasphemous ‘Quiero ser santa’ (I Want to be Holy) (an early 1980s song by movida band Parálisis Permanente later made famous by Alaska

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and Dinarama). ‘Piel canela’ (Cinnamon Skin), originally sung by Sara Montiel in Juan José Ortega’s 1953 film of the same title, is superimposed over ‘I only wanna be with you’ (by Mike Hawker and Ivor Raymonde, first sung by Dusty Springfield in 1963) with a visual style that references a kind of generalised 1950s and 1960s idealised playful ‘modernity’ (A-line mini skirts, strong primary colours, quiffs, dance moves – the jitterbug, the Madison or the twist – are all redolent of the new kinds of post-war vernacular modernity being explored in musicals like West Side Story [Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961]). Madonna’s bubblegum pop song ‘True Blue’, the original sound and music video of which was already 1950s retro style (video directed by James Foley in 1986), is turned into a parody of the hetero-normative cycle of boy-meetsgirl, couple marries, procreates and woman becomes a lonely and unhappy housewife while man finds pleasure elsewhere in an exaggerated rom-com aesthetic that borrows in part from other Madonna performances.17 Other iconic artists referenced in this regard include David Bowie and Queen, whose video for the 1984 hit song ‘I want to break free’ featured openly gay singer (and AIDS victim) Freddie Mercury in drag, also as a frustrated housewife. This song is appropriately used here to illustrate the all-important sex change operation that closes the film. Conclusion The three films analysed in this chapter all deal in various ways with the relationships between transgression and the boundary. Just as transgression can help to draw attention to (and thus, in some way, strengthen) the boundary, so boundaries themselves can draw attention to a ‘beyond’ space, and thereby call for their transgression. This fundamentally self-contradictory structure works for both gender and vernacular song (and, indeed, for all symbolic systems). Just as vernacular song takes up a place in subservience to the master culture (thereby drawing attention to the incomplete nature of the master culture) so transgenderism takes up its place vis-à-vis the conservative binaristic gender matrix that calls for its own transgression. This structuring of the relation of cultural forms to cultural hegemony can be understood in the Spanish post-Franco context, as a reshaping of the public discourse around religion, which, in

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these three films in particular (but in many others also), operates as a domain in which the boundary/transgression drama is played out. Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘blasphemy’ as both critique of, and fidelity to a pre-existing belief system is particularly useful here in that she seems to be calling for a refusal of the either/or position in relation to that against which one wishes to transgress, without thereby settling on a bland and stable middle ground. The Spanish Transition to democracy and, in particular, its referencing or thematisation in subsequent Spanish films, holds the explicit (but absolutely unrealisable) promise of a wholesale abandonment of the past. That past, of course, is something that, in the end, sticks around. Indeed, as Ocaña makes clear in his criticism of what he calls ‘university types’ who would seek to do away with ‘old women’s rituals’ and offer them nothing in exchange, the abandonment of the past leaves a gap. The avowed yet unstable religiosity of his saeta for the Virgen de la Asunción, the terrifying discipline and transgression of the Catholic boys’ school in La mala educación, and the overtly blasphemous ‘Thriller’-like scene of ‘Quiero ser santa’ in which, at one striking moment, Cervera hovers above the crowd adopting the pose of the crucifixion, are all symptomatic of a certain crisis of filiation that can be plotted along what might be termed a blasphemy continuum (from intense hyperbolic, almost hysterical affiliation, through to abject and repulsed rejection). In gender designations in these and other films made after the demise of the Franco regime, a set of adherences to, and abandonments of, the normative heterosexual gender matrix may be detected, which cannot be simply reduced to the either/or of the radical/conservative. As demonstrated, transgenderism offers no simple way out of the affiliation/abandonment prison house, but brings itself into a relation with the dominant gender matrix that is ideologically always dialogic, always forced to remain in that asymmetrical relation with normative gender designations. In addition, vernacular songs, especially those attached to non-normative performers, are structured into the same dialogic relation with their master culture, always attached to their own position in that asymmetrical relation, and yet always bucking against it. The contention of this chapter has been that the conceptual frame of the blasphemy continuum offers perhaps the best way of thinking about these two structural ‘incommensuratenesses’ since other reading strategies

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(those which emphasise parody, irony or playful deconstruction) are not able to account for the structural impasse in any but the most reductive terms such as ‘failure’ ‘nostalgia’ or a ‘weak’ or flawed attachment to modernity. Indeed, reading religiosity simply as a sign of the old order can sometimes miss the complex affiliational structures that radical ideological shifts leave in their wake: with every abandonment comes a consequent recuperation, with every disavowal a deep-seated attachment. The jouissance of such attachments, what Žižek, after Lacan, terms the ‘enjoyment’ of adherence to the master signifier of the old order (Žižek, 2002: xi–xciv) is what makes ideological transformations of the cultural field so complex and so difficult. At that very moment of the joy of the final abandonment, citizens of the nascent democracy are left mourning for precisely that which they have rejected, and shocked to the core by the gap left by the demise of the old sadistic father, the certainty of his patrician law of family and church, the comfort of ‘old women’s rituals’ and the gentle seduction of the copla. When all this has gone, Ocaña reminds us, Spain will not be content. Notes 1 For a useful discussion of this point, particularly with regards literature and more specifically Mendicutti’s Una mala noche la tiene cualquiera (Anyone Can Have A Bad Night, 1982) see Garlinger (2000 and 2003) and Pérez-Sánchez (2007, especially pp. 93–8, where she engages productively with Garlinger’s interpretation of her own earlier work on this topic). Despite some slightly different interpretations of terminology, they both agree in warning of the dangers of equating the ‘transitional’ quality of transgender characters with cultural and/or socio-political changes in the Spain of the Transition: namely to conveniently apply the metaphor but forgetting the reality of the referent (the transgender character). 2 The term acousmêtre is taken from Chion (1994: 129, and 1999: 17–30). Chion’s term is used generally to describe a character that exists in a film only as a voice, without a body. Here it is used to describe the acoustic attributes of the character in song. 3 ‘Copla’ is a term used to refer to a style of song invented in Spain in the 1940s, and popularised by the songwriters Antonio Quintero, Rafael de León and Manuel Quiroga. It is characterised by its sentimental love thematics and a ‘folkloric’ or archaic musical style, drawing on

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flamenco and zarzuela. ‘Zarzuela’ is a late nineteenth-century light opera genre, peculiar to Spain and its colonies, with Andalusian themes and references to traditional music forms. Middleton takes this term from Gilroy (1993). Recent legal changes in Spain are also an important factor to take into account when reading from a post-2006 perspective, as noted by Feenstra in her study of the Spanish musical (2008: 251). The siguiriya is a style of flamenco cante jondo (deep song), which is characterised by its slow, melismatic and melancholy style of delivery, and its ‘free’ rhythmic articulation. Zorongo is a style of siguiriya, popularised by Lorca. Donna Haraway made this point in her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’: ‘Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously . . . Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy’ (1991: 149). Feenstra’s reading of the españolada (Spanish film musicals, mostly from the Franco era, that emphasised ‘traditional’ or ‘folkloric’ and clichéd images of Spain and ‘Spanishness’; the term was often used pejoratively) as ‘an act of performance where mise-en-scène masquerades as nation, allowing the audience to immediately recognise the cultural origins of the film’ is also a useful referent here (2008: 247). This kind of multiplicity seems to be a common trope in Almodóvar’s use of performances by transgender characters, as Vanessa Knights (2006) has discussed at length. The closest referent here is the performance by Femme Letal (Miguel Bosé) of a Luz Casal recording of ‘Un año de amor’ (A year of love) from the earlier Tacones lejanos (High Heels, 1991). Knights, Kinder (1993: 258–60) and Smith (2000: 124– 7), among others, have discussed this aspect of the film in detail. See Vernon (2009) for a detailed and inspired analysis of how ‘music and song enable mobility and migration’ in three of Almodóvar’s recent films, including La mala educación. In the same volume, D’Lugo (2009) writes convincingly about the figure of Sara Montiel in the film as a key metaphor that stands for Spanish history: a physical and aural fetish that underscores what he reads as ‘postnostalgia’ in Almodóvar’s film. ‘Moon River’ was written by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini in 1961. The song was first performed by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961). As Vernon notes, the song was adapted by Almodóvar for the film, transforming the original English lyrics ‘into a much darker consideration of nature as the source of troubling secrets’ (2009: 61). She adds that in Ignacio’s three vocal performances music works as ‘a stimulus

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Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema and vehicle of outsized emotion that either cannot or dares not find expression in other settings’ (2009: 62). ‘La movida’ was a term originally used to capture Madrid’s youth culture(s) after Franco’s death – cultures characterised by their hedonistic nightlife, recreational drug-taking, a certain avant-garde sensibility (with regards both to art, ways of living and sexuality) and a strong counter-cultural self-identification. The movida also had parallels in Vigo, Valencia and other major cities in Spain and has come to stand for nightlife-centred youth cultures in urban Spain during the Transition. Only very briefly in ‘Muchachita’ is there a fleeting reference to the  paso doble (a traditional Spanish dance in the military style), and,  more broadly to cante chico (the ‘light’ or lyrical genres of flamenco) in a short aflamencado (flamenco-ised) bridge passage to the lyrics ‘Hoy, tenemos un destino que seguir’ (Today we have a destiny to follow). All these forms also appear in Björk’s popular music video ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ (Spike Jonze, 1995), which could well have been the most direct inspiration for this opening number. Although there is no room to develop this further within the scope of this chapter, the fort-da game (hiding and revealing) surrounding the revelation of the penis throughout this film is another aspect that links the three films studied here in an example of what Peter Lehman has called ‘the melodramatic penis’ moment in cinema (2000: 27). This is also clear in the Ocaña Ramblas scene and in the phallic spectacle surrounding Ángel in La mala educación – for a further discussion of visual representations of genitalia in 20 centímetros see FouzHernández and Martínez-Expósito (2007: 193–6). Elsewhere, in 20 centímetros, the phallic discourse is symbolically present, for example, in the shortness of Marieta’s flatmate Tomás, which is contrasted both with Marieta’s large penis and with the size of the double bass that he wishes to learn to play. See Madonna’s own parodic version of her 1985 song ‘Material Girl’ performed in her 1990 ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour.

References Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies that Matter: on the Discursive Limits of Sex, London and New York: Routledge. Chion, Michel (1994), Audio-vision, trans. Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press. Chion, Michel (1999), Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press.

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D’Lugo, Marvin (2009), ‘Postnostalgia in Bad Education. Written on the body of Sara Montiel’, in Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki (eds), All about Almodóvar. A Passion for Cinema, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 357–85. Evans, Peter W. (2004), ‘Marisol: the Spanish Cinderella’, in Antonio Lázaro Reboll and Andrew Willis (eds), Spanish Popular Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 129–41. Feenstra, Pietsie (2008), ‘Dancing with “Spanishness”: Hollywood codes and the site of memory in the contemporary film musical’, in Jay Beck and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega (eds), Contemporary cinema and genre. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 241–58. Fouz-Hernández, Santiago and Alfredo Martínez-Expósito (2007), Live Flesh: the Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema, London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Garlinger, Patrick Paul (2000), ‘Dragging Spain into the post-Franco era: transvestism and national identity in Una mala noche la tiene cualquiera’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 24: 2 (Winter), 363–82. Garlinger, Patrick Paul (2003), ‘Transgender nation: Bibi Andersen, postmodernity, and the Spanish Transition to democracy’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 37 (January), 3–30. Gilroy, Paul (1993), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Doubleconsciousness, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Haraway, Donna (1991), ‘A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century’, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 149–81. Heelas, Paul (1996), ‘Introduction: detraditionalisation and its rivals’, in Paul Heelas, Scott Lash and Paul Morris (eds), Detraditionalization, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1–20. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kassabian, Anahid (2001), Hearing Film. Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music, New York: Routledge. Kinder, Marsha (1993), Blood Cinema: the Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Knights, Vanessa (2006), ‘Queer pleasures: the bolero, camp, and Almodóvar’, in Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (eds), Changing tunes: the use of pre-existing music in film, Aldershot: Ashgate, 91–104. Lehman, Peter (2000), ‘Crying over the melodramatic penis: melodrama and male nudity in the films of the 90s’, in Peter Lehman (ed.), Masculinity: bodies, movies, and culture, London and New York: Routledge, 25–41.

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Middleton, Richard (2006), Voicing the Popular: on the Subjects of Popular Music, London and New York: Routledge. Mira, Alberto (1999), Para entendernos: diccionario de cultura homosexual, gay y lésbica. Barcelona: Ediciones de la Tempestad. Perez-Sánchez, Gema (2007), Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture: from Franco to la Movida, New York: State University of New York Press. Smith, Paul Julian (2000), Desire Unlimited: the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar, 2nd edn, London and New York: Verso. Stone, Rob (2002), Spanish Cinema, London: Longman. Triana Toribio, Nuria (2003), National Spanish Cinema, London and New York: Routledge. Vernon, Kathleen M. (2009), ‘Queer sound: musical otherness in three films by Pedro Almodóvar’, in Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki (eds), All about Almodóvar. A Passion for Cinema, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 51–70. Žižek, Slavoj (2002), For They Know not What they Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd edn, London and New York: Verso.

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Bien pagá: popular song in the films of Pedro Almodóvar Eric M. Thau

Since his films were first analysed in the early 1980s, Pedro Almodóvar’s use of music has been duly noted as an essential element of his filmic vision. Indeed, his intimate, even emblematic participation in la movida, Madrid’s countercultural liberal arts movement of the late 1970s, signalled the close association between music and a punk/kitsch attitude toward cultural markers of all kinds. Almodóvar has always carried out a ludic celebration of the most rancid elements of the Francoist Spain in which he was raised, but most especially in the six films which mark his earliest phase, from 1980 to 1987. In Pepi, Luci, Bom, y otras chicas del montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, 1980), Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passions, 1982), Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits, 1983), ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (What Have I Done to Deserve This?, 1984), Matador (Matador, 1986) and La ley del deseo (Law of Desire, 1987) we witness a gradual development of the musical sophistication that will become evident in his mature films, which begin with Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988). In European Film Music (2006), Kathleen Vernon and Cliff Eisen analyse Almodóvar’s collaboration with soundtrack composers Bruno Bonezzi, Riuchi Sakamoto, Ennio Morricone and Alberto Iglesias. While at times alluding to soundtrack music, this chapter focuses, instead, on the use of popular song in Almodóvar’s films. The use of music in Almodóvar’s early films represents a nexus between the director’s undeniable affection and nostalgia for the popular culture of the Francoist Spain of his childhood and adolescence, and the camp/kitsch attitude developed within the gay/ punk underground, which became la movida. As such, it carries the often problematic weight of the postmodern condition,1 where

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the juxtaposition of earnest feeling and decontextualised or recontextualised cultural markers risks the charge of superficiality. And yet the pairing of these elements often represents some of the director’s most profound commentaries on the condition of postFranco Spanish culture. Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón was Almodóvar’s first full-length feature. Its comic book intertitle cards and Warholesque anti-style had as much to do with an attitude as with his lack of experience as a filmmaker. Most of the popular songs in the film serve as documentary evidence of la movida, as can be seen when Pepi (Carmen Maura) visits her friend Bom (punk singer Alaska) and watches her band, The Bomitoni Group, rehearse ‘Muy cerca de ti’ (Very Close to You). The Bomitoni group is actually Alaska y los Pegamoides, one of the leading punk groups of la movida. While Alaska will later perform ‘Murciana marrana’ (Filthy Sow from Murcia), an original composition dedicated to Luci, her masochistic lesbian lover, ‘Muy cerca de ti’ is a pop song from 1967, originally performed by artists such as Los Cinco Latinos and Ana Belén on Spanish television. Other songs which mark Almodóvar and the punk movida’s fascination with pop artefacts from their childhood under Franco can be heard as background music in the club scenes, including Chilean singer Monna Bell’s ‘Estaba escrito’ (It Was Written) and former 1960s child star Maleni Castro’s ‘Su loca juventud’ (Your Crazy Youth). This last song has special impact for followers of Spanish cinema as it played an integral part in the development of the character Enrique in Carlos Saura’s La caza (The Hunt, 1965). Enrique is the only member of the younger generation raised under Francoism, and the song sets him apart from his brother-in-law Paco and the other two embittered Civil War veterans, who will end up murdering each other in the film. But where ‘Su loca juventud’ is played as a generational dividing marker in Saura’s film, in Pepi, Luci, Bom it conjures the ironic, retro celebration of the cultura rancia (rancid culture) of the Franco era by the punks of la movida. The most fascinating use of popular music in Pepi, Luci, Bom reaches back even further into cultural manifestations of lumpen Madrid street life. Pepi, who has been raped by a policeman, asks Bom and her band to beat him up for her. In a homage to A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), a la española, they

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dress as manolas and chulos (the folkloric styles of the mid-to-late nineteenth century) and approach the unsuspecting target (who turns out to be the policeman’s twin brother), singing a duet from Ruperto Chapí’s La revoltosa (The Naughty Girl), a zarzuela (light musical theatre) from 1897 which replicated the success of La verbena de la paloma (The Festival of the Dove, 1894) and has had similarly long-lasting popularity in Spain. The humour in this moment is based on the juxtaposition of the fascistic tendencies of the policeman (and their resulting impact on his humble brother) and the assumption of societal safety and familiarity in the sudden appearance of these folkloric figures on the dark streets of Madrid. It should be noted that unlike its British counterpart, Spanish punk culture had very little negativity and nihilism. Its celebration of newly found freedom and decadent indulgence was much more joyful. This is apparent in the farcical quality of the beating. This type of operatic pantomime will be repeated four years later in ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? with a much stronger connection to the central theme of the film. Writing about Entre tinieblas, Alejandro Yarza has suggested that Almodóvar utilises what Yarza refers to as ‘neo-kitsch’ which ‘seeks to exploit the fashion of bad taste. This assumes, as such, a popularisation of the camp sensibility which, through the appreciation of the ugly grants to the spectator a certain aura of superiority and refined decadence’ (1994: 626). The playful use of La revoltosa thus allows for a celebration of nostalgia for the castizo (traditional) Madrid of the nineteenth century. Although it is embraced as emblematic by the Franquistas (followers of Franco), it is turned on its ear through the camp/punk aesthetic of the director. Almodóvar would continue to use pop music, with the same ironic stance as Yarza would later find in Entre tinieblas, in Laberinto de pasiones, although in this screwball documentary of the settings and attitudes of la movida, he himself sings the two most important songs, ‘Gran Ganga’ (Big Deal) and ‘Suck it to me’, with his punk/drag band partner Fanny McNamara. While both songs are diegetic, as their band performs live, the former relates directly to the plot line with its references to Riza (Imanol Arias), the ‘Tiranian’ whose conjoined status and nationality (tyrant and Iranian) offers a play on words in reference to the recently deposed Shah of Iran’s son. The references to past pop culture and folkloric allusions which served as foreshadowing for Almodóvar’s work

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in Pepi, Luci, Bom are left behind as he completely embraces the ambience of the Madrid of la movida in what he terms a ‘sociological’ approach (Strauss, 1996: 25). In Entre tinieblas, the protagonist, Yolanda (Cristina Sánchez Pascual, the bearded lady of Pepi, Luci, Bom) is a nightclub singer. As such, music is a crucial element. Whereas in his first two films, Almodóvar’s work could be characterised as amateurish, given the ragged camera work, abrupt cutting between scenes and acceptance of less than stellar acting, by Entre tinieblas he is beginning to hone his craft as a filmmaker. For example, in terms of soundtrack it should be noted that while in both Pepi, Luci, Bom and Laberinto de pasiones the music is fundamentally diegetic, in Entre tinieblas he begins to weave music between diegetic and extradiegetic locations. The key moment when this occurs is as Yolanda walks down the hallways of the convent. The music surges on the soundtrack until she enters the Mother Superior’s office. It then becomes clear, as the camera offers a reverse angle of Yolanda and the Mother Superior, that there is a stereo playing the 1960s’ bolero ‘Encadenados’ (Chained). Mother Superior begins to sing along with the record and exchanges verses with Yolanda, in what is clearly a scene of lesbian seduction. Paul Julian Smith in Desire Unlimited quotes Almodóvar from the 1983 script: ‘The music floods the room. Without speaking, both women sing along to the song, forming an operatic duo loaded with hidden meanings (intenciones). Yolanda is subtly flirting with the Mother Superior’ (1994: 53). Smith goes on to say that: What interests me here is Almodóvar’s insistence on the non-verbal character of music, even when it involves (as here) the use of the voice. There can be no clearer example of the way in which music and mise-en-scène serve as the ecstatic medium for powerful drives (for intenciones) which resist overt verbal expression, whose rapture threatens to overflow the fixed frame of diegesis. (1994: 43)

Vanessa Knights points out that the ‘lyrics obviate the need for explanatory dialogue or voice-over, articulating the tension between desire and the impossibility of its satisfaction through the accumulation of terms signifying pain such as “torment”, “damage”, “martyrdom”, and “punishment” ’(2006: 97). She indicates that the use of the song over the closing credits reiterates the ‘martyrdom’ of their relationship in the eyes of the Mother Superior.

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It could be said that the juxtaposition of this song with the song Yolanda sings as a tribute to the Mother Superior at her party, ‘Salí porque salí’ (I Left Because I Left), a salsa tune originally recorded in 1980 by Puerto Rican singer Cheo Feliciano, continues the tradition of ironic distancing that we have seen in Almodóvar’s earlier films. The upbeat tune, salaciously performed by Yolanda in a seethrough gown, insinuates the impossibility of their relationship for Yolanda and the careless handling of the Mother Superior’s feelings that she will demonstrate in the ensuing scene in her dressing room. Sor Rata (Sister Rat) introduces the song as a tribute to all women, and the performance includes shots of the nuns avidly responding to the decidedly unchaste performance. Almodóvar would use the same technique of diegesis/extradiegesis as in this performance of ‘Encadenados’ in ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? After Gloria’s (Carmen Maura) unfulfilling sexual encounter in the shower with the impotent Polo (Luis Hostalot), she grabs the wooden kendo staff-like sword and begins to wield it violently. The opening of Zara Leander singing ‘Nur nicht aus liebe wienen’ (Don’t Cry About Love), a plaintive ballad of lost love and frustration, seems to be extra-diegetic, but the scene segues to her husband Antonio singing along to a tape of the song in his taxi. The popular German song of the 1940s is thus used as the thread connecting Gloria and Antonio and, as Smith suggests, hints at the unresolved drive for satisfaction which in some ways is the only thing binding them together. The music is merged with the visual elements as Gloria’s downward thrust of the kendo sword cuts directly to the shot of Antonio in close-up in the taxi, foreshadowing her fatal attack on him with the ham bone in the film’s climactic scene. Nuria Triana Toribio has pointed out how Almodóvar here undermines our expectations about the musical tastes of a Madrid taxi driver, while at the same time alluding to Spanish emigrant workers in Germany (1999: 234). The other diegetic use of song in the film is similarly constructed. As Antonio climbs on top of Gloria in their bed, seeking sexual satisfaction during his break from driving, she attempts to make him focus on the bills she needs to pay. The opening strains of Miguel Molina singing ‘La Bien pagá’ (The Well Paid Woman) can be heard in the background during their ‘lovemaking’ but the film quickly cuts to an odd image: a man (played by Almodóvar) dressed as an eighteenth-century cavalier moves like a marionette

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behind a ‘woman’ (Fabio/Fanny McNamara) wearing a ball gown and seated before her vanity mirror. He begins to lip-sync to the song until the camera pulls back to reveal that it is a programme on television, watched by the grandmother and older son Toni, in the apartment’s living room on the other side of the wall from Gloria and Antonio. At the end of the song, Almodóvar cuts to the grandmother, whose statement, ‘How lovely are the songs of my era!’ serves as an exclamation point to the absurd, yet thematically important display we have witnessed. Triana Toribio (1999) has examined the socio-political implications of the choice of this song in great detail. Almodóvar chose the version of exiled Republican Miguel Molina rather than that of some folclórico (folk singer) within the Spain of Franco, but as Triana Toribio notes, in keeping with the director’s postmodern punk ethos, there is little confrontational resonance here unlike in the so-called ‘Cinema of Opposition’ that countered Francoism in the era before his arrival on the scene. Instead, it is again a ludic swipe at the most rancid elements of both the Francoist past, and the Socialist present of the film, when TVE broadcast pantomimes of zarzuela featuring famous actors (who could not sing) in an effort to ‘elevate’ Spanish culture. Here, the extra-diegetic soundtrack, composed by Bernardo Bonezzi, includes the evocative ‘Gloria’s Theme’. This rousing romantic music is used again in absurdist fashion, as its melody, with muted trumpet, suggests the reunion of long lost lovers, but here it is used for Gloria’s reunion with her younger son Miguel, the 12-year-old homosexual prostitute, who has returned to become ‘the man of the house’. Three years later in La ley del deseo, when Almodóvar collaborated with Bonezzi for the third time, this musical theme would be used for the reunion of Pablo and his transsexual sister Tina, played by Carmen Maura, an intertextual reference which alludes to the similar bittersweet relationship of the siblings. Bonezzi had abandoned a promising career as a pop musician to pursue soundtrack composition. He was the leader of the group Los Zombies, whose hit ‘Groenlandia’ (Greenland) is warmly recalled by followers of Spanish pop/punk of the 1980s. He would collaborate on five films with Almodóvar. In Matador (1986), Bonezzi was responsible for a complete extra-diegetic soundtrack in keeping with the film’s sombre quality (in spite of its more absurd elements, such as the revelation that Antonio Bandera’s character, Ángel, has psychic powers). The only use of

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song in Matador is the bolero ‘Espérame en el cielo’ (Wait for Me in Heaven), employed for the elaborately choreographed lovemaking between the murderous lawyer and the equally homicidal bullfighter. It is again an allusion to the songs of Almodóvar’s childhood, performed by the Italian ballad singer Mina Mazzini on her 1961 album Mina canta en español (Mina Sings in Spanish). The ultra-romantic lyrics, including the opening line ‘Wait for me in heaven, my love, should you get there first’ are completely ironised by the scene’s fierce dance of death. It is in La ley del deseo (1987) when the atmospheric and thematic use of popular songs reaches its highpoint in the early phase of Almodóvar’s career. As he told Frederic Strauss, he had no composer for this film, and instead used popular songs to evoke moods and underline thematic motifs (1996: 63). The two songs which help to frame the thematic elements of the film are ‘Lo dudo’ (I Doubt It) by the band Los Panchos (who had also recorded a celebrated version of ‘Espérame en el cielo’, though theirs was not used in Matador), and Jacques Brel’s iconic song of despair ‘Ne me quitte pas’ (Don’t Leave Me), as recorded by the Brazilian samba and bossa nova singer Maysa Matarazzo, who died in a traffic accident in 1977. ‘Lo dudo’ is assigned as the emblematic ‘love theme’ for Antonio Banderas’s psychopathic character in his liaisons with Eusebio Poncela’s Pablo. This song of obsessive love places Antonio’s unrequited love for Pablo in stark contrast with Pablo’s unreturned love for the departed Juan. I doubt it, I doubt it, I doubt it, That you will come to love me, Like I love you. I doubt it, I doubt it, I doubt it, That you’ll find a purer love, Than the one you have in me. You’ll find a thousand adventures without love, But at their end you’ll only have pain. They’ll give you, from pleasure, Frenzy, But not the sincere hope, Like the hope I gave you. I doubt it, I doubt it, I doubt it, That you’ll find a purer love, Than you have in me.

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As such, the song is answered in some way by the use of ‘Ne me quitte pas’, which plays on Pablo’s stereo as he sees Juan for the last time before he leaves for the summer. ‘Lo dudo’ is heard as Antonio and Pablo meet at Pablo’s home, and again when, after killing Juan, Antonio takes Pablo hostage before killing himself. The plaintive longing in the Los Panchos song is taken to a perverse extreme, only hinted at in its first iteration, during the last, desperate lovemaking that accompanies its second playing. The use of ‘Ne me quitte pas’ is even more thematically charged as it serves to mark Pablo’s thwarted desire for Juan as well as the frustration evident in the interwoven drama of Tina, her daughter Ada and Ada’s mother. As Strauss claims, the song has a ‘vast premonitory resonance’ in the film (1996: 72), signalling various levels of abandonment. It hints at Tina’s desertion by the two men in her life (the priest and her own father) as well as Tina and Ada’s abandonment by Ada’s mother (Bibi Anderson). Many critics have noted Almodóvar’s casting of a woman as the transsexual Tina and of transsexual Bibi Anderson as her female ex-lover, but in the Strauss interview Almodóvar protests that for him Bibi has always been a woman, so the real-life detail is irrelevant. The casting is, however, fascinating, in light of his homage to motherhood, which includes the transsexual Agrado in Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, 2000). Don’t leave me. It’s necessary to forget Everything you need to forget, Which is already over. Forget the times Of the misunderstandings. The lost time. To know how To forget the hours, Which sometimes kill The reasons why The heart is full of joy.

In the scene we see Ada, the child, lip-synching ‘Ne me quitte pas’ on stage, as Tina acts out the frustrations of the abandoned woman in Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice (1932), which served as the inspiration for what would become Almodóvar’s next film, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. Ada, the mother, enters

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the theatre and asks her daughter to come with her to Milan. The daughter refuses to leave Tina. In this way, the song carries an almost redemptive quality, as the daughter’s decision consolidates her connection with her adoptive mother figure, Tina. Brel had written the song as an explanation/apology for his break-up with lover Sissou, after he had refused to acknowledge his paternity of her child. He is said to have declared that the song was not a love song, but a song about men’s cowardice. The abandonment by Ada’s mother, and the resultant strengthening of the bond between the child and Tina, in some way merge the cowardice of the abandoner with the bravery of the abandoned in what Almodóvar suggests is a very rational use of the song, but one deeply seated in emotions. In this sense it carries a similar extra-diegetic resonance to that which Paul Julian Smith has identified in Entre tinieblas. In Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios Almodóvar bookended his film with the thematically resonant songs ‘Soy infeliz’ (I’m Unhappy) by Lola Beltrán, the celebrated Mexican singer and movie star, and ‘Puro teatro’ (Pure Theatre), sung by the Cuban singing star La Lupe. The former, a plaintive bolero, is used non-diegetically over the credits, but as Triana Toribio points out, the track moves from non-diegetic to diegetic when Pepa hears it and hurls the record bearing a written dedication to her by Iván out of the window (1994: 244). The song, while full of anger at the betrayal of the singer by the lover, remains focused on her self-torture and wallows in suffering. By the final credits, Almodóvar employs the bravura performance by La Lupe of ‘Puro teatro’ to express Pepa’s dismissal of Iván and to underline the ‘simulacrum’ of love so in consonance with the tone and mise-enscène of Mujeres. In a sense, the theatricality and the performative nature of life, underlined in the song, call attention to the ironic, postmodern attitude demonstrated in Almodóvar’s work since his first film. Such scenes as the zarzuela street beating in Pepi, Luci, Bom, the opening sequence of ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?, where the camera and sound man leave the film set and instead follow Gloria into the kendo martial art studio, and the lip-synched request to ‘lie to me’ during the dubbing of the film Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) by Iván and Pepa, attest to Almodóvar’s consistent foregrounding of the elements which illustrate this performative quality. In ¡Átame! (Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, 1990), Almodóvar’s

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absurdist take on l’amour fou, the diegetic use of popular song in some ways reverts to his earlier form. The crucial tune here is the group El Duo Dinámico’s ‘Resistiré’ (I Will Resist), the anthem of Spain’s most successful pop stars of the 1960s, who in their day outsold The Beatles domestically. This song of survival allows for a bridge of understanding between Ricky (Antonio Banderas) and Lola (Loles León), protective older sister of kidnapped love object Marina (Victoria Abril), while ironically underscoring the perverse ‘Stockholm syndrome’ that underpins Marina’s love for Ricky. Carrying forward his take on the unnatural contortions underlying notions of ‘traditional’ heterosexual love, Almodóvar emphasises that hope may emerge from hopelessness in the very ironic setting of the home village in ruins to which the characters return, thereby suggesting redemption through abjection. The director continues to probe the various configurations of being and desire in Tacones lejanos (High Heels, 1991) in which Almodóvar re-engages with the fluidity of gender roles most effectively portrayed previously in La ley del deseo. The ‘highly taut musculature’ of Marisa Paredes’s Becky, the celebrated cabaret diva, is placed in parallel to the ever-changing gender roles assumed by Miguel Bosé as the detective Hugo, the judge Domínguez, and the drag queen Letal, who performs a tribute act to Becky. Almodóvar has both Becky and Letal singing ‘Piensa en mí’ (Think of Me), the former live and the latter in lip-sync playback, a bolero performed in the classic ‘filin’2 style created in Cuba by Olga Guillot and embraced by La Lupe. Knights suggests that the use of pop singer Luz Casal’s familiar voice creates ‘a bridge between past and present’ similar to Almodóvar’s use of pop songs in his earliest films. But what interests Knights in this and other uses of the bolero in Almodóvar’s films is the quality of camp awareness that the song form projects. Knights evokes what Susan Sontag referred to as camp’s nature as ‘Being-as-Playing-aRole’ (2006: 102) because, as she underlines repeatedly, the heart of camp in the bolero, and in Almodóvar’s cinematic use of the form, is in the seriousness with which the parodied emotions are expressed and received. The irony of camp, in the boleros and in Almodóvar’s films, is founded on an acknowledgement by the Queer3 creators and audience of how much the unburdening of gender roles matters, and how well the parody can create empathy in the viewer/listener.

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Almodóvar’s use of the songs of Chavela Vargas, beginning with his film Kika (1993) would, as Knights comments, help revive the career of the Mexican singer, who embarked upon a concert tour of Spain when she was already 74 years old. While her ‘Luz de luna’ (Moonlight) is used to great effect in this farce about the media’s invasion of privacy, it is in the next two films, La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of my Secret, 1995) and Carne trémula (Live Flesh, 1997), that the power of her music will have the strongest impact. As Knights explains, in the former, while Leo drinks in a bar to ease the pain of her rejection by her husband, on the television monitor ‘Vargas sings the ranchera “En el último trago” (In the last drink/gulp). The emotions that Leo is not altogether successfully repressing in the confined space of the bar overflow in Vargas’s unrestrained performance in which the pain of life and art come together’ (2006: 95). Knights goes on to underline how Vargas’s troubled life served her art much like other gay icons, such as Edith Piaf and Judy Garland. La flor also includes ‘Ay, amor’ (Oh, Love), a bolero by Bola de Nieve, one of the few openly gay singers in Cuba who embraced the Revolution. His song, ‘Déjame recordar’ (Let Me Remember) was previously used extra-diegetically in La ley del deseo. Subsequently, in Carne trémula Vargas’s song is used extradiegetically as background music. As Thomas Deveny points out: ‘Somos’ [We are] poignantly underscores the emotions of Victor and Elena during their love-making scene, and Almodóvar brilliantly fuses the music and the images when the lyrics proclaim, ‘Somos dos gotas de llanto en una canción’ [We are two tear-drops in a song] and we see a close-up of the tear-drop shaped anatomy of their buttocks, an image used in the film poster. (2000: 2)

In Todo sobre mi madre, meanwhile, Almodóvar makes interesting use of Senegalese singer Ismael Lö’s song ‘Tajabone’. The haunting melody plays out as Manuela’s train exits a tunnel, providing a panoramic view of Barcelona by night. The moment represents the closure of her time in Madrid with her son, Estéban and the beginning of her return to her nurturing ways as she emerges from the depths of her sorrow caused by Estéban’s death. The song, sung in Wolof, celebrates the Muslim tradition of Tajabone, when, at the end of Ramadan, money, candy and food are collected for children. In one translation, the lyrics are interpreted as:

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Tajabone, we’re going to Tajabone Abdou Jabar, he’s an angel coming from the skies to your soul He’s going to ask you, did you pray? He’s going to ask you, did you fast? He is coming to your soul He’s going to ask, did you pray, did you fast? (Diop, 2008)

The idealised vision of Barcelona that accompanies the song helps to connect the death of Estéban with his mother’s rebirth into human contact and foreshadows his symbolic rebirth in the form of Estéban III, the son to be born of the liaison between Lola and Sister Rosa (Penélope Cruz). The lyrics refer to the angel Abdou Jabar, a kind of Muslim St Peter, who assesses those who want to enter Heaven. But Almodóvar’s mordant sense of humour comes to the fore as Manuela’s taxi ride ends up in a dystopian wonderland of transsexual prostitution, a merry-go-round of lust and debauchery, whose closing image is of two lingerie-clad, platform-heeled prostitutes squatting and playing patty-cake. With this image the song ends and Manuela is forced into reality by the violent fight between a prostitute, who turns out to be her old friend Agrado, and one of her clients. Coming on the heels of his greatest triumph (Todo sobre mi madre), Hable con ella (Talk to Her, 2002) finds Almodóvar calmly assured, even when engaging with horrifying moral issues. In terms of the use of song, the centrepiece of the film is a flashback to the attendance by Marco, the travel writer, and Lidia, his bullfighter lover, at a celebrity-packed performance by Caetano Veloso that includes many of the stars of Almodóvar’s previous films. This moment serves as a pivotal point in the development of the story. At a luxurious private home (featuring a Hockneyesque moment of a man swimming underwater), Marco and Lidia are on opposite sides of the performance area, but will come together through the emotional impact of the song. Veloso sings Tomás Méndez’s huapango,4 ‘Cucurrucucu paloma’, a song first performed in 1965 in the film of the same name, by Lola Beltrán. In comparison to Beltrán’s highly dramatic delivery of the song, Veloso’s soft, plaintive version in many ways evokes the transition in Almodóvar’s cinema to a more measured, mature approach to human relations. In Hable con ella, Almodóvar chooses male protagonists for the first time since La ley del deseo. Both of the characters in question, Benigno and Marco, are in love with women who are in comas.

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They will plumb the depths of sorrow and demonstrate the spectrum of possible gender roles while remaining situated within the heterosexual framework, although it can be strongly argued that the homosocial relationship between Benigno and Marco is even stronger than either of the one-sided heterosexual relationships they are each part of. Harking back to the various drag performances mentioned above, Almodóvar includes a drag remake of ‘Quizás, quizás, quizás’ (Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps) made famous by folclórica performer Sara Montiel in Noches de Casablanca (Casablanca Nights, Henri Decoin, 1963), in what may be his most autobiographical film, La mala educación (Bad Education, 2004). The performance by Gael García Bernal is crucial to the construction (of this facet) of his character, bringing to life the performative nature of his impersonation of his transgender brother. The other popular song used to dramatic effect in the film is the interpretation of Henry Mancini’s ‘Moon River’ by boy singer Pedro José Sánchez Martínez. The song, originally used in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961), allows Almodóvar to evoke both the innocence and the decadence of Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), within the framework of the not always innocent Catholic boarding school depicted in the flashback where the song is heard. By 2006, in Volver (To Return), Almodóvar had clearly established an intimate link between his song selections and the spirit of the scenes in which they were used. The title song, first composed and performed as an Argentinian tango by Carlos Gardel in 1935, is here reinterpreted as a flamenco tango by Estrella Morente, the gifted daughter of the late flamenco singer Enrique Morente. The song, performed in lip-sync by Penélope Cruz, encompasses the spirit of the film. It represents Raimunda’s return to the hope of a happy life, her daughter Paula’s escape from sexual abuse, her mother Irene’s literal return to the world of the living, and the entire family’s return to full and loving relationships. It also represents, as Almodóvar has said, a return to La Mancha, to the feminine universe, to the maternal breast: ‘Hell, heaven and purgatory are us, are inside of us, Sartre already said it better than me’ (Almodóvar, 2006). As can be seen by these examples, Pedro Almodóvar has honed his skill in the use of popular songs in the service of his thematic undertakings, moving from the almost documentary use of punk

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and pop to a more sophisticated interweaving of plot, theme and music in the later films, without necessarily abandoning his camp/ kitsch attitude along the way. The deeply rooted ‘Queer pleasures’ to be found throughout his soundtracks, and so convincingly celebrated in the analysis of boleros carried out by Vanessa Knights, are intrinsic to Almodóvar’s sensibility. In his later films the use of popular songs, especially those performed by Chavela Vargas, Bola de Nieve and Caetano Veloso, melds perfectly with the soundtrack themes composed by Bernardo Bonezzi and Alberto Iglesias, creating a musical atmosphere as singular and personally identifiable as the so-called ‘Almodóvar look’ of his mise-en-scène. Notes 1 Postmodern here refers to elements of pastiche, of intertextual referencing, of ironic distantiation, of the embrace of the superficial and of the relativistic nature of the interpretation of values, all of which have been postulated in postmodern theory, and all of which can be seen at work in Almodóvar’s cinema at one time or another. 2 Hispanised use of the English word ‘feeling’. ‘Specialists on Cuban music contend that this style emerged in the 1940s. Features that shaped a way of interpreting the song succeeded in this style, which was defined by its followers as a sort of genre that emerged from the urban folklore. Filin singers use certain licenses in the tempo, special voice inflections as final portamentos with the addition of a melodic flourishment and a tendency to say the song in a conversational way. What is said in filin should be stressed by the melodic tune.’ www.revistasexcelencias.com/ Caribbean/SaveArticle.aspx?a=276903 (accessed 9 March 2011). 3 I use the term ‘Queer’ in the contemporary sense of homosexuals who embrace not only their gender-identification difference, but also its socio-cultural implications. 4 The huapango is a Mexican musical style which utilises complex rhythmic changes and typically a falsetto vocal. Veloso’s interpretation simplifies the mariachi original into a simple vocal/guitar arrangement.

References Almodóvar, Pedro (2006), ‘Confesión’, En palabras de Pedro Almodóvar. Online: www.clubcultura.com/clubcine/clubcineastas/almodovar/volver lapelicula/enpalabras02.htm (accessed 23 May 2010). Deveny, Thomas (2000), ‘Carne trémula: An Almodovaresque screen adaptation’, West Virginia Philological Papers, Fall 2000. Online: http://

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findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6546/is_2000_Fall/ai_n28815990/pg_2 /?tag=content;col1 (accessed 23 May 2010). Diop, Yacine (2008), ‘Tajabone’. Lyric translation online: http://stormy7g. wordpress.com/2008/05/12/tajabone/ (accessed 20 May 2010). Knights, Vanessa (2006), ‘Queer pleasures: the bolero, camp, and Almodóvar’, in Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (eds), Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-Existing Music in Film, Aldershot: Ashgate, 91–104. Smith, Paul Julian (1994), Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar, London: Verso. Strauss, Frederic (1996), Almodóvar on Almodóvar, London: Faber & Faber. Triana Toribio, Nuria (1994), Subculture and Popular Culture in the Films of Pedro Almodóvar, Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Triana Toribio, Nuria (1999), ‘¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?’, in Peter William Evans (ed.), Spanish Cinema: The Auteurist Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 226–41. Vernon, Kathleen and Eisen, Cliff (2006), ‘Contemporary Spanish Film Music: Carlos Saura and Pedro Almodóvar’, in Miguel Mera and David Burnand (eds), European Film Music, Aldershot: Ashgate, 41–59. Yarza, Alejandro (1994), ‘Un caníbal en Madrid. El altar y la estética Kitsch/Camp en Entre tinieblas de Pedro Almodóvar’, Romance Languages Annual, 6: 624–32.

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El otro lado de la cama: remixed Transition (1973–82) Nuria Triana Toribio

In 2002, when Emilio Martínez-Lázaro’s El otro lado de la cama (The Other Side of the Bed) was released and became one of the biggest box-office successes of the year, the Partido Popular (the Popular Party, commonly known as the PP), in power since 1996, was in its second term. This was a second term which consolidated José María Aznar’s power with the clear majority awarded to him in the 2000 elections. The nationalist posturing of the party in charge was perfectly captured in the summer of 2002, when a group of Moroccan soldiers and policemen occupied the tiny island of Perejil in the Mediterranean in the name of their country. Sebastián Balfour and Alejandro Quiroga explain that: ‘The Aznar government’s response to the occupation was to send Spanish elite troops backed by the Air Force and the Navy to recover what they considered national territory. The operation, which was named “Romero-Sierra”, cost around a million euros’ (2007: 333).1 In that same summer, at roughly the same time that the government was throwing good money after bad, the cheap-and-cheerful El otro lado de la cama (henceforth referred to as El otro lado), a comedy of affairs, errors and songs, was becoming a word-of-mouth success in cinemas and multiplexes (Alsedo, 2003: n.p.). Less than a year after El otro lado’s success, the PP government brought Spain into the coalition that invaded Iraq, disregarding the lack of proof about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the disapproval of the United Nations. These years will also be remembered for a combative sector of the Spanish film establishment voicing its opposition to involvement in Iraq and taking a stance against the PP government. The Goya film awards ceremonies, particularly that of 2003, became a platform for expressing political dissent.2 As part of the same political opposition, Jennifer

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Green explains, a group of Spanish filmmakers united to level a critique against the PP government’s policies through a series of short films, just before the election campaign of 2004 got underway (2006: 236). It may seem counter-intuitive that a romantic musical comedy should be placed against this belligerent historical background, and it would be misreading the film to argue that it speaks directly to the political situation. It would equally be misinterpreting the text to say that it does not, however. El otro lado is inextricably related to the later PP years leading up to the defeat of the party in the elections of 2004. Whose cinema? Whether El otro lado deserves a place in a possible canon of Spanish cinema is not a matter for lengthy consideration, given that many scholars still need to be persuaded that anything of intrinsic or lasting cultural value can be achieved by canon-making. But before exploring such contradictions this chapter considers the putative place in the imaginary canon that this film should hold. It is important to do so at the outset because there is no denying that for critics and audiences El otro lado holds symbolic value, as illustrated below, which cannot be swept aside when seeking to understand the film’s soundtrack, which is the central preoccupation of this chapter. For critics such as Andrés Hispano, El otro lado contains the essence of iconicity, capturing what Spanish cinema was at that particular time in history: If I have to be honest, I am one of those people who, in general, does not watch Spanish cinema, who walks past the national DVD shelves, who has yet to watch Soldados de Salamina [Soldiers of Salamina] (2003, David Trueba) and who has no curiosity whatsoever with regard to The Other Side of The Bed. (Hispano, 2006: 245)

Reflecting the diversity of contemporary Spanish cinema, the musical comedy, El otro lado is the low culture counterpart to the  highbrow Soldados de Salamina, a literary adaptation of a prestigious novel which tries to bridge the gap between the two sides of the Civil War.3 When Hispano declares that neither the ‘highs’ nor the ‘lows’ of Spanish cinema have any interest for him, he is dismissing national films in one fell swoop. He explains the reason for this as follows: ‘None of my sensors . . . tells me that

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I should see them, that there is anything in them which I can talk about to my friends’, by which he is implying that he and his friends have more discerning taste (2006: 245). However, the reason for subjecting his words to a close reading is that Hispano evidently feels that he has to mention that particular film, if only to dismiss it. In other words, El otro lado has become an unavoidable reference, a way of summing up a certain trend in Spanish cinema. For other critics who are far less dismissive of the ‘popular’ and the ‘Spanish’ when they come together, El otro lado provides a clear link to a popular and populist cinema of the past. For instance, Josep Lluís Fecé argues that, in reaching its target audience, this film goes further than many other national productions: it is interesting to note briefly the role played by comedies such as . . . El otro lado . . . since they link, to a greater or lesser extent, with one of the Spanish cinema traditions most vilified by the ‘institutional’ Spanish cinema: the españolada. We must not forget either that the sexy Spanish comedies or españoladas of the 1960s and 1970s, despite their lack of artistic interest, did connect with the audiences whereas, the art-house cinema of the time did not. (Fecé, 2005: 93)

Fecé further points out that El otro lado is a new version of the old under a thin veneer of modernity, namely ‘the comedies by the team Esteso-Pajares-Landa, at least in the type of humour displayed’ (2005: 94). He argues that the film establishes various links to Spain’s cinematic past, as explored in more detail below. There is an evident nod to the 1960s musical comedies of Marisol, for example, and El otro lado encapsulates in the actor María Esteve Flores (Pilar) an entire tradition of musical comedy. Esteve, the daughter of Pepa Flores (the real name of Marisol), as well as one of the dresses her mother wore in Marisol rumbo a Río (Marisol on Her Way to Rio, Fernando Palacios, 1963), feature as part of the cast and mise-en-scène, respectively, of El otro lado.4 But Esteve is also the daughter of Antonio Gades, and if she serves as a reminder of her mother’s place in the hearts of the national audience, by the same token, she connects audiences to her father and his leading roles in high-art legacy musicals such as Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding, Carlos Saura, 1981) and Carmen (Carlos Saura, 1983). It is not, however, simply the cinematic past that is brought back to life in El otro lado. Marina Díaz López identifies and traces the

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5 Pedro (Guillermo Toledo) and Pilar (María Esteve) in El otro lado de la cama (2002), dir. Emilio Martínez Lázaro, prod. Impala, Telecinco, Telespan 2000, Vía Digital.

continuities between this film and the long-standing theatrical and cinematic traditions of comedia de enredo and the ‘anarchic and reconstructive conventions of the so-called “other generation of ’27” led by comedians such as the brothers Miguel and Jerónimo Mihura, Enrique Jardiel Poncela and José López Rubio’ (2008: 158). As both Fecé (2005) and Díaz López (2008) argue, what director Emilio Martínez-Lázaro and scriptwriter David Serrano achieve in El otro lado is to repackage the battle of the sexes for a new generation and to serve up these same supposedly modern masculinities and femininities (which are, in fact, elbow deep in retrograde values of machismo) in new settings and with a new musical accompaniment. Both in the aversion it inspires in some critics and in the more benign sentiment and affect that it triggers in others, El otro lado provides a fascinating case of the type of film that continues to be made in many national cinemas, and that connected with local audiences in the early 2000s. Funding bodies such as the Instituto de las Ciencias y las Artes Audiovisuales (Institute of Audiovisual Arts and Sciences) would undeniably prefer to fund a national output of perceived ‘cultural value’ and films which would serve the dual purpose of entertaining national audiences and promoting Spain’s culture abroad for the same price. Nevertheless, comedies such as El otro lado continue to establish an immediate connection with national audiences but do not travel well, except to the countries that share a ‘paisaje melódico’ (musical landscape) with Spain, borrowing Marvin D’Lugo’s term (2008: 90).5

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El otro lado connected with national audiences in a manner that other Spanish films can only dream of. It was the undisputed boxoffice success of 2002 (with takings of more than 12 million euros), and it inspired a sequel (Los dos lados de la cama [The Two Sides of the Bed, Emilio Martínez-Lázaro, 2005]), as well as a musical theatre version that toured triumphantly throughout the country during 2004 (Díaz López, 2008: 161–2). Few films in Spanish cinema can claim to be the inspiration for so many successful related cultural products. Whose generation? In her essay ‘¡Viva la diferencia (sexual) o El otro lado de la cama (Emilio Martínez-Lázaro, 2002)’, Díaz López (2008) notes how intent critics were to identify and label the supposed ‘generation’ represented by the characters in the film. In order to classify or identify this group of people, critics and commentators latched onto the lack of maturity that the characters display and decided on that characteristic (rather than their latent machismo, their dominant heterosexuality or, for instance, their locality) as their defining feature. Most critics singled out that defining characteristic as the trait of a generation, condemned to be ‘Peter Pans’, young men and women who do not want to grow up. The ‘Peter Pans’ have plans but these do not involve having children and no political, social or existential problem keeps them awake at night. (Díaz López, 2008: 162)

In Díaz López’s words ‘the intense need to pin a label on them is remarkable’ (2008: 162). As she further indicates, the problem is not located in the film itself but in the eyes of the beholder. The beholder happens to be the Spanish critical milieu dominated by a generation that came of age cinematically with the New Cinemas movement of the 1960s and who cannot assimilate a Spanish comedy that does not wear its social or political commitment clearly displayed on its sleeve: ‘this little sentimental treatise ends up being impossible to assimilate by a critical establishment whose understanding of Spanish comedy has to have a realist implication which necessarily must dwell on social issues’ (Díaz López, 2008: 262). Therefore, the characters’ lack of preoccupation with

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immediate material worries (they are affluent members of the bourgeoisie) is interpreted (mistakenly) as an avoidance of politics. Such a reading overlooks the fact that romantic comedies often rely on this conventional lack of concern precisely since only in that given context are the protagonists able to concentrate on matters of the heart, or rather on matters of other organs, as is the case in El otro lado. It could be argued that the film was a success precisely because of what it was not: not another comedia casposa (lit. comedy with dandruff)6 that pokes fun by using tasteless images of the retrograde and pre-democratic elements still lurking in Spain. It was similarly not a film that would ostensibly upset the right-wing government by putting forward a different point of view about latent political issues (such as La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra [Basque Ball, Julio Medem, 2003])7 but a bright and cheerful urban comedy that presented, seemingly, a world of romance, sex and friendships in which apoliticism reigned supreme. And yet, within the context of the PP’s overt imperialist posturing, this romantic comedy, which at first sight seems to allow its audience to sing along without a care in the world, contained thinly veiled Trojan horses that pointed to a historical context in which the unresolved issues of the Transition (1973–82) and the dictatorship were still bones of contention. The truth is that this is not a comedia de pijos in the real sense of the world.8 It is not an apolitical comedy, but the politics are not in the dialogue and the plot but rather in the backstage aspects, in the choice of actors themselves, and in the soundtrack. Both director and scriptwriter fielded frequent questions about which group or generation was represented by the film or what differences could be found between this generation and previous ones (Mora, 2002; Zorrilla, 2003). The scriptwriter and creator of the project defended his choice, explaining that he was concentrating on what he knew well, having himself been born in 1975: ‘I write about what I know: normal people, neither rich nor destitute, middle-class people. I cannot write about what I don’t know’ (Mora, 2002). Martínez-Lázaro (born in 1945), who was chosen as director de encargo (a commissioned director),9 explains the similar attitude he found among the generation of the film’s actors and earlier generations, such as the one he depicted in his film Sus años dorados (Their Golden Years, 1980):

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I have witnessed a full circle. Young people in the 1980s, which is when I made Their Golden Years, which is set in the years of the Transition, were very belligerent. With the arrival of democracy, as there was no longer an enemy to rebel against, suddenly there was a lull, as though they were all stupid. And recently I have witnessed, with the actors in this film, that they are more like I used to be. (Zorrilla, 2003: 81)

Díaz López (2008) has identified the importance to the film of the theatre company Animalario, to which many of El otro lado’s actors belong. As she explains, Animalario has to be taken into account in any reading of the film. For Spanish audiences, the presence of Alberto San Juan (who plays the sexist taxi driver Rafa, for whom Spain’s main problem is the lack of sexual activity) and of Guillermo Toledo (who plays the jilted Pedro), Ernesto Alterio (the stingy Don Juan Javier) and Nathalie Poza (the harassed theatre director Lucía) would signal a particular stance, namely censure of the PP government and its cronies. The important role that this alternative [theatre] group had in the creation of a new comedy theatre in Madrid, in a place of creativity which comes from a tradition also started in the 1980s, was publicly confirmed at the Academy’s [Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences of Spain] Goya Awards ceremony in 2003. The provocative quality of the work of Animalario has continued the challenging act of opening up everyday spaces but also of unmasking the clearly fictional spaces of contemporary [Spanish] politics using satire once again (for instance, in the abovementioned award ceremony but also in the play Alejandro and Ana. What Spain could not see of the Wedding Banquet of the President’s Daughter10 [by Juan Mayorga and Juan Cavestani, 2003]). (Díaz López, 2008: 157)

This chapter proposes to read this comedy film as a return of the ‘popular repressed’ (as Fecé [2005] suggests). It will concentrate particularly on those Trojan horses or hints hidden in a soundtrack of eight songs, most of which belong to artists whose careers started in and are related inextricably to the years of the Transition (1973–82): the rock band Coz (who penned and sang ‘Las chicas son guerreras’ [Girls are Warriors]), Kiko Veneno (the composer and performer of ‘Echo de menos’ [I Miss It]), and Tequila (the writers of ‘Dime que me quieres’ [Tell Me You Love Me], ‘Salta’ [Jump], and ‘Mucho mejor aka Hace calor’ [Much Better aka It’s Hot’]).

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6 Javier (Ernesto Alterio) and Paula (Natalia Verbeke) in El otro lado de la cama (2002), dir. Emilio Martínez Lázaro, prod. Impala, Telecinco, Telespan 2000, Vía Digital.

Whose side of the bed, I mean, of history? El otro lado features the same song by Tequila on two different occasions. ‘Dime que me quieres’ is an upbeat, ‘feel-good’ love song that became a household favourite in the late 1970s for its catchy tune and freshly laundered lyrics. Hay una cosa que te quiero decir / There’s something I want to tell you, Es importante al menos para mi / It’s important, at least for me it is Toda la noche estuve sin dormer / I couldn’t sleep last night Porque una frase de tus labios quiero escuchar / Because I want to hear a sentence from your lips Dime que me quieres / Tell me that you love me.

In these lyrics, a self-centred and narcissistic boy (Es importante al menos para mi / It’s important, at least for me it is) demands with insistence to be recognised as the object of love (presumably by a girl in the hetero-normative world of Spain in the 1970s). The film appropriates this song but performs a gender reversal: the performers are now women, first Paula (Natalia Verbeke) and afterwards Pilar (María Esteve). Paula has become frustrated by Javier’s lack of initiative in going public as her lover. She breaks up with Pedro at the start of the film but cowardly Javier has still to leave Sonia, and the signals they

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give when they are together in front of Paula imply that they are very much still a couple. Pedro visits Paula at work to reassure her and invite her to go on a weekend away with him. He convinces her, and she beckons him to follow her into an empty office with midnight blue black-out curtains, where she performs a slow and seductive version of Tequila’s ‘Dime que me quieres’. In this scene, Paula is wearing a figure-hugging red dress and black stiletto shoes. She is bathed alternately in red, blue and green light, which seems to emanate from a projector in the room. But in spite of this nod to a realistic mise-en-scène of an office space, the effect of the eerie light is to accentuate the staged and choreographed quality of her rendition of the song. She dances on the table for Javier, bringing to his attention her cleavage and legs, which are in his eyeline as he is sitting in an office chair by the table. Three faceless dancers in similar red dresses and high-heeled shoes join Paula. Javier is mesmerised, rolling around on his chair as she and the other three women roll over the table. The use of lighting seals this performance off from the rest of the film, in a manner characteristic of certain classical Hollywood musicals, such as Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952), and transports the characters from the diegetic world into a parallel ‘dream’ world for the length of the particular song. Later on in the film, the same song is performed in a more U-certificate choral performance by the girl-like Pilar, with a chorus of actual young girls, non-professional dancers, who serve as a backing for Pilar’s singing. ‘Dime que me quieres’ is sung this time to Pedro at his workplace, the Natural History Museum, and the performance is not separated from the diegesis but very much sutured to it by using the same lighting and the same colour scheme. Contrasting with the effectiveness of Paula’s rendition in getting Javier hot under the collar and wanting more, Pilar’s sunny and cheery performance brings her no closer to Pedro. Paula, the heartbreaker seductress is contrasted with the naive and mind-numbingly boring (code for virginal) Pilar. The virgin/whore dichotomy is revamped for this comedy without much subtlety, and if El otro lado has interesting or productive political readings, it is not in the field of sexual politics where we are to find them. As mentioned above, Fecé (2005) finds links between this film and the comedies of Landismo.11 The crude anachronistic attitudes to sexual politics which El otro lado depicts are one of the reasons

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for this perceived similarity. We must not forget that, for instance, Landismo comedies such as No desearás al vecino del quinto (Thou Shall Not Covet the Fifth Floor Neighbour, Ramón Fernández, 1970) often relied on a thin veneer of modernity against which traditional values were triumphantly held up. The same strategy is deployed in El otro lado. Nevertheless, the film’s soundtrack can unlock other political readings. More than a decade separates the songs of Tequila and El otro lado. The Spanish-Argentine group’s music served, in fact, as neither the soundtrack for the generation of the scriptwriter Serrano, who is widely credited with the idea for the film, nor for that of Martínez-Lázaro (the director, who, although hired at the behest of the scriptwriter as a director de encargo by producers Tele 5, made the project his own [Mora, 2002: 42]). Serrano was born in 1975 (the year when General Franco died) and was a baby when the barely 17-year-old Tequila members launched their first hit album, Matricula de Honor (Magna Cum Laude) in 1978, whereas the earlier generation to which the director belongs perhaps could be considered too old to be fans of Tequila. The generation of the Transition, who experienced both dictatorship and early democracy in their youth, were more inclined to enjoy the less quinceañera (teenage) sounds of Tequila in preference to bands such as Burning or Mermelada de Lentejas. These Madrid groups practised a more testosterone-oriented, rock and roll-influenced type of urban rock, which was heavily reliant on the guitar sound. The older generation was more attracted to singer-songwriters such as Luis Eduardo Aute, or members of the Cuban nueva trova12 such as Silvio Rodríguez, whose songs alluded directly to the political and social contexts in which they were created. There is no denying that just as a hypothetical canon of Spanish cinema would necessarily include El otro lado, for sheer box-office popularity and cultural resonance at the very least, the history of Spanish rock music cannot be complete without the inclusion of Tequila. Jesús Ordovás (1986) explains how Tequila made history in the early years of the Transition. He dates the creation of the band to 1977 and identifies its original members as the Argentineans Alejo Stivel and Ariel Rot, and the Spanish Julián Infante, Felipe Lipe and Manolo Iglesias. Furthermore, in the context of the Transition, they are ‘the first Spanish pop group that

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recorded and was successful’ (Ordovás, 1986: 387). It is important to note that Ordovás calls their music pop and not rock. This distinction is crucial as their stage presence and sound were marked by the presence of young female audiences and this association came to distinguish the group from bands such as the ones mentioned earlier. Even today it is possible to see the appeal of their performances to female audiences on television programmes such as Aplauso, available via the Internet, or in the pages of teenage magazines like Super Pop.13 Ordovás’s labeling of the band as ‘pop’ rather than ‘rock’ is interesting since Tequila are widely considered to be the forerunners of la movida madrileña,14 which encompassed pop rather than rock groups, in spite of the clear influence of British and US punk rock. By the time la movida pop bands Radio Futura or Alaska y los Pegamoides were in full swing, Tequila had decided to throw in the towel. It may well be that in the collective remembrance of the Transition, Tequila forms part of the memories of the late 1970s and early 1980s, before la movida madrileña became a mass phenomenon. However, Tequila is remembered as one of the groups that first connected with urban youth in the Spanish language, rather than English, but without the working-class identity that was associated with the heavy metal flamenco rock or rock con raíces (literally, ‘rock with roots’), which were seen at the time as too closely linked to certain geographical areas and social groups. This class element is important in reading the group and interpreting their success, and it connects them clearly to the earlier comments made by scriptwriter Serrano about writing about what he knows, namely ‘normal people, neither rich nor destitute, middle-class people. I cannot write about what I don’t know’ (Mora, 2002). Tequila, like the later movida madrileña, were widely considered fit for consumption by the middle classes, or ‘normal people’ in Serrano’s words. Tequila, as Ordovás further explains, started their career playing for university students in halls of residence and in dance clubs, creating ‘a bright, fresh and catchy pop sound’ (1986: 387). Where do the origins of this late 1970s ‘bright, fresh’ sound lie? Not in Spain, that is for sure. Stivel and Rot went on a trip down memory lane for the television programme Buenafuente: ‘our background was very much linked to Argentina, to Argentine rock’ (Buenafuente, 6 July 2008). Their Argentine background

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credentials included influences from the Rolling Stones circa 1970. Ariel Rot clearly modelled himself on Mick Jagger, in his hairstyle, his boyish yet androgynous thinness, and his impossibly tight drain-pipe trousers in primary colours and fitted jackets with thin lapels, and he had a female following to match that of his role model.15 For the interviewer and comedian Buenafuente, Tequila’s sound, with the benefit of twenty-five years of hindsight, ‘rompe con todo’ (breaks all the rules) and was ‘the right sound to clear the cobwebs of the grey country that was Spain in the 1970s’ (Buenafuente, 2009). Given their reputation is as a pop group with a ‘fresh and catchy’ sound (Ordovás, 1986: 387), it is only fitting that one of Tequila’s songs that features in the film should be ‘Salta’ (Jump). ‘Salta’ seems designed as an antidote to teenage angst and it is hard to believe that the ‘grey country’ would have produced such a song: Salí de casa con la sonrisa puesta / I left home with a smile on my face Hoy me he levantado contento de verdad / I got up today truly happy.

However, in El otro lado the song is hilariously and incongruously sung by Guillermo Toledo. His six-foot frame and his bulkiness seem at odds with the dance routine he performs, and his lack of grace and gruff singing voice, which does not quite hit the right notes, seem to belie the lyrics of the song. In other words, he really does not look all that happy. In El otro lado Tequila’s songs are used against the grain, or are made to capture new meanings by changing the gender of their performers or by the use of certain settings or performance styles. The film appropriates them effectively for comedy and romance. However, another aspect of the soundtrack seems highly significant. The incorporation of Tequila’s songs in particular, and those by other groups such as Coz or Kiko Veneno in general, points directly to the time of the Transition to democracy, as stated earlier. Such a choice is significant because at the time the film was released, in 2002, Spanish cinema represented the past (for instance in the film Soldados de Salamina) but steered well clear of setting stories during the Transition. As Buse et al. (2007) argue in The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia, the film Muertos de risa (Dying of Laughter, Álex de la Iglesia, 1999)

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was a rarity at the time for choosing its historical setting as the Transition, as confirmed by the filmmaker Pablo Berger: After the first British screening in 2004 of Torremolinos 73 (2003), an audience member complained to director Pablo Berger that Spanish cinema was obsessed with revisiting the past and that Torremolinos 73 was yet another example of this malady. Berger, one of Álex de la Iglesia’s former collaborators, admitted that the Civil War had been over-represented in Spanish cinema, but argued that the early 1970s, the period in which Torremolinos 73 is set, had hardly been touched at all. (Buse et al., 2007: 98)

Writing from the vantage point of 2010, the situation could not be more different. La Ley de la Memoria Histórica (The Law of Historical Memory), passed in December 2007, facilitated not only the unearthing of the corpses of the victims of Fascism during the Civil War, but forced Spaniards to revisit the time and circumstances during which it had been decided to let such corpses lie, the time when the Ley de Amnistía del 15 de octubre de 1977 (Amnesty Law of 15 October 1977) was passed. This law had made it impossible to bring to justice those responsible for crimes and human right violations from within the Francoist institutions. When in 2010 judge Baltasar Garzón tried to investigate crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Civil War and Francoism, groups that were deemed not to have political clout any more (such as the Falange Española [see note 3]) and the group Manos Limpias)16 came out of the woodwork to put a stop to his inquiries, and Garzón was forced to leave the Supreme Court in June 2010 (Tremlett, 2010). If one were to suggest that the Transition has not yet finished, one would be more than justified in saying so. But more importantly, that period of Spanish history is today open to public debate in a way in which it could not have been in 2002, in the middle of the triumphant years of the PP. Many very recent Spanish films and television series are set in the 1970s. Perhaps the example which has had the most impact is the Televisión Española series Cuéntame cómo pasó (Tell Me How it Happened, Miguel Ángel Bernardeu and Santiago Ladrón de Guevara, 2001), but others include feature films such as Lobo (Wolf, Miguel Courtois, 2004), Salvador (Manuel Huerga, 2007) Los años desnudos (The Naked Years, Dunia Ayaso and Félix Sabroso, 2008) and Balada triste de trompeta (The Last Circus, Álex de la Iglesia, 2010).

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This overabundance of representations and reminders of the 1970s was simply not there when El otro lado was released, and it is important to remember that at a time when the representation of the 1970s/early 1980s was taboo, Martínez-Lázaro and David Serrano, joining forces with Animalario, saw it best to place the years of the Transition (1973–82) centre stage as hidden reminders of a seemingly absent political situation amid the entertaining and sexy scenes of a romantic comedy. El otro lado can thus be read as an unlikely harbinger of those more recent films which dwell in the dark and still traumatic years of the Transition, and for all its song and dance, Martínez-Lázaro’s film hints at things that may have been left unresolved or unmade . . . in addition to the lovers’ beds. Notes 1 All translations from the original Spanish are by the author. 2 See Granado (2006). 3 Soldados de Salamina brings together the destinies of a Spanish Republican soldier and an ideologue of the Falange. The Falange (short for Falange Española y de las JONS) is defined elsewhere as the ‘Party created in 1933 out of different fascist and right-wing groups and which became the fascist party of Spain. José Antonio Primo de Rivera was its first leader’ (Triana-Toribio, 2003: 179). 4 Díaz López identified this important sartorial clue (2008: 158). For more details on Marisol see Evans (2004) and Triana Toribio (2003). 5 El otro lado was released in a few countries under normal conditions but it became mostly a film which was shown in the context of film festivals or events designed to showcase Spanish cinema (see www. imdb.com/title/tt0301524/releaseinfo [accessed 23 December 2010]). A recent example of a comedy which relies on a ‘shared musical landscape’ between Spain and Argentina is Pagafantas (Friendly Zone, Borja Cobeaga, 2009). 6 Comedia casposa is a derogatory term used by some Spanish film critics to designate a series of comedies made in the late 1990s. These films are unpolished, lack political correctness and ‘have appropriated not just the black comedy conventions of the 1950s and 1960s, but they hark back to the very cinema that the Miró legislation was created to terminate’ (Triana Toribio 2003: 152). Perhaps the most iconic comedias casposas are the Torrente Saga: four films directed by and starring Santiago Segura (as the police officer José Luis Torrente). Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley (Torrente, the Stupid Arm of the Law, 1998), Torrente 2: misión en Marbella (Torrente 2: Mission in

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7 8

9

10

11

12

13

Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema Marbella, 2001), Torrente 3: el protector (Torrente 3: The Protector, 2005) and Torrente 4: crisis letal (Torrente 4: Lethal Crisis, 2011). These films rely on sexism, homophobia, racism, crude visual jokes at the expense of the human body, slapstick humour and celebrity cameos to reach their young and male target audience. See Chapter 7 for analysis of La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra. Comedia de pijos is a term used by Spanish critics to label a series of comedies representing the lives of well-off youth. Films such as ¿Por qué lo llaman amor cuando quieren decir sexo? (Why Do They Call It Love When They Mean Sex, 1993) and El amor perjudica seriamente la salud (Love Seriously Damages Your Health, 1997) directed by Manuel Gómez Pereira are examples of this 1990s trend. See, for example, Mora (2002) and Zorrilla (2003) for details about how the director was chosen by the production company when it was decided that the script was worth funding but that the scriptwriter was perhaps too inexperienced to be assigned the role of director. A commissioned director or director de encargo is in effect a ‘director for hire’ in the sense of having been chosen by the producers rather than a director who has been involved in the project from its inception. The title of the play by Juan Mayorga and Juan Cavestani: Alejandro and Ana. What Spain could not see of the Wedding Banquet of the President’s Daughter refers to the daughter of the then president and leader of the PP party José María Aznar. Landismo (or Landinismo) is defined elsewhere as ‘A social phenomenon provoked by the popularity in the 1970s of comedies starting Alfredo Landa (1933–) which partially satisfied the audience’s desire to see films with a sexual content on the screen, however censored. Landinismo is also used to describe the style and aesthetic characteristics of these films’ (Triana Toribio, 2003: 180). ‘Paralleling nueva canción [new song] in Chile and Argentina, Cuba’s political and social turmoil in the 60s and 70s produced a socially aware form of new music called nueva trova. Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés became the most important exponents of this style. It arose from travelling singers in the early 20th century, including popular musicians like Sindo Garay (best-known for “La Bayamesa”), Nico Saquito, Carlos Puebla and Joseíto Fernández (best-known for “Guantanamera”). Nueva trova was always intimately connected with Castro’s revolution, but its lyrics frequently expressed personal rather than social issues, focusing on intense emotional issues.’ see ‘History of Cuban Music: Nueva Trova’. Online: www.boogalu.com/generic_music-history.html. Aplauso was broadcast by Televisión Española’s channel number one (TVE1) on Saturday afternoons from 1978 to 1983. It was presented by José Luis Fradejas. More details about the programme can be

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found in Cortell Huot-Sordot (2006: 80). Super Pop is a fan magazine which features news and gossip about film stars and musicians and is popular among teenagers in Spain. It is still published today and can be accessed online (www.superpop.es/). 14 La movida madrileña is defined elsewhere as ‘the term applied to the explosion of creative activity, centred around youth culture, which dominated the Madrid cultural scene in the late 1970s through till the mid-1980s. Similar in many ways to British punk, it was nevertheless a response not to unemployment but to affluence and the new sexual permissiveness: in this sense it could be seen as a delayed form of 1960s culture, but of an aggressively apolitical nature. The term has by extension been applied to other subsequent explosions of youth culture, as in movida galega [Galician movida]’ (Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi [eds], 1995: 423). 15 Patricia Godes describes Rot as a ‘youth sex symbol’ in the late 1970s and early 1980s (1986: 560). 16 Manos Limpias is a trade union founded in 1995. According to Montserrat Comas d’Argemir and other members of the Consejo General del Poder Judicial (General Council of the Judiciary Power), ‘its main leader has been historically linked to the extreme right’ (Comas d’Argemir et al., 2010: 33).

References Alsedo, Quico (2003), ‘Optimismo y Sensualidad’, Cultura (El Mundo) (13 February), n.p. Balfour, Sebastian and Quiroga, Alejandro (2007), España reinventada: nación e identidad desde la Transición, Madrid: Península. Buenafuente. Online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlFmjAAzC5c&feature =related (accessed 4 October 2010). Buse, Peter, Triana Toribio, Núria and Willis, Andrew (2007), The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Comas d’Argemir, Montserrat et al. (2010), ‘Garzón, suspendido y en el banquillo’, El País (15 May), 33. Cortell Huot-Sordot, Guido (2006), ‘Aplauso’, in Manuel Palacios (ed.), Las cosas que hemos visto: 50 años y más de TVE, Madrid: Instituto RTVE. Díaz López, Marina (2008), ‘¡Viva la diferencia (sexual) o El otro lado de la cama (E. Martínez-Lázaro, 2002)’, in Pietsie Feenstra and Hub Hermans (eds), Miradas sobre pasado y presente en el cine español (1990–2005), Amsterdam: Rodopi, 151–64. D’Lugo, Marvin (2008), ‘Volver o la contra-memoria’, Secuencias: Revista de Historia del Cine, 28: 2, 77–93.

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Evans, Peter W. (2004), ‘Marisol: The Spanish Cinderella’, in Antonio Lázaro-Reboll and Andy Willis (eds), Spanish Popular Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 129–41. Fecé, Josep Lluís (2005), ‘La excepción y la norma. Reflexiones sobre la “españolidad” de nuestro cine reciente’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, 49, 83–95. Godes, Patricia (1986), ‘Rock español, a pesar de todo’, in Patricia Godes, Mingus Formentor, Enrique Gil Calvo, Patricia Godes, Jaime Gonzalo, Ángel Harguindey, Loquillo, Diego A. Manrique, Josep-Vicent Marqués, Luis Mario Quintana, Jesús Ordovás, José Ramón Rubio, C. Santos Fontenla, Historia del Rock, Madrid: Promotora de Informaciones, 560. Graham, Helen and Labanyi, Jo (1995) Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Granado, Verónica P. (2006), 20 años de Goyas al cine español, Madrid: Aguilar, 251–6. Green, Jennifer (2006), ‘El cine español: Imagen e industria’, in Hilario J. Rodríguez (ed.), Miradas para un nuevo milenio: Fragmentos para una historia futura del cine español, Alcalá de Henares: Festival de Cine de Alcalá de Henares, 235–40. Hispano, Andrés (2006), ‘Paisaje sin conflicto. Los riesgos de ser sincero’, in Hilario J. Rodríguez (ed.), Miradas para un nuevo milenio: Fragmentos para una historia futura del cine español, Alcalá de Henares: Festival de Cine de Alcalá de Henares, 241–5. ‘History of Cuban Music: Nueva Trova’. Online: www.boogalu.com/ generic_music-history.html (accessed 24 April 2011). Mora, Miguel (2002), ‘Los del Atleti hacemos películas así, de perderores’, El País, 30 August, 47. Ordovás, Jesús (1986), ‘Hijos del agobio’, in Patricia Godes et al., Historia del Rock, Madrid: Promotora de Informaciones, 386. Tequila performances. Online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOlPbNwgjB E&feature=related (accessed 4 October 2010). Tremlett, Giles, ‘Judge Baltasar Garzón suspended over Franco investigation’. Online: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/14/garzonsuspended-franco-investigation (accessed 22 December 2010). Triana Toribio, Nuria (2003), Spanish National Cinema, London: Routledge. Zorrilla, Virginia (2003), ‘Martínez-Lázaro “Me ha sorprendido esta burrada de éxito” ’, La Clave, 31 (6 February), 78–81.

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On the function of punk aesthetics in Salto al vacío and Historias del Kronen María Pilar Rodríguez Salto al vacío (Leap into the Void, 1995) and Historias del Kronen (Stories from the Kronen, the 1994 novel by José Ángel Mañas, and the eponymous 1995 film by Montxo Armendáriz) are products of a cultural environment which reflects the transition from the creative generation of la movida of the 1980s – a movement characterised by a hedonistic desire to transgress the norms and principles imposed by the Franco regime and to become European in every way possible – to the new writers and filmmakers of the 1990s, a decade defined ‘by a total absence of state, governmental, or global European-style projects other than that of monetary integration’ (Moreiras, 2000: 35). By the mid-1990s, the lives of young people in Spain were very similar to those of their counterparts in the rest of the western world and there was no desire to revisit or re-enact any previous Spanish tradition. Rather, the influence of icons and topics present in North American music, films, novels and lifestyles was very apparent. In this context, it is widely acknowledged that an appropriation of certain aspects of punk resurfaces in the 1990s in Spanish artistic and cultural projects.1 Nevertheless, most critical efforts have been devoted to literary analyses with no focus on cinematic productions. This chapter aims to address this imbalance by exploring the presence of punk aesthetics (or the lack thereof) in Salto al vacío and Historias del Kronen in the theoretical context of New Punk Cinema. Nicholas Rombes states that from the beginning of the 1990s a series of films emerged in different parts of the world, which became highly popular among mainstream audiences – films that challenged and radically revised many of the narrative and aesthetic codes that governed Hollywood productions, and which

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he classifies as New Punk Cinema. Rombes admits that like the term punk itself, Punk Cinema remains a contested term with no clear-cut definition or characterisation, but he defends the need to approach the study of New Punk Cinema not as a movement, but rather as ‘a tendency and an approach to filmmaking that share certain key gestures and approaches with punk’ (2005: 11). He adds: ‘Like punk itself, it is not confined to one city, nor one nation – this in itself distinguishes it from many previous New Waves and film movements’ (2005: 11). Halim Cillow provides a useful summary of the most visible characteristics of this tendency: New Punk Cinema is concerned with influencing the audience with new ways of seeing, rather than manipulating the audiences with new ways of selling. Films of New Punk Cinema fight against the traditional storytelling rules, and by challenging the viewers to understand films from new angles, these filmmakers simply stated that there is not a concrete formula to make films. New Punk Cinema not only resists Hollywood, its formulaic systems, plots and characters, but most importantly it ferociously rejects the notion of ‘film as a commodity’ through not allowing their cinema to be shaped by the demands and the expectations of the public. (Cillow, 2010)

Salto al vacío does not take punk as its subject, nor does it include punk music as the major component of its soundtrack. However, it does offer a visual and narrative treatment which is explored here in terms of New Punk Cinema aesthetics and their function in our final perception of the film. As Rombes accurately notes, to claim that a film is ‘new punk’ does not mean that the film is not something else, too (2005: 4), and in this case, despite the many different ways in which Calparsoro’s film could be categorised (Justin Crumbaugh [2001: 40] defines it as a ‘shocking postmodern tragedy’ and Ann Davies [2009: 7] characterises it as a particular subgenre of cine social (social cinema), what she terms the ‘“marginalized urban youth” genre’), it fits appropriately within the tendencies of New Punk Cinema. In particular, three aspects of New Punk Cinema are analysed in this chapter. First, the notion of a do-it-yourself ethics, in which improvisation and innovation are essential to the film, are studied in terms of dialogue, movement and documentary style. Second, a spatial and visual configuration marked by degradation and decay is related to an intention to place this film as a critical alternative to Hollywood narratives, which are

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marked by an attempt to guide the interpretation of the plot along carefully planned channels. Finally, consideration is given to the use of songs by groups such as El Inquilino Comunista, Smashing Pumpkins and Stiltskin. The case of Historias del Kronen is radically different. The novel by José Ángel Mañas offers traces of punk ideology such as blankness and emptiness, an accentuated nihilism and a new form of expression. The main character, Carlos, is portrayed as a ‘bad boy’ and in that sense it is pertinent to quote the words of Malcolm McLaren, legendary manager of such punk bands as the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls, in an article titled ‘Punk and History’. He attempts to explain the method behind the madness, and concludes: ‘I think I can sum up by saying that I was a very bad boy, and that’s no lie’ (1990: 224). On the notion of being bad, he adds: ‘You see, the establishment notion of “bad” needed to be redefined. The notion of “good” meant to me things that I felt I just absolutely wanted to destroy’ (1990: 225). Mañas himself has defined his novels as punk, and declares: ‘punk is anti-technical, anti-literary, and anarchical; and its strategies to oppose the official Style range from voluntary coarseness to linguistic terrorism’ (1998: 42). He observes that ‘punk laughs at the values of maturity’ (1998: 42), just as Carlos laughs at sermons of personal growth and development in the novel Historias del Kronen. ‘When you mature, when you mature. Nah. I don’t believe anybody matures. You are just the same when you are twenty as you are when you are forty. People never change’ (1994: 170). Such punk traces disappear in the film by Montxo Armendáriz, and are replaced by a tendency to silence or temper the most conflictive aspects of the protagonist and by a  formal and visual treatment closer to conventional cinematography. Some comments on the musical elements in the novel and in the film are made later in this chapter. Salto al vacío as a New Punk Film Stacey Thompson departs from a traditional definition of punk music (a band must be capable of producing, distributing, and performing with little or no specialised training, without prohibitive financial investments, and without ties to corporate investors) and points to a ‘do-it-yourself ethic’ (2004: 48) as one of the constitutive and liberating elements of punk that evolved from a dialectical

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relationship between aesthetics and economics. Salto al vacío offers a portrait of the hopelessness of Basque youth. The film centres on the character of Alex, a complex 20-year-old woman with the word ‘void’ inscribed on the back of her head. She and her colleagues live in the outskirts of Bilbao, dealing in drugs and arms and involved in delinquent activities as the only means of survival in an extremely hostile environment. The confrontational dialogues, jump cuts and handheld camerawork create a film which undoubtedly bears material traces of its low budget as well as the director’s lack of interest in producing a technically sophisticated film with the high gloss of a Hollywood production. Ann Davies insists in her study of Salto al vacío precisely on the ‘rough, unfinished and awkward style’ (2009: 59) of the film, and mentions the lack of finish in terms of style, dialogue and plot as trademarks of this and subsequent films by Calparsoro. The director himself explains, on the commentary which accompanies the DVD of the film, that he resorted to improvisation in many different aspects (most actors did not have a lot of experience, this was his first feature-length film, lack of money implied an absolute need to be resourceful in technical matters, and many scenes were improvised according to the needs of the moment). Such improvisation reflects, at least in part, the financial constraints and the director’s relative inexperience, but the film’s aesthetics are connected to a real desire to oppose mainstream cinematic practices and to counteract the previous celebratory character of la movida. Calparsoro declared in an interview: ‘If it can be said that Almodóvar’s films expressed a celebration of freedom, ours mean the celebration of disillusionment’ (Heredero, 1997: 258), and he situates his films in a context in which values have deteriorated, which in turn generates an individual insecurity and a social tension. Salto al vacío chooses to offer representations of emptiness and marginality instead of the comfort provided by urban comedies which Almodóvar and other directors created in the years of la movida. The film explores spaces of deprivation, of dearth, of shortage and failure. It underscores the lack of money; the absence of love and sexual fulfilment, and the impossibility of hope for the future in a world in which not even life can be thought of as a stable or lasting commodity. The marginality of the characters who populate Salto al vacío is emphasised by the conspicuous absence in other Spanish films

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of any artistic contribution by, or even existential trace of this segment of the population. The director selects a marginal world and locates it in peripheral spaces marked by poverty and postindustrial decay such as Sestao and Barakaldo, two of the ‘left margin’ towns, known as such for being located on the left side of the Ría de Bilbao (Bilbao River). Such places were industrial sites deeply affected by the crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, which led to extremely high unemployment rates. The visual aesthetics of the film favour ugliness, darkness, dirt and destruction. As Ann Davies explains, ‘The improvisation aimed at authenticity, a crucial motif for Calparsoro; in support of such authenticity the actors lived beforehand in Sestao, a suburb of Bilbao, where the action was filmed, going out at night and mixing with the people of the area. The sets, too, are authentic: crumbling houses in Sestao that were to be pulled down to make way for luxury housing’ (2009: 60). Improvisation is particularly present in two aspects: dialogues and camera movement. Such improvisation clearly echoes punk’s democratic dictum most famously expressed in a set of diagrams in an issue of Sideburns, which Thompson reproduces. The diagrams show how to play three guitar chords – A, E, and G – and the text reads: ‘This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band’ (2004: 48). In the film dialogues repeat themselves; the same slang and impoverished terms are used and abused by all characters in such a manner that the discourse itself forms a kind of musical theme composed, like the punk music dictum, of no more than three chords – ‘tío’ (mate), ‘fijo’ (sure), ‘joder’ (fuck) – and it conforms to a disturbing pattern precisely because it is representative of the degraded atmosphere that permeates their world. Such words are constantly reiterated by the characters in such a manner that they become the main component of the discourse of the film; there is no need for much elaboration in a context in which narrative action advances through visual images, movement and short dialogues. A musical rhythm based on extreme simplicity and repetition is created, similar to punk compositions. Calparsoro himself has defined this kind of language in terms of improvisation, lack of intellectual preparation, and emotional appeal: ‘To transmit in a clear, forceful and entertaining way a kind of language less cold than the one we are used to seeing in the movies, less studied intellectually. To make the movies seize you, grab your attention, make

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you laugh or cry and get to your heart’ (Rodríguez, 2002: 202). Although the female protagonist, Alex (Najwa Nimri), shares the same linguistic code, her monologues and her pre-eminence in dialogues in all situations give her a higher status as the leader of the gang and the head of the family. The chaotic nature of the lives of the main characters is evoked via appropriately shaky handheld camera work, which Crumbaugh has aptly described in the following terms: ‘The cinematography of Leap into the Void rejects the stabilizing effect of traditional stationary three-point perspective in favor of a shaky, constantly moving camera which obsessively hunts down and zooms in on the violence, the decay, the disorder and the delinquency of Alex’s barrio’ (2001: 44). In such a context, the portrayal of violence in terms of the internal effects it has on the characters, rather than violence as spectacle, is achieved in part through an impression of realism conveyed through a documentary style. Such a seemingly spontaneous approach is, of course, as Crumbaugh lucidly argues, the result of a highly artificial process of filming and editing (2001: 44). Nevertheless, such an attempt at depicting the lives of the protagonists in extremely colloquial and realistic terms reveals a decision to counteract the polished aesthetics of films which choose to tell less disturbing stories. According to Stacey Thompson, punk cinema ‘employs an open, writerly aesthetic, engages with history, and critiques its own commodification’ (2004: 47); such a critique assumes an alternative form which in a sense constitutes an implicit attack on the dominant culture. Calparsoro constructs such an attack by eliminating all advertisements and publicity signs from the streets, in an attempt to oppose the commercial nature of an urban design oriented towards wealthy and affluent citizens who can afford the luxuries that these signs promote. The inhabitants of Salto al vacío do not share the comforts and pleasures of bourgeois lifestyles; rather, they live constantly on the edge; dealing in drugs and weapons in a context in which not even their own survival can be taken for granted. The bare, grey surfaces of the façades of the houses hide dirty and decrepit interiors in which arguments are frequent in a town where the sun never shines. Calparsoro himself comments in an interview with Carlos Heredero that, contrary to previous Spanish films which worked above all to make the spectator feel at ease, he wanted to convey ideas by making the viewer uncomfortable, always trying to avoid the predictable path of reaching

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audiences via previously defined commercial models (Heredero, 1997: 268). To further complicate the film’s visual reception, the director asked Kiko de la Rica, director of cinematography, to use fluorescent lighting, giving the faces of the protagonists a pale green tone, which in combination with the grey atmosphere and the saturated red colour used in certain shots further accentuates the audience’s discomfort and restlessness. The lack of a reassuring and satisfactory closure in the film perpetuates the viewer’s feelings of distress and desolation. The dialogue between Alex and Javi is not so much a dialogue as a superimposition of two monologues in which each character follows a different line of thought. Alex tries to confirm the identity of Esteban as his brother’s murderer, whereas Javi only thinks about the need to escape. Each discourse is kept in parallel, without intersecting; there is no real dialogue and the possibility of reaching a shared future seems to be truncated, and revenge once again emerges as a useless solution. Regarding the use of music in the film, little can be added to Davies’s precise analysis of this topic in her study of Salto al vacío (2009: 80). As Davies explains, in this film Calparsoro uses pre-recorded music by the Smashing Pumpkins, Stiltskin and El Inquilino Comunista,2 and although the use of heavy rock music reinforces perceptions of the film as aggressive and violent, in fact most of the soundtrack consists of the argumentative dialogues of the band and the quiet voice of Alex, which at times is hardly heard. The combination of heavy rock, melodic and melancholic tunes, such as the ones performed by El Inquilino Comunista, choral music, and such songs as ‘All the Way’ by Billie Holliday, frequently in a discordant relationship with the action in the film, suggests that the use of music is more problematic than it appears. The choral music pieces frequently appear in scenes in which a lack of hope, decay and death are prominent, therefore challenging a straightforward visual perception. Thus, as Crumbaugh aptly describes it, ‘the music elevates the scene to a new, aestheticized category’ (2001: 44). To Davies’s pertinent analysis it may be added that Alex’s moments of introspection are marked by songs of a more lyric nature, such as the first song by El Inquilino Comunista heard the first time we see Alex in her bedroom upon returning from the violent episode marked by the killing of the policeman. This song is much more melodic, with a melancholic tone which underscores this moment of intimacy. Such is the case in similar

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scenes in which she appears almost naked, therefore reinforcing her femininity in the scarce moments when we are allowed to glimpse her sensual body without the protective coverage of her otherwise manly attire. It is also interesting to note the presence of El Inquilino Comunista in the film, a band from Getxo, which was formed in 1991. Getxo is located in Vizcaya, close to Sestao, where the film was shot, but in this case Sestao’s poverty is replaced by the relative prosperity of this town, whose local council provided financial assistance for local bands. Getxo therefore quickly gave rise to a scene in which punk and heavy rock bands emerged and evolved, and the term ‘Getxo sound’ was even coined to refer to such bands. El Inquilino Comunista achieved moderate success in the 1990s and played alongside such bands as Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth in the United States. Javi Letamendi, the band’s drummer affirms that they were quite surprised by the audience’s reaction, since they only attempted to play the music that they themselves enjoyed, without paying any attention to commercial success (Urivedder, 2009). In addition, he declares that to record music is to kill it as opposed to playing at live concerts, which he prefers. A local band with a spirit quite close to Calparsoro’s intentions in Salto al vacío thus provides a fitting soundtrack to the lives of the characters in the film. In sum, Calparsoro opposes a cinematic aesthetic based on the  clean and complacent visual and narrative techniques set by the dominant cultural and economic model. Davies reflects on the  way that most Spanish critics, while rarely condemning his work in absolute terms, often accuse him of ‘poor scripts, mumbled dialogues and a sense of his work as rough and unfinished’ (2009: 22), and concludes, ‘Calparsoro is the child that refuses to mature in the way his elders and betters would like’ (2009: 22). Salto al vacío, therefore, is a powerful example of New Punk Film, and still today stands out as one of the bravest attempts by a Spanish director to follow his individual and innovative cinematic path instead of following the mould of Hollywood production values. The two Historias del Kronen In his novel, José Ángel Mañas gives voice to the original punk spirit through Herre, a character who in the following quotation

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explains the method which his band follows to achieve what he calls ‘the simplest music, such as Nirvana’s’: ‘I get a cool rhythm and then I add the tune as it comes, improvising. I know nothing about music theory, you know, I get three chords, a rhythm and that’s it; then we put in the drums and the bass and songs come out like hot cakes’ (1994: 51). Again, this resembles the previously mentioned punk’s democratic dictum of forming a band out of three chords. Herre, indeed, seems to be familiar with punk music; among his favourite bands the following are mentioned in the novel: The Ramones, Burning, Parálisis Permanente, The Doors, and Siniestro Total (1994: 137). Greil Marcus affirms that punk was, more than anything, free speech: ‘Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a movement when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could have ever expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place’ (1990: 231). Mañas in his novels and particularly in the article ‘Literatura y punk’ vindicates un antiestilo (an ‘anti-style’) which represents life in its crudest form ‘without the willing veil to which one returns to hide Nothingness’ (1998: 42), and adds that he is prepared to face such Nothingness because art is born out of angst and the rest is artifice. Historias del Kronen is set in Madrid and the stories concern a group of friends in their early twenties whose main purpose in life is to derive as much immediate pleasure from music, alcohol, drugs and sex as they possibly can. Carlos is the protagonist who refuses to conform to the norms as expressed by his family and friends. As I have argued elsewhere, reading Historias del Kronen produces feelings of anguish, impotence and frustration born out of the perception of an emotional nihilism that rejects commitment and negates redemption (Rodríguez, 2005: 42). This reaction is achieved via a narrative style with a new form of expression characterised by oral speech, slang, and rebellion against the norms of purity and correctness of Spanish grammar, syntax and academic style. Mañas declares: ‘Punk is noise, violence, bad pronunciation. Punk is chaos, potential anarchy, incorrect practices’ (1998: 42). Such lack of correction in the novel works as a means of unveiling Nothingness, confronting it, and living it with the anguish that this entails. The novel perfectly captures the ‘No Future’ spirit of the eponymous song by the Sex Pistols:

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Don’t be told what you want Don’t be told what you need There’s no future, no future No future for you.

In Historias del Kronen Carlos, the protagonist, refuses to follow his father’s advice to apply himself to doing something productive (‘Here we go with the same old sermon’ [Mañas, 1994: 67]), and replaces such attempts at moulding his character into a productive social being with immediate pleasure-seeking, via alcohol, drugs, sex, music and films. To his father’s good intentions he replies, ‘I don’t need understanding. I need your money, that’s all’ (1994: 67), and to his best friend’s remark, ‘You don’t know how to enjoy the present’, Carlos retorts, ‘The present is shit’ (1994: 60). The overpowering need to enjoy the present leads the protagonist to the immediate future, to the greedy need to keep consuming drinks, drugs, songs and bodies. The refusal to put off desire implies a lack of trust in a future which is constantly tested by risking one’s life or indulging in dangerous practices. Such a lack of future prospects is also connected in the novel with contempt for any notion of personal development. Carlos openly rejects adulthood, maturity and responsibility as necessary paths for such development, spurning such notions, and he concludes: ‘I never regret anything I have done’ (1994: 170). Such refusal to grow up in the terms established and approved of by society at large is strongly associated with the original punk spirit, described by Malcolm McLaren as a conscious intention to reject what he terms the ‘work ethic’, which he describes as follows: In England we have a very simple work ethic. You are brought by your parents to listen to them. Then you go to school and listen to your teachers. Then you go to work and listen to your employer. If you didn’t want work from the day you were born you don’t want to listen to anyone – my criterion was to do that and to do that well. (McLaren et al., 1990: 244)

Carlos shows no interest whatsoever in the world of work, or in any ethics associated with it;3 when one of his friends reproaches him that he must work – in a vain attempt to open his eyes to a reality without privileges – he says he is bored by such remarks about work, and to the question about what they should talk about, he replies, ‘Sex and drugs and rock’n’roll’ (Mañas, 1994: 206). Such is the modus vivendi adopted by Carlos.

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Historias del Kronen has been characterised by María Pao as ‘blank fiction’; she mentions among its main defining features the following: indifference and self-absorption on the part of its central character, preoccupation with sex, violence and drugs, and the dominant influence of the media giving way to a flat narrative tone and commodification of the body (2002: 246). It is interesting to note in that sense, as does John M. Ulrich, ‘the way punk subculture repeatedly defines its generational identity in terms of blankness and emptiness’ (2003: 13). Such emptiness, in the case of Carlos, ends in a very troubling episode in the novel, after Fierro dies when he is forced by the protagonist to consume a large quantity of alcohol, even though everybody knows that he is a diabetic. Carlos, once again, refuses to become involved in any manner, and when an ambulance is called he accuses his friends of being cowards and leaves for Santander to continue his summer vacation and to avoid any consequences. Contrary to the spirit of the novel, the film Historias del Kronen consistently silences the most disturbing aspects of Carlos’s character. Montxo Armendáriz humanises Carlos and converts him in the end into a hero characterised by authenticity and responsibility (Rodríguez, 2005: 128). It is not hard to understand why the initial cooperation between Mañas and Armendáriz when co-writing the film’s script was soon to break down. As the director admitted in an interview, when referring to the ending of the film, he was unable to maintain the nihilism present in the literary work: ‘It was difficult for me to create a totally radical character. I believe that it is more enriching if he has more complexity, that is, if he has feelings even if he doesn’t want to have them’ (cited in Gómez, 1995: 41). Similarly, the critic Carlos Heredero reproaches the director for this redemptive tendency – which directly opposes the punk spirit present in the literary work – and remarks that the filmmaker needs to believe that a system of values will, sooner or later, redeem the characters in all of his productions (1995: 38–40). In the film, Carlos accompanies his friends to the hospital, talks to the doctors and ends up in a fight with his friend Roberto to defend their moral obligation to show to the authorities the videotape on which the death of his friend has been recorded. He becomes heroic in his intention to do the right thing, as opposed to the novel’s Carlos, who is always a very bad boy. The visual images in the film correspond to an urban spatial

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configuration marked by suburban houses and the interiors of bars at night. Dialogues and movement are not marked by improvisation but, rather, by a carefully planned cinematography which does not fail to portray a disturbing reality of affluent youngsters in Madrid. Such constant use of drugs and sex on the part of the protagonists is this time not a feature of the lives of a group of marginal characters, but rather part of the depiction of the kind of lives led by the sons and daughters of the main spectators of Historias del Kronen. However, the commercial nature of the film does not allow for the maintenance of the punk aesthetics present in the novel, and the result is easier to digest for Spanish audiences. Historias del Kronen displays a musical preference on the part of its protagonists for bakalao or máquina music (both types of heavy rock), although it may be noted that Carlos and his friends in the novel attend a Nirvana concert, which Carlos seems to enjoy, despite the deafening noise: ‘A fucking great concert, say I’ (Mañas, 1994: 108). Carlos also goes to an ‘Elton Yon concert’4 (1994: 156), mainly to please his girlfriend at the time, but his conclusion seems to be the following: ‘If i were a musician, i would never play a slow song in my concerts’ (1994: 156). Carlos defends noise and a fast pace in the same manner as Mañas describes punk as noise, distortion and rebellion. As Christine Henseler has noted, Mañas uses capitals in the novel to portray moments of screaming communication among his characters, which she relates to the angst of a generation expressed in a similar manner to how the Sex Pistols shouted their lyrics (Henseler, 2004: 696). In the film’s final scene the image of Carlos and Roberto fighting is reflected in a broken mirror surrounded by the lyrics of the MCD song ‘No hay sitio para ti’ (There is no place for you). It constitutes a paradoxically clear image of distorted and fragmented identities. Its equivalent in the novel is the song entitled ‘Giant’ by the British group The The, which opens and closes Mañas’s work: I am a stranger to myself And nobody knows I am here When I looked into my face It wasn’t myself I’d see But who I’ve tried to be.

In both cases a sense of alienation emerges for the young protagonists but whereas the film (and the song by MCD) conveys a

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sense of displacement from mainstream society caused by lack of integration, the lyrics by The The reveal a lack of recognition in the speaker, a substantial absence emphasised by negative words that are closer to the uncomfortable Nothingness which the novel portrays. As Paul Begin underscores, it is important to note that these works are set in a post-punk context (2007: 15) and in a particular location (Madrid and the outskirts of Bilbao), which prompts analysis of the appropriation of certain aspects of punk in these particular spaces. As has been argued, the notion of New Punk Film facilitates an interpretation of certain aspects that derive from the original punk aesthetics included in both Salto al vacío and Historias del Kronen, although in the latter case the novel offers a more radical approach than the film to the original punk spirit. Punk music is also diversely incorporated as an important component of the soundtrack of the films. Among the aspects derived from punk mentioned by Begin as present in the Spanish artistic context are the following: its blank quality, the social critique, its negationism and nonconformity (2007: 16). It is important to conclude, therefore, that while generational conflict is nothing new, what is unique in Salto al vacío and Historias del Kronen is the way these young writers and filmmakers reappropriate certain aspects of punk ideology. They do so mainly in order to emphasise generational identity in terms of blankness, emptiness, angst and a refusal to comply with an environment which either proves too hostile for protagonists such as Alex in Salto al vacío or is rejected in terms of moral development, as is the case of Carlos in Historias del Kronen. Notes 1 See, among others, Begin (2007), de Urioste (2004) and Henseler (2004). 2 The name of this band allegedly derives from the fact that a girl once told its members that she could not go to their first concert (held in one of the members’ house) because she was not feeling well due to the Inquilino comunista (literally, ‘communist tenant’, a euphemism for menstruation), and that was the name that remained thereafter (“Érase una vez.-El Inquilino Comunista”. Online: http://urivedder.wordpress. com/2009/07/11/erase-una-vez-el-inquilino-comunista/) (accessed 9 July 2010).

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3 Carlos suggests that his perfect lifestyle derives mainly from the fact that he has no obligations whatsoever: ‘I have nothing to do all day long, just eat, sleep and shit. It is clear that luxury means returning to the animal condition’ (Mañas, 1994: 65). 4 Mañas introduces in his novel the use of colloquial speech patterns and alters conventional Spanish orthographic norms to reproduce English pronunciation.

References Begin, Paul (2007), ‘The Pistols strike again! On the function of punk in the Peninsular Generation X fiction of Ray Loriga and Benjamín Prado’, in Christine Henseler and Randolph Pope (eds), Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular Fiction, Film and Rock Culture, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 15–32. Cillow, Halim (2010), ‘New Punk Cinema: Rowing against the tradition of film as commodity’, Online: http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/242 (accessed 11 June 2010). Crumbaugh, Justin (2001), ‘An aesthetic of industrial ruins in Bilbao: Daniel Calparsoro’s Leap into the Void and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’, International Journal of Iberian Studies, 14: 1, 40–50. Davies, Ann (2009), Daniel Calparsoro, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gómez, Concha (1995), ‘Entrevista a Montxo Armendáriz’, Dirigido, 234, 41–42. Henseler, Christine (2004), ‘Pop, punk, and rock & roll writers: José Ángel Mañas, Ray Loriga, and Lucía Etxebarria Redefine the Literary Canon’, Hispania, 87: 4, 692–702. Heredero, Carlos (1995), ‘Montxo Armendáriz visita el Kronen’, Dirigido, 234, 38–40. Heredero, Carlos (1997), Espejo de miradas: Entrevistas con nuevos directores del cine español de los años 90, Madrid: Fundación Colegio del Rey. McLaren, Malcolm, Hell, Richard, Sprouse, Stephen, Marcus, Greil, Savage, John and Taylor, Paul (1990), ‘Punk and history’, in Russell Ferguson, William Olander, Marcia Tucker and Karen Fiss (eds), Discourses: Conversation in Postmodern Art and Culture, Boston: MIT and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 224–45. Mañas, José Ángel (1994), Historias del Kronen, Madrid: Destino. Mañas, José Ángel (1998), ‘Literatura y punk: el legado de los Ramones’, Ajoblanco, 108, 38–43. Moreiras Menor, Cristina (2000), ‘Spectacle, trauma and violence in contemporary Spain’, in Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas (eds), Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, London: Arnold, 134–42.

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Pao, María (2002), ‘Sex, drugs, and rock & roll: Historias del Kronen as blank fiction’, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, 27: 2, 245–60. Rodríguez, María Pilar (2002), Mundos en conflicto: aproximaciones al cine vasco de los noventa, San Sebastián: Universidad de Deusto Press. Rodríguez, María Pilar (2005), ‘Nihilism and simulacrum: The two Historias del Kronen’, Chasqui, 34, Special Issue No. 2: Cinematic and Literary Representations of Spanish and Latin American Themes, 122–31. Rombes, Nicholas (ed.) (2005), New Punk Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thompson, Stacey (2004), ‘Punk Cinema’, Cinema Journal, 43: 2, 47–66. Ulrich, John (2003), ‘Generation X: A (sub)cultural genealogy’, in John Ulrich and Andrea Harris (eds), Genxegesis: Essays on ‘Alternative’ Youth Subculture, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 3–37. de Urioste, Carmen (2004), ‘Cultura Punk: la Tetralogía Kronen de José Ángel Mañas o el arte de hacer ruido’, Ciberletras: Revista de Crítica Literaria y de Cultura, 11. Online: www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/ v11/urioste.html (accessed 12 October 2010). Urivedder (2009), ‘Érase una vez – El Inquilino Comunista’, Online: http://urivedder . wordpress . com / 2009 / 07 / 11 / erase - una - vez - el inquilino - comunista / (accessed 9 July 2010).

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Mobile soundscapes in the quinqui film Tom Whittaker

A number of films made during Spain’s Transition to democracy centred on the experience of the juvenile delinquent living on the margins of the city. Known as cine quinqui,1 the key films of the cycle included Perros callejeros (Stray Dogs, 1977), Perros callejeros 2: busca y captura (Stray Dogs 2: Arrest Warrant, 1979), Los últimos golpes del Torete (El Torete’s Final Blows, 1985) and Yo, El Vaquilla (I, El Vaquilla [Little Bull], 1985), which were directed by José Antonio de la Loma and set around Barcelona. Carlos Saura’s Deprisa, deprisa (Hurry, Hurry, 1980), an auteurist take on the delinquency film, was based around Madrid, and resonates thematically with his other films Los golfos (The Delinquents, 1961) and Taxi (1996).2 A prominent feature of these films was their overinvested soundtracks, which comprised pop songs written and performed by enormously popular Gypsy groups such as Los Chichos, Los Chunguitos and Bordón-4. In exploring the role of these songs in the quinqui film, this chapter demonstrates how they can contribute towards our understanding of the relationship between sound and space. As will be argued, the music articulates a structure of spatial mobility – in both the movement of migration routes, and the consumption of the songs as mobile objects through the prominent use of car stereos in the films – that is central to the shaping of migrant youth subculture during the Transition to democracy. This chapter illustrates how, through sound, the delinquents were able to actively produce a space of their own, both inside and outside the film text. It will argue that the soundscape that they produced was one of resistance and transgression, and a crucial means of articulating their visibility in a geography that excluded them, and rendered them invisible. Although it was one of the most popular and enduring genres of

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the Transition, cine quinqui has received very little critical attention outside Spain.3 Its iconography is well known: real-life delinquent actors, exciting cat-and-mouse car chases featuring stolen Seat 124s, corrupt police, and the macarra slang of the period feature heavily in the films, as well as the explicit depictions of sex, drugs and violence that were typical of the destape.4 Most strikingly, the genre blurred the lines between authenticity and artifice to an uncanny degree. The Perros callejeros films were originally based around the real-life juvenile delinquent, Juan José Moreno Cuenca, otherwise known as ‘El Vaquilla’. De la Loma originally intended for El Vaquilla to star in his films, but as he was sent to reformatory school, the director cast his delinquent friend Ángel Fernández Franco (‘El Torete’) instead as the protagonist in the first three films. Similarly, Saura cast José Antonio Valdelomar, a teenager who had been in reformatory school, in the leading role of Pablo. In an antimimetic twist of fate typical of the quinqui film, Valdelomar was unable to attend the premiere of his own film as he was in prison. He had been arrested three weeks previously for robbing a bank – a real-life crime that mirrored his own performance of a bank robbery in Deprisa, deprisa. Like the Warner Brothers pre-Hays Code gangster of the early 1930s, the juvenile delinquent in these films is a highly ambivalent and contested figure. Part mythical and part real, he is as much a product of the national imagination as he is of his social environment. Much of the contemporary reception of the films maligned them, fearing that they would trigger copycat patterns of criminality and chaos. Idealised and demonised in equal measure, the quinqui can also be seen as a continuation of the tradition of the picaresque anti-hero, a roguish but likeable character whose movement is defined by transience and transgression. As this chapter shows, the protagonists’ fluid movement provided a means of survival, and this most clearly found its expression in the songs heard in the films. Mobile soundscapes The soundtrack of the films contained pre-existing songs, as well as numbers that had been recorded especially for the films. Indeed, the cross-promotion of music and film contributed largely to the genre’s success, and the synergy of these two media was found most noticeably in the release of the album soundtracks of

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7 Performing the self: real-life delinquents, José Antonio Valdelomar and Berta Socuéllamos, in Deprisa, deprisa (1981), dir. Carlos Saura, prod. Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas S.L., Les Films Molière.

Deprisa, deprisa and Yo, el Vaquilla. In spite of the central role that groups like Los Chichos, Los Chunguitos and Bordón-4 played in the youth culture of the Transition, and the conspicuous commerciality of their songs, there has been very little critical writing – in English or in Spanish – on their music. They developed a hybrid style, known as a rumba or rumba urbana, which combined aspects of traditional flamenco with glossy, disco and pop-inflected production values. The timbre of their voices, with its serrated edge and microtonal range of notes, unmistakably builds upon the tradition of cante flamenco. However, unlike traditional flamenco, where the melody is largely unmoored from a regular metric rhythm, the vocal delivery of the rumba is set against the steady insistence of an up-tempo groove, underpinned by an ensemble of electric bass, electric guitar and drums. In some songs, the rhythm is further held in check by the use of syncopated hand claps and synthesisers. While flamencologists such as Washabaugh have described cante flamenco as ‘closed off, hidden, introverted’ (1996: 101), rumba urbana casts its gaze outwards, providing a window onto the social conditions of the migrant underclass in the city. Mariano de Zúñiga, a prominent music executive in the 1970s, recalls the first time he heard Los Chichos: ‘When you listen to them, you hear the history of music and the social context of that moment’ (Peña and Valderrama, 2005: 52). This is vividly borne out in the lyrics of these groups. For instance, the chorus of the Los Chunguitos song ‘Soy un perro callejero’ (I’m A Stray Dog), which is played over

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the end credits of Perros callejeros 2, articulates both the fleeting transience and alienation of life in the contemporary city: ‘I’m a street dog / and I say who cares? / Living my life alone the best I can / the life that society gave me’). Bordón 4’s song ‘Al Torete’, which appears at both the beginning and the end of Los últimos golpes, is a call of defiance against a society that chooses not to see those whom it has excluded: ‘Stand up to the society / that has turned its back on you / Don’t give up the freedom / that your body needs’. As an expression of fatalism and social protest, their lyrics were coloured by their own experiences of life on the margins of the city. Like their on-screen delinquent counterparts, the members of the groups were in most part rural migrants, and part of the massive exodus from the Spanish countryside to the city which occurred during the miracle years, the name given to the economic boom in Spain from 1959 to 1973. The members of Los Chunguitos, for instance, were born in rural Extremadura, and moved to Madrid as children, living in the notoriously gritty barrio of Vallecas. As a hybrid of the Andalusian and the Anglo-American, the popular and the mass-produced, rumba urbana eloquently reflects the inbetween status of the rural migrant during these years. Its embrace of the modern and the traditional is an ambivalent expression of the antagonistic duality at the heart of the quinqui – a subculture that seeks to be part of the city, while at the same time articulating a nostalgia for the rural, without ever properly belonging to either. Their songs therefore map out a vivid relationship between music and place – or rather, music and the very absence of place. Music in the quinqui film is shaped by a vivid structure of mobility. While musical genres are never static, and are always subject to constant transformation and flux, this is most strikingly the case when music follows the routes of migration. While rumba urbana was clearly shaped by the cultural movement of people, it was transmitted and circulated by another structure of mobility: the relatively new invention of the radio cassette, which as a moving sonic object, significantly transformed the modes in which music was consumed. In Deprisa, deprisa, for instance, the songs of Los Chunguitos, ‘Ay que dolor’ (Oh such pain!) and ‘Me quedo contigo’ (I’m staying with you) are played repeatedly in the stolen cars that the teenagers drive, with close-up shots of the tape deck emphasising its diegetic source. Saura speaks of how during the rehearsals, the actors would play the rumbas on a stereo which they would

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carry around with them off-camera; he then took their cassettes and chose the songs he liked best for the film’s soundtrack (Sánchez Vidal, 1988: 147). Indeed, as Peña and Valderrama have noted, Los Chichos made principally ‘música de viaje’ (driving music), and as such, their cassettes were the most widely sold in Spanish petrol stations at the time (2005: 95). But while Los Chichos have sold approximately 18–19 million copies of their albums over their career, their music has also succumbed to one of the worst rates of piracy in Spain (Peña and Valderrama, 2005: 91). Significantly, the circulation and diffusion of their music was therefore often an act of transgression in itself. Similarly, in the films, the diegetic source of music from within stolen vehicles neatly reifies this relationship between movement and transgression. A review of Perros callejeros praised the film for its naturalistic performances, where ‘the young protagonists, who move around as spontaneously and as gracefully as they do in their everyday lives, reveal themselves to be fine actors’ (‘Los olvidados’, El País, 1986). This freedom of movement, however, is only usually found in the films when the actors are on the peripheries of the city, or the countryside that lies just beyond its reach. As they move further into the city, their movement becomes increasingly trammelled and subject to surveillance – a dynamic which is articulated primarily through performance and framing. As the teenagers loiter outside a bank towards the end of Deprisa, deprisa their bodies are partly obscured by stationary cars as they insinuate themselves between background and foreground, as if passing through the cracks of the city. While the stolen car, which is so central to the quinqui film, offers up the temporary individualism of the open road (as seen, for instance, in the night-time trip to the sea in Deprisa, deprisa), it also inevitably leads to either the capture or death of the delinquents. The final scene of Perros callejeros, for example, ends dramatically with El Torete’s car abruptly swerving off the road, and falling down a towering cliff.5 In its most basic and material form, music can be seen as a transmission of airwaves across space. It is evanescent and fleeting, and is able to travel distances, moving in, across and through physical spaces. According to Jazeel; ‘sounds evade fixity and easy definition’, and, as such ‘they are difficult to draw boundaries around’ (2005: 236). It is precisely this fluid dimension of sound that resonates so effectively with the geographical trajectory of the

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delinquent. The music of the quinqui flows in directions that cannot be controlled: it is able to penetrate forbidden spaces, passing through the material and social boundaries of the city that contain and exclude these young men. This fluidity therefore provided a means of survival within a geography of oppression, enabling the teenagers to negotiate the fixity of their immediate environment. According to Shubert, the rapid expansion of urbanisation during Spain’s miracle years took place in a political context in which no plans or controls were applied and in which corruption proliferated (1990: 220). Many cities suddenly became overcrowded and polluted, with many migrants settling in shacks, and later in highrise suburbs (Carr, 1980: 160). Neighbourhoods such as Gran San Blas in Madrid and La Mina in Barcelona, the location of Perros callejeros, comprised rows of identikit tower blocks, which were shoddily constructed of prefabricated material and unbearably overcrowded. For instance, Cuestas shows that in 1975, La Mina had 2,721 dwellings for 15,113 inhabitants (Cuestas, 2010: 187). Correspondingly, the mise-en-scène in these films is dominated by a geography of stasis. In José Antonio de la Loma’s films, establishing shots frequently pan the rows of buildings, or tilt upwards to underscore their great height. Often captured from an oblique angle, the emphatic camera movement dramatises the rigidly functional, stark lines of their modernist architecture. The use of framing economically situates the delinquents as products of their environment: in an early sequence in Perros callejeros, for instance, a long shot abruptly zooms out, placing El Torete against a dynamic backdrop of imposing edifices. In Deprisa, deprisa, Madrid’s barren hinterlands, which straddle the M-30 motorway, are punctuated with endless pylons, defunct agricultural machinery and sewage.6 Again, the camera alerts us to the homogenisation of place: soulless rows of buildings present the city as an impenetrable fortress, thereby creating a deterritorialised landscape of outsideness, seemingly indifferent to those who live there. Within this immobile environment, the rumba urbana creates a soundscape of resistance: it provides the temporary freedom of movement within a static geography of exclusion. As Michel Chion has written, ‘in the film frame that contains movement many other things in the frame remain fixed. But sound by its very nature necessarily implies a displacement or agitation, however minimal’ (1994: 9–10). As is often the case with the quinqui genre, it is the context which

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surrounded the films that brings the relationship between sound and space most vividly into play. In his autobiography, El Vaquilla recalls how he heard one of the Chichos’ songs being played in a bar as he committed armed robbery in a branch of the La Caixa bank in Barcelona. Some years later, while on temporary day release from prison, he stole a car, only to later find several cassettes of the group’s music inside the glove box, along with a lump of hash (cited in Peña and Valderrama, 2005: 100). In a further blurring of the lines between life and art, José Antonio de la Loma would later ask Los Chichos to write the soundtrack to Yo, El Vaquilla, the film adaptation of El Vaquilla’s autobiography. The group would visit him in prison several times, where they collaborated together on ten songs which recounted the story of his life, such as ‘Campo de la Bota’, named after the shanty town where he grew up, before his community was relocated to the tower blocks of La Mina. After recording the songs, Los Chichos performed a special concert for the prisoners, stating defiantly in a newspaper interview that ‘El Vaca [Vaquilla] is one of ours and we’re willing to give twenty concerts in prisons’ (Gómez, 1984). The well-publicised concert brought into clear focus the tension between motion and containment – or rather motion within containment – which lay at the very heart of the rumba urbana: their songs not only offered respite and hope, but resistance and opposition, albeit fleeting and temporary, to the panoptic structures of space. Moreover, the cultural bond between singer and audience demonstrated how criminality and transgression, while regrettably a reality in many migrant Gypsy lives, were also central to the subcultural capital of these groups, and their subsequent claim to ‘authenticity’. Whether this ‘authenticity’ was achieved through a commodification of the criminal experience is open to interpretation. After giving their concert to the prisoners, the journalist notes that Los Chichos drove away in a white luxury BMW sports car (Gómez, 1985) – a conspicuous symbol of mobility and consumption, the likes of which their audience that day could only have dreamt of. The production of music and space As we have seen, music in the quinqui genre – whether diegetic or non-diegetic – occupies a much more central position in the films

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than merely a means of establishing place and mood, or an accompaniment to the narrative. Saura has commented on the importance which he ascribes to music in his films, asserting in an interview that ‘when I write or when I’m shooting, I see the scenes with music. The music almost always comes first. It’s previous music’ (Castro, 1986: 52). Elsewhere he has added that music ‘functions not only as the catalyst for something, but it can turn into the protagonist. And it’s not the usual American music of accompaniment, but rather something very specific’ (Castro, 2003: 67). Similarly, when de la Loma heard the songs that Los Chichos had composed especially for Yo, el Vaquilla, he altered the script to fit around the songs, so that the music had a more prominent role in the film (Peña and Valderrama, 2005: 103). This is perhaps not surprising given the important visuality of pop songs. Since its inception, pop music has been inseparable from the image. Recordings of live performances, choreography and fashion, for instance, all interact powerfully with the ways in which pop songs are produced, disseminated and consumed. The synergy of all of these media finds its most striking expression in the form of the music video. According to Carol Vernallis, the relationship established between sound and image in the music video is clearly distinct from that of film music. She argues that while in films, the image may adopt a denotative function and the music, a connotative one, in music video, the situation is reversed: ‘in order to showcase the music, the image connotes, providing the gloss on the music’ (2004: 194–5; emphasis added). A similar dynamic, to an extent, is borne out at several junctures of the quinqui genre: the films can be seen as music with pictures, rather than the more classical mode of pictures with the accompaniment of music. Indeed, a proliferation of amateur video homages to El Torete and El Vaquilla on YouTube have built upon this very relationship. A younger generation of contemporary fans have posted their favourite songs by Los Chichos and Los Chunguitos on this website, which are played over a montage of scenes or images from different quinqui films. Significantly, it is the music that drives the rhythm of the images, rather than the other way round. As Inglis has written, pre-recorded music in film ‘comes with its own contours’ (2003: 9). A pop song has its own architecture, usually comprising a verse, chorus, and often a bridge and an instrumental section. It has its own fixed frame, in the same

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way that the cinematic image has a frame. In possessing its own autonomous structure, it cannot therefore be moulded around the narrative in the film nearly as dexterously as a score that has been especially commissioned. For instance, a song has its own rhythmic organisation (which is particularly noticeable in the upbeat and syncopated rhythms of the rumba) just as the film creates its own tempo through editing, the movement of actors and camerawork. Moreover, the instrumentation and vocals of a song each have their own distinctive timbre and phrasings, just as the mise-en-scène has its texture, colour and shapes. Thus, despite the vivid sense of time and place suggested by the rumba urbana, sound and image in the films are not so much held together in synesthetic harmony as they are in competition with each other. The sound design of Deprisa, deprisa, in particular, provides a self-reflexive exploration of the location of the song. Saura blurs the demarcations between diegetic and non-diegetic music to a great degree in the film. Unlike many Spanish films of the 1970s and 1980s, the dialogue is recorded synchronously with the image, lending the performances a greater sense of spontaneity and authenticity.7 However, the teenager’s diegetic music, whose source is frequently seen in the mise-en-scène (a jukebox and a car stereo, for instance) has been recorded post-synchronously. This enables the sound level to be mixed in some scenes so that the songs almost ‘take over’ the scene, and assume a post-diegetic quality. Elsewhere, location is established sonically before it is done so visually: at the end of the two sequences where the characters drive to the sea at night and visit a discotheque, a sound bridge fades in the music of the following scene. The song therefore repeatedly asserts its own autonomy within the film. Despite its title, Deprisa, deprisa unfolds at a slow and contemplative pace; for the most part, its slow rate of editing and discreet camera movement work together to create a poetic meditation of the quinqui subculture. Usually held in a steady long shot or an extreme long shot, the camera tends to observe rather than to intrude, thereby contributing to the de-dramatisation of the performances of the non-professional actors. The fleeting and itinerant rumba clearly flows against the slow narrative spaces created by the film; it carves out its own sonic pathways that move and overlap both within and outside the diegesis. As such, music does not just fill space with meaning, or transform the experience of space, but actively produces space.

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The creation of soundscapes in film can be further illuminated by the writing of Henri Lefebvre. For Lefebvre, space should not be seen as a material and passive backdrop to human action, but a process which is ‘produced’ by human thoughts, relations and representations, which he terms ‘the (social) production of (social) space’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 26). The production of social space is inherently political in nature: it is a ‘counterspace’ (1991: 381), a site where contestation and resistance take place. For this reason, lived space is often ‘linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art’ (1991: 33). Crucially, social space is described by Lefebvre as lived space, where resistance is carried out at the level of everyday actions and practices. As we have seen, the rumba urbana is an art form that is imbricated in the everyday life of the migrant delinquent. In articulating the contemporary conditions of their existence, it exposes and challenges social inequality and the fixed spatial structures of the city. It produces a sonoric landscape of resistance, a dynamic ‘counterspace’, where sound and space are sensuously and inextricably realised the one in the other. The critical category of the everyday, and the political potential that it brings to bear, is usefully described by Ben Highmore as follows: ‘Everyday life is not simply the name that is given to a reality readily available for scrutiny; it is also the name of aspects of life that lie hidden. To invoke an ordinary culture from below is to make the invisible visible, and as such has clear social and political resonances’ (2002: 1–2; emphasis added). Indeed, in the opening sequence of Perros callejeros, an omniscient narrator delivers a grave lecture to the viewer, played over a sensationalist montage of car chases, images of tower blocks and the corpse of a delinquent: ‘The problem exists . . . it’s there and we cannot turn our back on it. [. . .] We are all involved in this problem. Essentially, we are all guilty, and it is up to all of us to do something to solve it.’ Like the didactic voiceover in the opening sequence of Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned, Luis Buñuel, 1950), the film sets out to expose a social issue that, with the important exception of Los golfos, was rarely addressed during the Franco years. In firmly focusing on the theme of criminality from the geographical perspective of delinquents, the film similarly invokes a culture from below. Sound therefore becomes a marker of presence, a means of making the invisible visible. As a marker of visibility, it exposes the true conditions of their existence which society tries not to see.

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(In)visible soundscapes The tension between invisibility and visibility is also inextricably bound up with the social identity of youth. The geographer, Doreen Massey, has written that ‘the control of spatiality is part of the process of defining the social category of youth itself’ (Massey, 1998: 126). The geographical exclusion of the teenager, who is forbidden from many of the spaces designated for both children and adults, plays a key role in his social exclusion. The identity of the adolescent is thus constituted by where he is not allowed to be. While the teenager is rendered socially invisible, his symbolic absence and alienation are compensated through outward appearance, through an emphasis on clothing and fashion. As Dick Hebdige has famously argued in relation to British subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s such as the punks and the mods, ‘subcultures rely on leisure and style as a means of making their values visible in a society saturated by the codes and symbols of dominant culture. However, the challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather, it is expressed obliquely through style’ (1979: 17). Their objection to hegemony is therefore displayed in a spectacular fashion, which operates on the ‘profoundly superficial level of appearances’ (Hebdige, 1979: 17). The body of the adolescent can therefore be conceived as both deviant and controlled, and stylish and spectacular – or in other words, both invisible and visible. Although Spain’s so-called miracle years had already begun to gather apace in the late 1950s, it was not until the Transition to democracy that ‘youth’ were truly interpellated as consumers. As Cuesta writes, the fading of National Catholicism and the sudden shift towards social liberalisation brought with them new modes of leisure for teenagers, who expressed their freedom through the consumption of items (such as music, clothes, fizzy drinks, comics, and so on) that specifically tapped into the emerging teenage market (Cuesta, 2010: 189). However, in spite of these patterns of consumerism, this period was also dogged by conspicuously high unemployment rates, which lingered long into the 1980s, reaching 17 per cent in 1982 (Harrison, 1985: 176). Significantly, young people were those who were most affected by joblessness: 60 per cent of the unemployed during this time were under the age of 25 (Cuesta, 2009: 189). This was met with soaring crime rates, where

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for instance, delinquent crime rose two-fold between the years 1976 and 1978 (Hernando Sanz, 2001: 265). Correspondingly, the constant movement of the quinqui delinquent is simultaneously motivated by poverty and the pleasure principle: his excessive pursuit of sex, drugs, consumerism and money provides both a means of freedom and an escape from his oppressive surroundings. Throughout the films, the delinquent body is presented as one of consumption: many scenes are centred around the characters consuming objects, alcohol and drugs (which, in the gritty depiction of heroin addiction in the films of Eloy de la Iglesia, also end up consuming the teenager). Yet, of course, this freedom can only be obtained through the illegitimate means of petty theft and bank robbery. Thus, the excess and the transgression of the quinqui during these years throw into tension both the visibility and the invisibility of youth. In the films, their pursuit of conspicuous consumption leads inevitably to their arrest, and the subsequent disciplining and control of their bodies in overcrowded youth detention centres and prisons. Their visibility and invisibility therefore do not stand in opposition to each other, but serve as a mutually reinforcing relationship – a relationship which illuminates the social ambivalence of the delinquent. The quinqui genre is thus structured around an economy of excess and discipline. On the one hand, delinquents are symbolically located as a symptom of both the unfettered capitalism of the miracle years, and the new social freedoms that the Transition to democracy brought to bear. Their tragic but inevitable downfall, however, signals Spanish society’s greater need to contain and discipline these excesses: like the classical American gangster, their death brings about both a resolution to the narrative, and a means of assuaging the greater fears and anxieties of the public at the time. The tension between excess and discipline is further reinforced through the use of music. In de la Loma’s films, songs are played non-diegetically over entire scenes and sequences with little or no dialogue. In Perros callejeros 2, the Los Chunguitos song ‘Como yegua brava’ (Like an Untamed Mare) is played over a scene in which El Torete lies semi-naked on the bed with a young woman, as they share a joint together and have sex. Its explicit depiction of sex and drugs – extraneous to the plot in the way typical of the scandal-mongering destape – momentarily freezes the flow of the narrative and gives way to spectacle. Indeed, the use of flattering

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three-point lighting softly illuminates the contours of their bodies, while the actor’s digital watch and various items of flashy gold jewellery underline the spectacle of conspicuous consumption. Claudia Gorbman argues that songs – both diegetic and non-diegetic – can also contribute towards the creation of spectacle in films. In reference to the songs played over Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952), she writes that ‘rather than participating in the action (the film’s) theme songs behave somewhat like a Greek chorus, commenting on a narrative temporarily frozen into spectacle’ (1987: 19). The music in this scene from Perros callejeros 2 fulfils a similar function: the sexual lyrics of the song (‘you’re like an untamed mare that needs a firm hand’) not only comment on, but compete with the accompanying images. Most significantly, the song ends abruptly as two armed policeman force themselves into the apartment, hit El Torete with a gun, and take him away for questioning at the police station. The use of music here foregrounds the ambivalence of the quinqui delinquent, whereby he constitutes an excess to both the narrative and society. The song’s sudden removal symbolises a greater social need to contain this excess: in coinciding with the eruption of police brutality, both the music and the delinquent are disciplined. In silencing the quinqui, his spectacular body of consumption and transgression is rendered invisible. Since the end of this film cycle in 1985, the tower blocks of La Mina and the other worst excesses of chabolismo vertical (homes built on top of one another) have been destroyed, and the delinquent stars El Torete, El Vaquilla and José Antonio Valdelomar, who continued to lead a life of crime after the cycle of films had ended, all died tragically young.8 But while the original geography and delinquents are now finally out of sight, the quinqui film has recently acquired a new-found visibility. Some thirty years or so after their original release, quinqui films have become a cult phenomenon, attracting an ever-growing, committed fan base of younger audiences. Countless websites and blogs pay homage to El Torete and El Vaquilla, and the songs of Los Chichos, Los Chuguitos and Bordón 4.9 The body-hugging flares of the quinqui delinquent have been resurrected nostalgically for their retro aesthetics, while many of the films’ minimal budgets, low production values and lurid depictions of sex, violence and drugs have a strong paracinematic appeal. And the true spirit of the quinqui lives on in the consumption of the films, with many conspicuously available to

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download illegally. Indeed, in recognition of their growing popularity, an exhibition entitled ‘Quinquis de los 80. Cine, Prensa, Calle’ was held in the Centro de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona in 2009, signalling the first major critical engagement with the genre. In exploring the role of the song in the quinqui film, this chapter has explored the crucial ways in which song articulated mobility and political resistance within a geographical context of stasis and exclusion. An examination of the crucial role of the rumba urbana contributes towards our understanding of the complex relationship between sound and space. As we have seen, the music of delinquents did not just re-appropriate or transform space, but actively produce a space of their own, both inside and outside the film text. Examining how this soundscape was produced enables us to tease out the contradictions of the representation of the juvenile delinquent during the Transition to democracy: both visible and invisible, a symptom of excess and discipline, the music of the quinqui is a vivid evocation of a period of tumultuous social, political and geographical change. Notes 1 The word quinqui originates from quinquilleros (tinkers), a derogatory term used to describe mercheros, a group of nomadic people from northern Spain who were known for selling pieces of cheap and discarded metal, and who were ethnically distinct from gitanos (Gypsies). At the time of the films, however, the term quinqui was associated more generally with all aspects of crime, marginality and delinquency, and no longer necessarily referred to this ethnic group. 2 Other quinqui films include Eloy de la Iglesia’s Navajeros (Young Knives,  1980), Colegas (Pals, 1982), and El pico (The Shoot, 1983), Todos me llaman Gato (They All Call Me Gato, Raúl Peña, 1980), Barcelona Sur (Barcelona South, Jordi Cadena, 1981) and Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón’s Maravillas (Marvels, 1980), which was more experimental in style. 3 Perros callejeros was seen in the cinemas by 1,900,000 viewers, and made 170 million pesetas at the box office (‘Delincuentes actores’, 1979: 119). 4 The destape refers to the era of social permissiveness and new-found freedom of expression which emerged after the death of General Franco in 1975 and the relaxation of censorship in 1977. 5 In Yo, El Vaquilla, more than thirty-five cars were destroyed during the shooting of the car chases (El Correo Catalan, 1985).

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6 For more detailed analysis of the representation of landscape in the film, see Whittaker (2008). 7 Like Italian cinema, Spain has traditionally used post-synchronised sound. Saura’s film El jardín de las delicias (The Garden of Delights, 1970), also produced by Elías Querejeta, was the first Spanish film to use direct sound. 8 El Torete and El Vaquilla died of Aids-related illnesses in 1991 and 2003 respectively, while José Antonio Valdelomar died of a heroin overdose while in prison in 1992. 9 See for instance, http://toreteyvaquilla.tusblog.com/Quinquis-b16/79– canciones-kinkis-b16–p3.htm (accessed 22 December 2010) and www. myspace.com/elvaquilla (accessed 22 December 2010).

References Carr, Raymond (1980), Modern Spain 1875–1980, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castro, Antón (2003), ‘Interview with Carlos Saura’, in Linda M. Willem, Carlos Saura: Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 52–64. Chion, Michel (1994), Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press. Cuesta, Mary (2010), ‘Los quinquis del barrio’, in J. Ramoneda (ed.), Quinquis dels 80: Cinema, Premsa I Carrer, Barcelona: CCCB i Direcció de Comunicació de la Diputació de Barcelona, 185–95. ‘Delincuentes actores’ (1979), Cambio 16 (4 November), 119. El Correo Catalan (1985), ‘Próximo estreno de “Yo, El Vaquilla” ’, El Correo Catalan (17 August), n.p. El País (1986), ‘Los olvidados’, El País (4 April), n.p. Gómez, J. M. (1985), ‘Los Chichos cantan al ‘Vaquilla’ “porque es de los nuestros” ’, Tiempo (Madrid) (24 November), n.p. Gorbman, Claudia (1988), Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Harrison, Joseph (1985), The Spanish Economy in the Twentieth Century, London: Croom Helm. Hebdige, Dick (1979), Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Methuen. Hernando Sanz, Felipe (2001), Espacio y delincuencia, Madrid: Consejo Económico y Social. Highmore, Ben (2002), The Everyday Life Reader, London: Routledge. Inglis, Ian (2003), ‘Introduction: popular music and film’, in Ian Inglis (ed.), Popular Music and Film, London: Wallflower Press, 1–7. Jazeel, Tariq (2005), ‘The world is sound? Geography, musicology and British-Asian soundscapes’, Area 37, 233–41.

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Lefebvre, Henri (1991), The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, Doreen (1998), ‘The spatial construction of youth cultures’, in T. Skelton and G. Valentine (eds), Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, London: Routledge, 121–9. Peña, Rosa and Valderrama, Juan (2005), Nosotros los Chichos, Barcelona: Ediciones B. Sánchez Vidal, Agustín (1988), El cine de Carlos Saura, Zaragoza: Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada. Shubert, Adrian (1990), A Social History of Modern Spain, London: Unwin Hyman. Vernallis, Carol (2004), Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context, New York: Columbia University Press. Washabaugh, William (1996), Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Popular Culture, Oxford: Berg. Whittaker, Tom (2008), ‘No man’s land: transitional space and time in Carlos Saura’s Deprisa, deprisa’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 85: 5, 679–94.

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Song-shaped cinema: the performance of Gypsy and Basque songs in relation to film form Rob Stone A porcelain figurine of a ballerina, a bombastic symphony marking a decisive battle, and a charcoal sketch of an overcast landscape all express the fusion of form and content that creates or adds to the significance of art. Likewise on film the expression of songs, rather than their mere representation, requires empathetic technique and results in an affined film ‘shape’ that both contains and communicates meaning. This chapter analyses the influence of the cantaor, the singer of cante jondo (flamenco deep song) on films about flamenco, specifically Sevillanas (Carlos Saura, 1992) and Flamenco (Carlos Saura, 1995), and it examines the influence of the bertsolari, the improvising Basque poet, on a peculiarly Basque tradition of composition that led to the unique collage of the full-length documentaries Ama Lur (Motherland, Néstor Basterretxea and Fernando Larruquert, 1968) and La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra (Basque Ball, Julio Medem, 2003). The songs are not merely performed in these films and they do not only punctuate the narrative; rather, they influence the rhythm, structure, tone and time (or duration) of the films to such an extent that the shape of the films must be recognised as an aesthetic response to the ‘events’ of the songs themselves. In addition to analysing the performance systems of the cantaor and the bertsolari, this chapter explores the empathetic relationship between film and music as art forms that, perhaps uniquely, have the ability to express a sense of the variable duration of time. It also applies theories of carnival to the performance of songs in order to appreciate how those who see themselves as denied a voice and marginalised (such as some Gypsies and Basques) can exist, at least in these song-shaped films, in a different time and space from that of the country, Spain, that has arguably oppressed them.

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Certain filmmakers have despaired of their chosen medium’s similarities to literature, theatre and photography. ‘What is the point of this equivalence?’ asked François Truffaut in his essay that kick-started the French New Wave and an entirely novel way of appreciating and making films (2000: 59; emphasis in original). Most films are still constructed with the commercially minded aim of efficiently delivering resolutions to linear narratives. However, what matters in the consideration of song-shaped cinema is not narrative but this capability film shares only with music to communicate a protean perception of time. This understanding of the construction of film sense beyond the constraints of narrative rejects traditional theories of montage, whereby two images of separate content are juxtaposed to create a third, supposedly higher meaning. Instead, what is explored is the potential for expression of an evolving sense of time by means of an accumulative collage of images and sounds in which meaninglessness is avoided by the association of form with content. As shown here, Sevillanas, Flamenco, Ama Lur and La pelota vasca each transcend mere experimentation with form and indicate a highly responsive deployment of filmmaking techniques that, when added to the dismissal of linear narrative, result in films that are vehicles for subversive, even anarchic thought that provide a model for song-shaped cinema. Singing the past: the cantaor Francoist cinema exhibited flamenco in a number of folkloric musicals somewhat derogatively termed españoladas and andaluzadas,1 but these had seldom allowed for the expression of any genuine folk (or Gypsy) identity because their narrative resolutions mostly propagated a morality and doctrine that was obeisant to the Church-backed dictatorship (1939–75). In opposition, Carlos Saura’s dense, metaphorical films of the 1960s and early 1970s, such as La caza (The Hunt, 1965), La prima Angélica (Cousin Angelica, 1974) and Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens, 1975) had sought the faint but resolute pulse of individualised opposition to Franco. Yet, following Spain’s transition to democracy, Saura made a series of films that centred on the culture of flamenco – Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding, 1981), Carmen (1983) and El amor brujo (Love, the Magician, aka. A Love Bewitched, 1986) – that accords with

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Robert Stam’s theory that ‘music is closely tied to communitarian culture and “structures of feeling” ’ (2000: 222). Bodas de sangre examines the legacies of dissidence and submission in Antonio Gades’s flamenco dance company as it performs a dramatic but wordless adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s play, while the interweaving of reality and fantasy in the creation of a revisionist flamenco ballet version of Carmen evokes a bitter and ironic examination of the evolution of gender roles in relation to myths of ‘Spanishness’. Similarly, the tableau of Gypsy folklore that is displayed and deconstructed in El amor brujo seemingly concludes Saura’s investigation into the complex interaction of inauthentic traditions with genuine innovation. Taken together, these films result in a so-called ‘flamenco trilogy’ that explores and complicates the multi-layered affectivity that goes into structuring the ‘feeling’ of communities such as those of dance companies and Gypsies and, moreover, makes any single narrative of post-Franco ‘Spanishness’ impossible. These films also constituted Saura’s attempt to assuage his own potential irrelevance in the liberal environment of post-dictatorship Spain by purposefully secluding himself within the film/dance studio in order to stimulate his creativity in response to selfimposed limitations. Consequently, what distinguishes these films and the later Sevillanas and Flamenco – as well as Tango (Carlos Saura, 1998)2 and Fados (Carlos Saura, 2007) – is their experimentation with the relationship of the rhythm of the numbers to that of the editing and the movement of the camera. Moreover, because Sevillanas and Flamenco dismiss narrative entirely in favour of an exclusive focus on the performances, the truth of flamenco (and so the identity of its performers) is discovered intact in the more authentic of the musical numbers. Flamenco and the Gypsies are inscribed in the discourse of each other, within which authenticity is not due to any hackneyed Orientalist notion of their lack of reflexivity being a product of their proximity to nature and tradition. Rather, the performances in which flamenco and ‘Gypsiness’ combine are highly reflexive in their resistance to the dominant culture. Thus, they fit well with the cinema of Saura, a non-Gypsy, non-singing filmmaker, because their subversive strategies overlap with those of his films with the result that their objectives are conjoined in expression of a shared marginalisation from the world beyond the films that is rendered in terms of unity within them.

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Free from the restrictions of story-telling and the inhibitions of generic conventions, these films resemble collages of songs and dances built to reclaim and redefine the time and space that would normally be subject to narrative. In effect, therefore, the authentic, associative meaning of the performances is liberated to the extent that flamenco is re-territorialised by many of the greatest cantaores, who also thereby rescue the very subject of flamenco on film from an ignoble, servile past. Consequently, what is celebrated in Sevillanas and Flamenco is the effort of contemporary performers of flamenco (and their audience) to reclaim its (and their) heritage from a history of oppression and posit a new, pluralist identity for democratic Spain instead. When possessed by the particular Gypsy muse called duende, the cantaor operates as a seer within a complex performance system that sees him draw on a repertory of collective thought in order to invoke mythical resonance in his cante. Signs and symbols that express the existential anguish of the disenfranchised are thus deployed by the cantaor, who typically assumes the protagonism of songs telling of frustration and desperation that, in turn, give rise to the characteristic howls and cries of an authentic performance. Instead of serving the extrinsic story of an imposed narrative, the cantaores in Sevillanas and Flamenco are liberated to communicate this intrinsic response to a hostile universe. Their songs thus simultaneously reclaim and re-shape the temporal and spatial realm or territory previously demarcated for flamenco and its performers in films that were subject to the propagandist narratives of Francoist nationhood. In parallel with this dismissal of narrative, moreover, Sevillanas and Flamenco respond to the modernist re-imagining of time that rejected the intellectual imposition of any manmade calibrations and encouraged an intuitive sense of it instead. In contrast with the intellect, which insists ‘conveniently only on fixed points’ (Bergson, 1992: 15), intuition denotes an ability to find reality in the unfettered flow of life. When attuned to this flow, time seems infinite, incomplete and instantaneous, with everything subject to it caught up in what Bergson considered ‘a creative evolution’ that maintains the ‘perpetual creation of possibility’ (1992: 21). Consequently, any expression of time on film that is intuitively performed and received, being subject to change and transition, may thus contribute to opposing the rigid, servile, intellectual concept of time that is trafficked in linear narratives.

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Like flamenco, time too is constantly evolving and may thus be celebrated for its similar ‘unceasing creation’ (Bergson, 1992: 18). This evolution is apparent in what Gilles Deleuze termed the timeimage, which is identified in contrast with the movement-image (see Deleuze, 2005a; 2005b). The movement-image is one that advances the narrative, simultaneously subjugating any sense of ‘intuitive’ time to its ‘intellectual’ cause of reaching a conclusion by means of a succession of movement-images. A time-image, on the other hand, is one that digresses from narrative and allows time to evolve naturally, whereby it is experienced by the protagonists of the film, whose feelings of alienation may be perceived by the audience intuitively sensing the same thing. In this, the communicative quality of the time-image is markedly similar in function to that of the cantaores in Sevillanas and Flamenco, whose purposeful displacement from narrative fuels their characteristic expression of dislocation. Form and content thus fuse in the time-images of singing cantaores to such an extent that the meaning of their songs is heightened rather than, as previously, elided on film. Crucially, whereas time is subject to the movement-image, the time-image (and so the cinematic apparatus and its audience) is entirely subject to time; that is, the duration of the thing that is filmed and the simultaneous duration of the shot. The performances in Sevillanas and Flamenco must therefore be understood as not merely occurring in a cinematic space but in a temporalised one. This is so because the time-image is determined by the expression of the time of the filmed event (rather than its representation in editing) and thus it may be argued that shots that respond exclusively to the rhythm of an intuitive performance of flamenco deep song may, by being equal to the event that is filmed, shape the form of the films accordingly. Precisely because genuine flamenco is, like time, in constant evolution, being unique, commutative and defined by its own infinite potential for change, so the shots determined by the rhythm of successive performances make up the affined time or ‘rhythm’ of the entire film. In viewing the sequential performances in Sevillanas or Flamenco, ‘we are, then, passing along different events, in accordance with an explicit time or a form of succession which entails that a variety of things fill the present one after another’ (Deleuze, 2005b: 97). Free from narrative, the performances or ‘events’ of the songs themselves shape the film, which therefore expresses only what the performances do.

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The ambition of the performers of authentic flamenco seen in these films is similarly organic, constantly developing and seeking new forms and means of expression. In order to convey this in relation to the particular sense of time expressed in intuitive performance, everything to do with Sevillanas and Flamenco, from the musicians, singers and dancers to the deployment of the cinematic apparatus, is subject to, or shaped by the rhythms that are intuitively expressed by the performers. And because ‘non-narrative films for the most part are distinguished from “real” films by their social purpose and by their content’ (Metz, 1972: 169), so the blunt sequencing of performances in Sevillanas and Flamenco serves the cause of purposeful, socio-political expression that is the celebration of authentic flamenco culture. Doing away with the restrictions of narrative also tallies with the theories of Siegfried Kracauer, who claimed that ‘practically all films following the lines of a theatrical story evolve narratives whose significance overshadows that of the raw material used for their implementation’ (1972: 17). Thus, Saura discards narrative in order to seek the social purpose that is present in the raw material, whereby the rhythm of the performances not only rescues flamenco from narrative, it also re-territorialises it away from ‘Spanishness’ towards authentic ‘Gypsiness’. Sevillanas begins with figures silhouetted on a diaphanous screen, strolling as if at a country fair, primping and gossiping as they practise a few dance moves and hand movements. However, this apparently aimless scene-setting acquires meaning with reference to the Russian theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin, who celebrated the public square as the venue of carnival, which he defined as the popular festival of the folk that supplanted all official discourse. For Bakhtin, as for Saura, it would seem, this communal celebration creates its own intuitive time, for ‘time is collective, that is, it is differentiated and measured only by the events of collective life; everything that exists in this time exists solely for the collective’ (Bakhtin, 2006: 206: emphasis in original). Bakhtin thus posits carnival as a political act and, correlatively, although he was writing in and about the Russia of the 1920s, his concern for the folk culture that was under threat from totalitarianism has its echo in Saura’s celebration of genuine flamenco culture in opposition to Francoism and its legacy. In addition, the question of what Bakhtin termed ‘the grotesque’ in relation to its expression during carnival may also be meaningfully incorporated into the corollary because certain performances,

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8 The cantaor Agujeta sings ‘¡Qué locura!’ (What Madness!) in Flamenco (1995) dir. Carlos Saura, prod. Canal+ España, Juan Lebrón Producciones, Junta de Andalucía, RTVA Radio Television de Andalucia, Sociedad General de Autores, Sogepaq.

such as those of the cantaor Agujeta in Flamenco, who sings the martinete3 ‘¡Qué locura!’ (What Madness!) with grimacing, pained expressions that are magnified by Saura’s extreme close-ups, attest to the authenticity that warrants (with great respect) the label of grotesque realism. Bakhtin’s observation that ‘during the classic period the grotesque did not die but was expelled from the sphere of official art to live and develop in certain “low” non-classic areas’ (1984: 30–1) may thus be seen to correspond to the largely clandestine evolution of authentic flamenco during the dictatorship, which is so fiercely expressed in the agonised performances of Moneo, Agujeta and others. Consequently, when institutionalised racism against the Gypsies in Spain is also taken into account, it is apparent that the identification of the Gypsies as grotesque in pre- and, to some extent, post-Franco Spain, is something that Saura seeks to transform into a badge of pride for Gypsies like these, whose authenticity is apparent in their performance of their genuinely grotesque cante jondo. Furthermore, Bakhtin maintains that carnival has a shaping effect on language because it is associated with collectivism, Socialism, instinct and the spontaneous creativity of the people

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and, consequently, its expression of intuition duly opposes official language and culture. Thus, these uninhibited, instinctive performances constitute oppositional, even revolutionary acts. What is grotesque about the performances in Sevillanas and Flamenco (in which even the overt sensuality of the farruca4 danced by Joaquín Cortés might strike the prudish as grotesque) is therefore posited ironically as a deliberate affront to the conformist propriety of a history and a contemporary society that retains some relation to the Church-backed rule of Francoism. Just by performing on screen, the protagonists of these films celebrate the liberation of the once-oppressed grotesqueness of genuine flamenco from the kind of subjugation that is equivalent to the imposition of narratives. Instead of the closed, single, linear, conventional texts of official culture that disallow any and all independent interpretations based on divergent intuition, Bakhtin duly celebrates the notion of a ‘dialogic text’ that is constantly reworked by the performers and the audience, who are empowered to make the text their own. Flamenco and Sevillanas may therefore also be understood as dialogic texts that are both about, and indicative of, the true evolution of flamenco, for in their fusion of form and content they effectively revise and re-territorialise recent Spanish history. Crucially, it is unclear whether the folk who fill the carnival space at the beginning of Sevillanas (as well as those who crowd onto the set at the start of Flamenco) are the performers or the audience. This ambiguity is vital to the oppositional rhetoric of the films because it fulfils what Jane Feuer describes as ‘the criteria of “folk” qualities [that] the film musical wishes to retain: the direct mode of presentation, the amateur quality, spontaneity and informality’ (1993: 54). Thereafter, the authenticity and relevance of the performance/ language system of flamenco song is continually evidenced in the way the films express the styles, rhythms and performances that contribute to the dialogic work, with the result that the temporalised spaces of the films must also be understood in terms of their social function. As described by Henri Lefebvre, the village square (the typical venue of carnival) is a space that is socially produced and therefore inherently political in nature, because the resistance that is expressed in this ‘lived-in’ space is ‘linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life’ (1991: 33). Likewise, this area of performance is a social space that is defined by perception, liable

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to be valued, and therefore ‘also serves as a tool of thought and of action’ (Lefevbre, 1991: 26). In other words, the performers are all engaged in a kind of revolution via the re-territorialisation of authentic flamenco via time-images that, in turn, respond to the intuitive rhythms that simultaneously shape the film. Deleuze argues that films based on time-images do not represent an external reality but a means of arranging and expressing time as something incomplete, discontinuous and instantaneous. Following Deleuze, the expression of time in the cinema must oppose any linear narrative representation of such hegemonic causes as nationhood, and foster reflection, dissent, opposition and eventual re-territorialisation instead. Consequently, after Deleuze, film must be appreciated as event rather than representation (see Stam, 2000: 256–62), which is exactly what informs Saura’s filming of performances in Sevillanas and Flamenco. By allowing the performance of each song to evolve ‘before our eyes’, the performers, performances and the audience are empowered to ignore all pressures to conform because ‘matter and movement are imbued with and inseparable from consciousness’ (Stam, 2000: 258). In other words, it is the rhythm of the song and its determining effect upon a shared, intuitively perceived sense of time that results in the film expressing nothing but its own event. In effect, therefore, Sevillanas and Flamenco reveal themselves as films that feature time-images in a manner similar to ‘certain marginal, or marginalised cinemas [of] those populations within a nation that constantly question its pedagogical narrative of belonging’ (Martin-Jones, 2006: 46). The previously dissident and persistently oppositional cinema of Saura thus fuses with the ethos and practice of flamenco as the expression of a marginalised folk because the collage of performers defined by their own rhythm is effectively made up of time-images in which they re-sing the palimpsestic past, thereby erasing previous narratives and, moreover, suggesting resistance to any imposed myths of Gypsy and/or Spanish national identity. Here is authentic flamenco, even to the extent that its authenticity rejects ‘Spanishness’. Like Sevillanas, Flamenco constitutes both a festival of tradition and a carnival of innovation. Its abruptly sequential series of performances or ‘events’ brokers no linear thread of any sort besides the changing illumination on massive backdrops and mirrors that suggests the vague passage of time from dusk till dawn. As in Sevillanas, the performers arrive with a sense of occasion, and the

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arena is transformed into a space in which song-styles such as the siguiriya,5 the martinete and the petenera6 express the characteristic agonies and ecstasies that are often recognised in performance as the dual existential responses of the Gypsy cantaor to a marginalised existence. However, there is also clear optimism in the evolution and adaptation of the form with the inclusion of Latin American and contemporary pop influences as well as in the maintenance of traditional Moorish Arabic song styles, all of which contribute to the unselfish transmission of knowledge through performance. Moreover, in conflating the performers with their audience, which is typical of authentic cante flamenco in which the cantaor is goaded and guided by the collaborative jaleo (cries and utterances) of the crowd, Flamenco not only revives Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival but connects this with a concept put forward by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Letter to M. D’Alembert of 1758: Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square. Gather the people together and you will have a festival. Do better still: make the spectators themselves the objects of the spectacle; make them into actors so that each sees and loves his own image in the others and thus all will be better united. (1960: 126)

Such a spectacle served as ‘a model – a microcosm – of harmonious democracy’ (von Geldern, 1993: 34). Nevertheless, Jacques Derrida took Rousseau’s notion to warn of ‘the replacement of theatrical representations with public festivals lacking all exhibition and spectacle, festivals without “anything to see” ’ (2001: 309). Indeed, the risk of authentic cante flamenco being diluted remains in contemporary Spain, where bland, commercial pop stylings have arguably done more damage than the dictatorship, not least because, as for Saura, the absence of constraints may fail to inspire the creativity of its authentic performers. Nevertheless, in this transition from a space concentrated on the stake to one focused on people, ‘the transfer of political power from an absolute centre to a decentred democracy’ (Hilton, 1987: 17) invites a final comparison with Spain’s political Transition of the 1970s. Thus there is a correspondent new liberty of expression in Sevillanas and Flamenco that combines their director’s enduring social concerns with the rejuvenative essence of genuine cante. That is to say, the fusion of the medium and the message in these song-shaped films allows Saura

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to restate his opposition to Francoism in tune with Gypsy cantaores who so determinedly re-sing the past.

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Singing the future: the bertsolari In comparison with the flamenco cantaor, the performance of the Basque bertsolari (verse-maker) is also based on improvisation and therefore it too incorporates a malleable sense of time that has the potential to ‘shape’ film. Like the cantaor, the bertsolari expresses a complex, multi-layered sense of identity in a performance in which composition and recitation are simultaneous. As Samuel G. Armistead notes, this is ‘a widely known custom in many areas of the Hispanic world and, in some cases, it has vigorously survived even down to the present day’ (2005: 30). Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultural influences are evident in the performance of the bertsolari, while verbal duelling in verse form is a common element of Spanish plays since the early 1500s and endures in Hispanic rap. Yet, whereas the memorisation of verses is common practice, it is the competitive verse of performers who spar with improvised rhymes and poetic rhetoric that signals the oppositional form of the authentic performance of bertsolariak (verse-makers). Their extemporised bertso (verse) is often combative and satirical, although even the most aggressive duelling is a collaborative effort, much like the cantaor and the guitarist, who goad each other on. Traditions of orally improvised poetry are common in many parts of Spanish America, Portugal, Brazil and Peninsular Spain too, but the bertsolari, the Basque bard, occupies a distinctive role in the evolution and survival of Basque culture because, although the performance of a bertsolari demonstrates individuality, it is always in relation to the collective tradition. Thus the bertsolari was, in effect, charged by his community with remembering and reminding it of the otherwise forbidden Basque language of Euskara during the decades of Franco’s dictatorship, when the government tried to suppress Basque nationalism because of the support shown by Basques (in areas other than Álava and Navarre) to the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Apart from evidently religious traditions, cultural activities in the Basque country during the dictatorship were reduced to ostensibly ‘quaint’ customs such as the singing of the bertsolariak, who still performed at festivals that corresponded to Bakhtin’s concept of

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the carnival because theirs was a subversive celebration of collective identity that opposed any official discourse. To the extent that the bertsolari, ‘by always singing in Euskara, maintained a loyal support throughout the smallest villages and towns of the Basque valleys’ (Trapero, 2005: 55), the Basque language may not otherwise have survived. The bertsolari is a minstrel whose song is based on the internal rhythm of the verse form called the kopla zaharrak. To construct a bertso he marries song, rhyme and meter, adding essential rhetoric and poetry as he performs. He mostly sings without accompaniment but with an immense variety of commonly known melodies at his disposition, and such is the shared knowledge of these melodies that an audience may join in when he characteristically repeats his final kopla, having committed the words to memory on first hearing the made-up verse. The bertsolari is a kind of seer, whose spontaneity follows inherited thought patterns traced by previous generations, with the result that tradition is its own response to the repression of Basque culture. However, although this tradition is currently flourishing in the climate of self-determination that fills stadiums with concerts and competitions of bertsolariak, it is at least debatable, as John Zemke indicates, ‘whether the contemporary Basque audience views the improvisational content and delivery of the bertsolaritza as a prophetic mode of speech’ (2005: 84). That is to say, in accordance with Derrida’s caveat, the bertsolari may endure but as Antonio Zavala remarks, ‘what was once life has now become spectacle’ (2005: 24). Nevertheless, the influence of the bertsolari on the structuring and shape of a key Basque film of the dictatorship – Ama Lur – and the influence of this work on ‘the most controversial Spanish film in decades’ (Gibbons, 2003) – La pelota vasca – certainly merit analysis. The oppositional form of the performance of the bertsolari is bound to the incorporation of contemporary social issues in the verses, although these may be alluded to through symbolism rather than related directly. Statements of policy and attitude may also be rendered metaphorically, but, as a vehicle for views on social and political developments, ‘the bertsolari himself has often been equated with Basque patriotism’ (White, 2001: 19). However, it is not the lyric content transposed to film that is the concern of this chapter but, as with flamenco deep song, it is the form that fuses with this content to create meaning. A bertsolari spouting

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improvised verse in Euskara tends to perform a role that could be an archetype, an actual person, object or thing, and he sings at a relatively slow tempo in short verses. The effect is of a medium, who acts as conduit for the thoughts of the character. The effect is also rather staccato, for the language of Euskara has sharp-sounding consonants, but it is also often melancholic and meditative as lines of verse are left hanging while the performer breathes and composes the next. Crucially, the bertsolari composes backwards from the end of his verse to the beginning, singing as he does so. That is to say, he decides on the meaning to be expressed and then begins singing with the aim of reaching it. His singing may sound monotonous at first as he plots the verse as he sings it, but the manipulation of melody and rhyme by bertsolariak is such that any designated metric structure may yield to ‘their ingenuity and speed of response, and the originality of their thoughts, to such an extent that the successful bertsolari is also, in many ways, an ideologue or an intellectual leader of the Basque people’ (Trapero, 2005: 56). What is notable about the mental dexterity of the best performers is that they do not repeat anything from memory, but draw instead from a communal tradition. When prompted by a topic, the bertsolari decides on a meaning as end-point and then begins building the verses (most often ten, but possibly more). Rhyme and melody respond to the topic, the audience and often the other performer with whom he may be competing. Thus it is possible that a bertsolari performing during the Francoist era could imagine the end of the dictatorship as his topic and then mark or plot the way to freedom in his prophet-like incantation. The audience, meanwhile, may recognise the structure but does not know the verse, and therefore looks to the bertsolari to add meaning or ‘shape’ to a shared knowledge, which is essential to the identity of their community, such as a belief in the resurgence of the Basque Country. As Zemke concludes: It is in this sense, then, that Basque verbal contest may be seen as a performance of Basque identity, with ample consideration of the ‘emergent’ quality of performance, and that the bertsolariak may be regarded as seers, spokespersons, for a unique social collective. (Zemke, 2005: 93)

The transposition of the structure of the ‘event’ of the versifying to film would suggest that the visual images or shots function as

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the words while the editing provides equivalency with the rhythm, rhyme and melody. If this were achieved, an audience able to recognise the affinity of the verse form with the rhythm of the editing would thereby be empowered to decipher the images in a manner akin to their understanding of the bertsolari’s song. This, to answer Truffaut, is the vital point of equivalence. As might be expected, the bertsolariak were at the forefront of the cultural resistance to the dictatorship that was identified with Basque nationalism. Despite the prohibition of Euskara, the continued tolerance of the bertsolari allowed many Basques to imagine a role for the language in the future of the Basque country, to the extent that the new Basque song movement of the 1960s and 1970s prompted a respondent public celebration of Basque culture. This too was tolerated by the centralised Spanish government, which even signalled this erstwhile defiance as an indication of the softening of Fascism in order to attract foreign investment and tourists to Spain. This simmering creativity had already been ignited by the publication in 1963 of a treatise by the sculptor Jorge de Oteiza entitled Quousque tandem. . .! (How long will you abuse our patience!)7 in which he posits an aesthetic interpretation of the Basque soul founded upon a comparative analysis of the synergetic evolution of language and the cultural expression of the collective: I write backwards. I look ahead, but I’m constantly retreating, moving back. In this way the panorama of our spiritual world is always expanding before me, and our particular cultural situation (I mean that of our country) also becomes clearer and clearer. [. . .] First, I finished the book, and now I’m at the beginning. (Oteiza, 2003: 288)

Writing backwards while looking ahead, and finishing the book before beginning it, clearly indicates Oteiza’s channelling of the influence of the performance system of the bertsolari into his work. Quousque tandem. . .! subsequently led the sculptor and painter Néstor Basterretxea and the filmmaker and musician Fernando Larruquert to transpose the ethos and practice of the bertsolari to the making of a short film entitled Pelotari (Basque Ball Player, 1963). A portrait of the eponymous sportsman, the player of Basque ball, this eleven-minute film incorporates jump cuts, the repetition of shots, canted camera angles and sombre, reflective fades to black, which all suggest the visual equivalency of an improvised verse on the same subject.

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Basterretxea and Larruquert followed Pelotari with Alquézar, retablo de pasión (Alquézar, Tableau of Passion, 1964), a short film on the Holy Week processions in the town of Alquézar, and thereafter devised a full-length feature that would be compiled from several such short films. Initially titled Euskalherria (Land of the Basque Speakers), this would evolve into Ama Lur (Motherland, 1968).8 This is a collage of images and sounds lasting 103 minutes that expresses an evolving sense of the Basque country, which it achieves via a structure that corresponds to that of the ‘event’ of the versifying of the bertsolari. As Larruquert has explained, in searching for a film language that was particular to the Basque country, he and Basterretxea approximated that of the bertsolari: I’ve paid a lot of attention to the mental structure of the bertsolari. I remember talking to [the bertsolari] Xalbador about the way I approached my documentaries. The first thing I do is ask myself, how does it end? Then I film the material. Once I’ve established how it’s going to end I think about how to begin the rest. ‘And what do you think we do?’ Xalbador asked me. ‘We do the same thing. I ask myself how the verse will end, what am I going to say at the end?; then, I start singing and all the rest comes of its own accord.’ (cited in Roldán Larreta, 1999: 21)

Ama Lur ends with a cut to black and the sound of Gora Euskadi Askatasuna (Long live the free Basque homeland) being spelled out in Morse code. Consequently, the entire film aspires to an improvised collage based on the association of images and sounds that leads to this coded though rousing conclusion. Images of landscapes, festivals, customs and traditions collected by the filmmakers over two years of travelling around the Basque country are connected via associative links that function like synaptic impulses. Smoke from a bonfire is matched with clouds, for example, votive candles are cut to a Holy Week procession, dancers in one village festival inspire a cut to performers in another, and so on. As analysed elsewhere, the accumulative effect is that of a mnemonic, an aide-memoire to remembering what the Basque country once was in order to recreate it after the dictatorship (see Stone, 2010). However, the notion that the film is shaped by the filmmakers’ imitation of the bertsolari requires further consideration and, indeed, comparative analysis with the films of Carlos Saura. As with the films about flamenco, the expression of time on film

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in Ama Lur is intuitive, subject to flux and transition. Instead of the imagery fitting the running time, the film lasts for as long as the association of imagery requires. In this fluid sense of Basqueness, Ama Lur thus opposes the rigid, servile, intellectual concept of time that is trafficked in narratives subject to oppressive notions of nationhood as, for almost two hours, the images ebb and flow by association until the preconceived conclusion of liberty for the Basque homeland is reached. The eternal becoming that Bergson promulgated is thus positioned as a new beginning. Moreover, because Ama Lur is not so much a montage of movement-images of customs and traditions but a collage of time-images of folk festivals, so the relevance of the carnival-grotesque emerges in order ‘to consecrate inventive freedom’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 34). Ultimately, it is this attempt at a new film language that signals Ama Lur as a dialogic work whose carnival spirit ‘offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world . . . and to enter a completely new order of things’ (ibid.) that, it is suggested, corresponds to that of post-dictatorship Spain. Nevertheless, the new order of things that might have been expected from Spain’s transition to democracy following the death of Franco in 1975, and the Statute of Autonomy for the Basque Country declared in 1979, has rarely been exempt from demonstrations and campaigns for greater independence, some of them violent. However, the dialogic nature of Ama Lur is such that its influence extends to the post-Franco period and to the documentary La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra, directed by Julio Medem in 2003. Intended as a preparatory piece of research that would inform the production of a fictional film (as yet unrealised) entitled Aitor,9 La pelota vasca grew from the filmmaker’s personal homework project into a highly controversial feature-length film that provoked public demonstrations and debate in the media throughout and beyond Spain. Like Basterretxea and Larruquert before him, Medem travelled the Basque country shooting landscapes and interviewing over one hundred people from all sides of the debate over Basque identity, autonomy and self-determination, including politicians, journalists, campaigners and relatives of the injured and incarcerated. Thereafter, in attempting to fashion a structure for the debate on film he reviewed Ama Lur and, in addition to including excerpts from that film in some of his more florid collages of Basque sports, customs and events, he also revived the dialogue

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with the bertsolari as an influence on film form by responding to the legacy of Ama Lur. Thus, in imitation of, and in dialogue with both Ama Lur and the bertsolari, Medem constructed La pelota vasca as a film whose aim was symmetry and, eventually, a resolution to the debate about the Basque country that it engendered. Working backwards from that probably naive ambition to see an end to the conflict over the Basque country, Medem attempted to match speakers with opposite views and experiences. Politicians interviewed separately thus appear to debate with each other, while opposing views are matched in imitation of the tradition of duelling bertsolari. Occasionally, the gambit is problematic because the considerations of victimhood equating serious injury and bereavement with incarceration and consequent estrangement are unbalanced. However, at least in imagining the end of the Basque conflict as his topic and ‘rhyming’ the interviews towards that end, Medem subscribed to a shaping of film that corresponds to the continuation of a cinematic tradition based on imitation of the bertsolari, whose singing towards the resolution provided by an imagined future is a strategy aimed at resolving the otherwise overwhelming problem of deciding just where to start. Singing the present A song-shaped cinema, in which the aural and visual content of a film is shaped by the performance system of a singer, has a unifying aim and process. The cantaor and the bertsolari both improvise, but this is not the result of any inability to remember or plan; rather, the performers, who are charged with remembering and disseminating the cultural identity of their community, race or nation, claim that their performances are a way of life, one that signifies its perpetual evolution. Thus these singer-seers perform in an eternal present moment of becoming in which they revise both the past and the future in their song. The following is an example of a deep song siguiriya: A la muerte yamo, / no quiere bení; / que hasta la muerte tiene, / compañera, lástima de mí (I call to Death, / but it does not want to come; / even death has, / my friend, pity for me). (Machado y Álvarez, 1985: 45)

And the following is a bertso:

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Uros bizitzeko, Jeinkoa / emadazu behar guzia. / Hortarik hemen kentzen badazu, / iduki zazu zeria (In order to live happily, dear God, / give me everything that I need / and if you take that away from me, / you can keep your Heaven). (Mallea-Olaetxe, 2005: 242)

Although the grief-laden anguish of the cantaor is far more tormented than the lyrical humour of the bertsolari, both make the claim in, and by, performance that their relationship to their environment, however antagonistic, may be resolved dialectically. Whether communicating with Death or with God, both the incantation of the Gypsies and that of the Basques effect a coded, oppositional manifestation of a cultural heritage that has resisted oppression and signalled instead a surviving, even evolving, sense of identity in time-wary performances and the song-shaped films that they inspire. Notes 1 Kathleen Vernon defines the españolada as a ‘filmic hybrid genre of romantic comedy and/or melodrama, incorporating regional, primarily Andalusian song and dance’ (1999: 249). An andaluzada is similar, but more typical of the region of Andalusia. 2 See Chapter 12 for analysis of Tango. 3 The martinete is a form of cante jondo or flamenco deep song that was traditionally sung in a forge according to the beat of clanging hammers. 4 The farruca is a rather static and slow form that reveals some influence of the tango on flamenco. 5 The siguiriya is the classic, deep (jondo), solemn, expressive form of flamenco song. A typical performance incorporates anguished wailing and a great deal of intense feeling. 6 The petenera is a flamenco song style that is commonly associated with the plaintive cries of a woman, although there are persuasive theories affirming that it originates in the songs of Sephardic Jews. Its lyrics are in stanzas of four lines. 7 ‘Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?’ is the full Latin phrase from a speech given by Marcus Tullius Cicero, the statesman and lawyer of Ancient Rome, against his rival Catilina. 8 Ama Lur was financed by the registration of its production as a public limited company that raised 4,900,000 pesetas from 2,200 shareholders. 9 Aitor is the name of an ancestral, patriarchal figure created by Agosti Xaho (1811–48), a Romantic Basque author whose The Legend of Aitor (1845) was intended as a national creation myth. It has become a common first name of Basque males and is commonly taken to mean ‘good father’.

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References Armistead, Samuel G. (2005), ‘Improvised poetry in the Hispanic tradition’, in Samuel G. Armistead and Joseba Zulaika (eds), Voicing the Moment: Improvised Oral Poetry and Basque Tradition, Reno: Center for Basque Studies Conference Papers Series 3, University of Nevada, Reno, 29–43. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1984), Rabelais and His World (trans. Hélène Iswolsky), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (2006), ‘Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel: notes towards a historical poetics’, in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist), Austin: University of Texas Press, 84–258. Bergson, Henri (1992), ‘Introduction 1’, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, New York: Citadel Press, 11–29. Deleuze, Gilles (2005a), Cinema 1, London: Continuum Impacts. Deleuze, Gilles (2005b), Cinema 2, London: Continuum Impacts. Derrida, Jacques (2001), Writing and Difference, London: Routledge. Feuer, Jane (1993), The Hollywood Musical, Hong Kong: Macmillan. Gibbons, Fiachra (2003), ‘Medem’s Basque documentary sparks bitter controversy’, The Guardian (22 September). Online: www.guardian. co.uk/film/2003/sep/22/festivals.londonfilmfestival2003 (accessed 12 January 2011). Hilton, Julian (1987), New Directions in Theatre: Performance, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kracauer, Siegfried (1972), ‘Basic concepts’, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 7–20. Lefebvre, Henri (1991), The Production of Space, Padstow: Blackwell. Machado y Álvarez, Antonio (1985), Cantes flamencos, Madrid: Aguilar. Mallea-Olaetxe, Joxe (2005), ‘Basque rap in the American West: Bertsolariak’, in Samuel G. Armistead and Joseba Zulaika (eds), Voicing the Moment: Improvised Oral Poetry and Basque Tradition, Reno: Center for Basque Studies Conference Papers Series 3, University of Nevada, Reno, 231–44. Martin-Jones, David (2006), Cinema and National Identity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Metz, Cristian (1972), ‘Some points in the semiotics of the cinema’, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 164–76. Oteiza, Jorge de (2003), Oteiza’s Selected Writings, Joseba Zulaika (ed.), Reno: Center for Basque Studies.

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Roldán Larreta, Carlos (1999), El cine del País Vasco: de Ama Lur (1968) a Airbag (1997), San Sebastián: Cuadernos de Cinematografía Ikusgaiak 3. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1960), Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre (trans. Allan Bloom), Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press. Stam, Robert (2000), Film Theory: An Introduction, Bodmin: Blackwell. Stone, Rob (2010), ‘The coding of aesthetic and thematic discourse in a cinematic mnemonic: the case of “Ama Lur” (1968)’, Journal of European Studies, 40: 3, 230–42. Trapero, Maximiano (2005), ‘Improvised oral poetry in Spain’, in Samuel G. Armistead and Joseba Zulaika (eds), Voicing the Moment: Improvised Oral Poetry and Basque Tradition, Reno: Center for Basque Studies Conference Papers Series 3, University of Nevada, Reno, 45–63. Truffaut, François (2000), ‘A certain tendency of the French cinema’, in Joanna Hollows, Peter Hutchings and Mark Jancovich (eds), The Film Studies Reader, New York: Arnold, 58–63. Vernon, Kathleen (1999), ‘Culture and cinema to 1975’, in David T. Gies (ed.) Modern Spanish Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Von Geldern, James (1993), Bolshevik Festivals: 1917–1920, Los Angeles: University of California Press. White, Linda (2001), ‘Orality and Basque nationalism: dancing with the devil or waltzing into the future?’, Oral Tradition, 16: 1, 3–28. Zavala, Antonio (2005), ‘Prologue’, in Samuel G. Armistead and Joseba Zulaika (eds), Voicing the Moment: Improvised Oral Poetry and Basque Tradition, Reno: Center for Basque Studies Conference Papers Series 3, University of Nevada, Reno, 15–26. Zemke, John (2005), ‘Improvisation, inspiration and Basque verbal contest: identity in performance’, in Samuel G. Armistead and Joseba Zulaika (eds), Voicing the Moment: Improvised Oral Poetry and Basque Tradition, Reno: Center for Basque Studies Conference Papers Series 3, University of Nevada, Reno, 83–93.

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Travelling song: music, iteration and translation in La leyenda del tiempo Parvati Nair

Beauty and sadness permeate Isaki Lacuesta’s film, La leyenda del tiempo (2006). So too does a strange dissonance. As the opening frame indicates, and as most flamencophiles will recognise from the title, this is a film that promises to be about the flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla. It is, more precisely, a film about the uneven spaces and the syncopated times of flamenco, at once rooted in and around the southern coastline of Spain and, like the gaze from the shoreline itself, prone to stretching imaginatively beyond the horizon into the unknown. Shot largely in one setting and rich in visual and aural aesthetic, there is, nevertheless, a rough jaggedness that cuts through this film, displacing the characters and unsettling viewers. The film sets viewers on edge. It achieves this not so much through the visual effects of the medium, but through a soundtrack that has been edited to provide a sense of suspense. The result is that viewers cease to explore the film visually and turn instead to the act of listening or, more precisely, listening out, not so much for Camarón’s voice, but for a repetition and a survival of it through the hoped-for vocalisations of other singers. In so doing, a haunting reverberates through the film, disturbing characters and viewers alike. Isaki Lacuesta is a filmmaker trained in documentary. His films occupy the interesting overlaps of documentary, fiction and auteurist cinema. This is evident in La leyenda del tiempo, where ‘fiction’ becomes inseparable from documentary. Shot without a pre-written script, Lacuesta states that his aim had been to portray characters realistically and with little or no artifice. With this in mind, he relies on them to bring to the screen what they will of their own lives, while also setting them up in scenes devised in the course of shooting. A ‘realism’ that draws from the technique of documentary combines

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in this film with a sensitive use of visual and aural metaphor, which provides for a marked aesthetic. With no plot in place, viewers must draw on sight and sound, as well as on their own imaginations, to make sense of the film. La leyenda del tiempo comes in two parts, one focusing on the young Gypsy boy, Israel and the other focusing on Makiko, a Japanese woman. The narrative of the film is split and tenuously held together by the location of San Fernando, the overriding collective memory of the late flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla, and the shared presence of Joji, a Japanese sailor who has come to live in San Fernando and who spends his time looking out to sea, sharpening knives or cutting fish. A repeated trope in the film is that of the absent father who is leaving his offspring to make their way in the world. There are other tropes too: shots of the horizon from the coastline once visited by Napoleon’s troops, of open spaces on the outskirts, or of the train that links the small town of San Fernando to the rest of Spain. Death, loss and mourning loom large in this film, for at the backdrop of all that we see and hear on screen is the actual void left in the world of flamenco by the untimely death in 1992 of one of the most iconic singers in the history of this song form, Camarón de la Isla (Lencero, 2004). Born in 1952 in the islet of San Fernando, Camarón was the son of an impoverished Gypsy blacksmith. He began singing at an early age as a means to earn a livelihood, singing for a while in a restaurant in his hometown and later on trains to Malaga. In 1979, he broke with the barriers of tradition with his album La leyenda del tiempo, which brought flamenco into contact with rock, jazz and other forms of music. The album created a stir in traditional flamenco circles and he was, for a while, the target of much reprobation from those who believed that flamenco ought to be ‘preserved’ from contamination by other musical forms. The figure of Camarón quickly became symbolic of ‘new flamenco’ or the kind that courts adventure, hybridity and innovation. Interestingly, though, the new ground he forged for flamenco turned Camarón into a legend in his own lifetime and beyond. It turned him into an established figure, especially for Spanish Gypsies. His song ‘Soy gitano’ (I Am A Gypsy, 1989) became adopted as the anthem for Gypsy identity and, at his funeral, his coffin was draped in the Gypsy flag of blue (for the sky), and green (for the earth), with a wheel in the middle (for the road that Gypsies have travelled since their supposed expulsion from

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India). Camarón’s name, in its rise to symbolic stature, epitomises in many ways the concerns of Lacuesta’s film, for it is through the filter of flamenco and of a shared sense of mourning for Camarón that flamenco lovers will view this film, which, ultimately, is as much about the spectrality of Camarón as it is about the characters we encounter. Twelve-year-old Israel, a gitano (Gypsy) born in San Fernando and heir to flamenco tradition in his family and community, has lost his father. With this loss, he eschews flamenco and ceases to sing in an act of prolonged mourning. In an early scene, his grandfather, a gitano canastero,1 asks him what he will do when he grows up and then asks for a song. Israel replies that he may become a policeman or else a builder, and that he no longer sings. His move away from stereotypical parameters of Gypsy authenticity begins here. Over the course of a year, his voice breaks and he grows taller, gradually entering manhood and so definitely dashing any hopes that he may assume Camarón’s mantle as the next visionary of flamenco. Makiko, on the other hand, leaves behind a dying father in Japan and travels to San Fernando, birthplace of Camarón, in the hope of learning to sing like him. Her stay in San Fernando, spent largely listening over and again to recordings of Camarón and to his brothers singing live in a bid to learn to sing like her hero is interspersed with the telephone calls she makes to her ailing father. In the last of these calls, he fails to come to the telephone and she is informed that he has passed away. On hearing this news, she returns to Japan, but continues her efforts to sing, if only for a brief moment, like Camarón. Through flamenco, she discovers a way of expressing her feelings of loss. Lacuesta states that the fact that both protagonists had lost their fathers was coincidental (interview with Lacuesta on DVD of La leyenda del tiempo, 2007). The stories of Israel and Makiko form two sides of the same coin, as the one wilfully renounces the singing that he was born to, whilst the other wilfully travels far and wide in search of ‘deep song’. Flamenco, rich in the cultural memories and the cultural myths surrounding the late Camarón, acts, therefore, as the musical thread that connects these disjointed narratives. Ultimately, this film is not so much about the characters themselves, as it is about flamenco as a complex music form that is shadowed by the spectral, even as it travels the globe and comes to life through individual and contingent performances.

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This chapter explores the idea of flamenco as a contrapuntal form of music in La leyenda del tiempo in order to argue that Lacuesta’s film works against essentialist perceptions of flamenco and presents it instead as metaphor for the ephemeral chimeras of identity and belonging, inexorable but ardently pursued. It explores the view that flamenco as represented in this film comes to life through a kind of performativity that hinges on both a spectral desire for repetition and a contingent migrancy that forces change, hybridity and innovation. Repetition and migrancy impose on this music a spatiotemporal counterpoint that shifts between iteration and translation. The play of the soundtrack with the viewer/listener, who spends the entire film listening out in vain for a repeat of the ‘original’ voice of the late Camarón, through the voices of those whom he has left behind, offers an experience of this counterpoint. The ‘original’ Camarón can only be heard in recordings, but the film centres around the hope that his spectral presence may sing through others, either those who are presumably ‘born’ to flamenco and so acquire it from birth, as does Israel, or those who take classes and strive to learn to perform the song, as Makiko does. The conceptual route for this analysis is forged from linking key concepts in the work of three theorists, Jacques Derrida, James Clifford and Judith Butler. Firstly, it refers to the theory of hauntology as outlined by Jacques Derrida in his Spectres of Marx (1994). It is the overshadowing of the spectre on the present that creates temporal dissonance in this film and it is also this that both maintains and disrupts myths surrounding flamenco as innate or inborn. The film is shot through, therefore, with the dichotomies of absence/presence and past/present. This chapter then seeks to connect the temporal consequences of hauntology with questions of spatiality that arise as a consequence, by referring to the idea of ‘routes’, as theorised by the historian and ethnographer, James Clifford (1997). For Clifford, temporal plurality complicates questions of space, whereby the ideas of travel and translation become foregrounded, concepts through which we must rethink the notion of culture. As portrayed in this film, flamenco rides the unstable and migrant axes of spaces and times contained in the conjoining of the concepts of hauntology and routes. It comes to life through a third dimension poised tenuously on these axes, necessarily that of performance, turning the latter at once into a double act, that of attempting to construct meaning or identity in the present and, at

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the same time, that of a ritual of the spectre confirming, as Judith Butler (1993) has explored, the iterability of the latter. In the case of La leyenda del tiempo, the soundtrack overrides the visual in order to frame the shifting, dissonant spaces and times of flamenco. At the etymological root of Derrida’s theory of hauntology lies the French word hantise, meaning both haunting and the spectral, through the related idea of revenant: that which both comes and goes, that which begins with the return. The revenant is the spectre that returns, a repetitive act that links the time of the here and now to another time and to another immaterial and intangible dimension. The path of history is thus disturbed, producing discomfort and dissonance in the present. The result, as Derrida states, is ‘a disadjustment of the contemporary’ (1994: 99). This complication of temporality translates into numerous coinciding but irreconcilable time frames, those of the past, the future, the conditional, the hypothetical and the present. Hauntology, for Derrida, disrupts the imagined linearity and the singularity of historical time, thereby opening up a space for the theoretical consideration of differance and deconstruction. All moments come accompanied by their spectres, shadows that interject, casting uncertainty and fragmentation on the course of time. Iteration, the repeated utterances of the spectre, interrupts the present, splintering it and shadowing it. This acknowledgement of the spectre has important historical, political and ethical consequences, for it leads to the undoing of linearities, essentialisms and totalities. Interestingly, though, if hantise is always present, then it becomes the one reliable constant in our otherwise disjointed experience of time. As such, mourning, the lived response to the absence/presence of the spectre, also accompanies temporal experiences, playing a crucial, if invisible and inaudible, part in determining the choices we make through time. Symbolic systems through which we construct meaning and the agency that we exert in the world also therefore become subject to temporal contradiction. Utterance – indeed, all nomination – is syncopated, shifting in its movement between contradictory time frames. Contained in what we say or do are the hovering shadows of loss, death and silence. Even the most assertive statements are fragile. The disruption of linearity and temporal coherence in linguistic and other expression leads to a certain migrancy, as expression through symbolic systems, such as language or music, does not so much construct identity or meaning as go looking for – and listen-

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ing out for – the latter. In his Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997), James Clifford puts forward the idea that culture must be thought of in terms of migrancy. Taking his cue from histories of colonialism, with its subsequent impact on the ‘postcolonial’ and the ‘tribal’, Clifford proposes instead a foregrounding of culture in terms of travel and translation. The idea of ‘routes’ points to culture as unfinished and on the move. This view of culture as ongoing process further takes into account the possibilities of cultural intersections, divergences and splits. Cultural expressions become akin to transit lounges, themselves mobile, and housing not definitive emblems of identity, but shifting, migrant perspectives. Roots are exchanged for routes. Cultural practitioners turn into travellers who engage in intimate translations of the symbolic systems they use for self-articulation. The results, cultural ‘texts’ and culture as that which is lived, are not ends in themselves, but become routes that lead on elsewhere. Clifford writes on ethnography in the context of postmodernity. At the backdrop of his conceptual network are the disjointed spaces and times of postmodernity. Cultures sustain themselves, therefore, in ‘hybrid historical conjunctures’ (1997: 261). Travel and translation become modes of cultural survival, but also render culture complex in its migrancy and impossible to map definitively. Flamenco, in the diversity of its manifestations and in terms of the different political and cultural uses to which it has been put since its inception in the nineteenth century, clearly reveals itself to be a semiotic system that crosses times and spaces. This is so for many artistic codes and musical forms. However, what is particularly interesting about flamenco is the fact that it simultaneously references multiple temporalities, always addressing the spectral understood in terms of myth and legend, as well as being contingent upon and responsive to current contexts. Flamenco, charged with the impenetrable notion of duende,2 is always at once both what is practised and what is desired, mourned or dreamt of. For the dedicated artist, flamenco is always an unfinished project. In this, flamenco, be it the song, guitar or dance, is a double gesture, the contradictory struggle between enactment and lack. As Rob Stone has noted: Flamenco becomes a concept which is signified and can be proven to have created a metalanguage – a system of symbols which are used to

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discuss another language or system. This language takes the form of a mythological code that is referenced in performance. (Stone, 2004: 9)

If flamenco is in its own right a meta-language, then it relies on the theatricality of performance to enact itself and become three-dimensional. Like jazz, rap or soul, flamenco has its origins in a specific sociocultural and historical context: that of the hybrid, economically challenged strata of Andalusian society in the course of the incursions of modernity (Mitchell, 1994). Unlike these other musical forms that are more related to race, class and ethnicity than to location, flamenco also has a very specific geographical referent, in that the landscape, the towns and villages, and the coastline of Andalusia provide a clearly defined physical mapping of the places and spaces of flamenco. They also provide spaces of memory that fuel the myths of authenticity and the grand narratives of flamenco tradition. What are much harder to map over time are the many travels and translations of flamenco in terms of postmodernity – that is, in terms of the complexities of time and space, as perceived via the concepts of hantise and routes. These have multiplied and become more complex since the 1990s, especially with the spread of digital technology to relay music across space. All of these, however, are reliant on performance and performativity for flamenco is, above all, cultural enactment. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), Judith Butler revises the enactments of sex and gender in terms of performativity. While questions of sex and gender are the focus of her study, the theoretical points she makes are of relevance across contexts and relate to questions of performance in general. In this context, we should note that both gender and music are inevitably performed through the body and are corporeally lived. Crucially, she brings to the idea of performance Derrida’s concept of iteration, so that performativity is shaped by choice made on daily and individual bases, as well as by the force of repetition. Iteration, itself linked to the revenant and to questions of hauntology, enforces spectral repetition and return: Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This

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iterability implies that ‘performance’ is not a singular ‘act’ or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint. (Butler, 1993: 95)

Butler, however, goes on to make the point that while iteration controls and restricts performance, nevertheless, it cannot shape it fully. Iteration is that which attempts to turn the performative into essentialism or the ‘natural’, but also that which allows for the revelation of temporal incoherence and conflict in the subject and so releases the latter from essentialism. Butler’s stress on iteration acts as a link with Derrida’s ongoing focus on this concept in the course of all of his work. There is, of course, an element of theoretical irony here, as iteration surfaces and resurfaces as the conceptual link among Derrida’s theories of hauntology, Clifford’s theories of routes, and Butler’s theories of  performativity. All across this conceptual triad, we see the temporal complexities that iteration provokes. Iteration, we must recall, is spectral, the temporal challenge to that which is enacted in the here and now. It accompanies, splits and complicates temporal experience. It both constrains and releases culture onto routes that have no fixed destination, and therefore has important consequences not solely for temporality, but for spatiality too. It proffers to cultural performance the repeated trope or the stereotype from the past, but in so doing and through its very spectral presence, it allows for spatial and temporal travel. The location of San Fernando, not merely the birthplace of Camarón, but part of the region of Cadiz and hence denominated part of the ‘golden triangle’ that forms the cradle of flamenco (Triana in Seville, Jeréz de la Frontera and the coast of Cadiz), is the setting where music, myth and memory coincide in the midst of loss and travel in Lacuesta’s film. Despite such apparently solid ‘roots’ in San Fernando, flamenco in this film is, like the absent fathers and the fragmented families, both a spontaneous mode of cultural expression that is part of local culture, and scattered and chaotically at a loose end, impossible to grasp or to pin down. Importantly, this contradiction is not merely what is portrayed in the film, but is part of the viewers’ world view of flamenco and is a contradiction inherent in flamenco, understood in the widest possible terms. Throughout the course of the film, the viewer cannot but listen out for the ‘original’ Camarón de la Isla’s historic rendering of Federico

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García Lorca’s poem, which transformed it into a global symbol of ‘new flamenco’3 that broke open the barriers of tradition: his title song of the album La leyenda del tiempo, which catapulted him to fame in 1979 and proclaimed the propensity of flamenco to engage in hybrid fusion with other musical forms. The song never comes. Camarón’s voice hovers in the air ghost-like, intimately familiar to the characters (and to viewers, no doubt), forever present in our memory and yet impossible to recapture live. The view, common to the orthodoxy, that flamenco is rooted in Andalusia and innate to gitanos – the idea that it is a natural and essential feature of Gypsy life – is tacitly challenged by Israel’s refusal to sing. What is perceived, instead, through Makiko’s pursuit of deep song, is the double movement of this art form away from its birthplace and over the horizon, to the distant unknown, as symbolised by Japan and by the many ships that pass by the coastline of San Fernando, and back again, to its heartland, in the small bars and locales of San Fernando. In this way, the film is purposefully ambiguous and almost contradictory, with no linearity of narrative or neat resolution on offer. As La leyenda del tiempo confirms, flamenco is replete with spectres. Viewers of this film come to it with two names resonating in their memories: those of the poet Federico García Lorca, who wrote the original poem of this title (1995), and of the singer Camarón de la Isla, who broke the boundaries of flamenco tradition with his 1979 album of the same title. Lorca and Camarón are iconic names in Andalusian culture and both played key roles in fomenting flamenco. Their spectres frame this film. The poem, too, resonates, from the opening verse onwards, with the spectral: El Sueño va sobre el Tiempo flotando como un velero. Nadie puede abrir semillas en el corazón del Sueño.

The dream floats over time like a sailing boat on water. No one can open the seeds at the heart of the dream.

As the last two lines state, it is impossible to know what exactly constitutes ‘el Sueño’ (the dream). It is unknowable, metaphysical almost, yet present. It is in movement, afloat, but intangible, accompanying and interrupting temporal experience. Rich as his poetry is in metaphor and in references to the nature and landscape of Andalusia, we also know that Lorca was killed for the politics of freedom that emanated through his work. Implicit in this poem are

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the twinned notions of death and temporal complexity; so too the notion of movement, of a voyage of, and into, the unknown. Poetic metaphor translates here into an engagement with spectrality and hence with release from essentialism and the linear logic of unities. It is not surprising, therefore, that Camarón should have chosen this poem for the title of his revolutionary album released in 1979. If Lorca produced much of his work during the Second Republic (1931–36), then Camarón came to the fore in the Transition to democracy. Like Lorca, he espoused a politics of openness to difference that was at odds with the flamenco purists, adherents of mairenismo,4 or the belief that flamenco was a cultural treasure that had to be preserved through sustained eschewal of innovation. For the flamenco purists, such preservation was achieved precisely through deliberate reiteration – the conscious repetition of palos (or musical forms) and the effort to emulate the great ‘forefathers’ of the art, Antonio Mairena being a key figure. In this way, traditions could be preserved. Camarón’s La leyenda del tiempo sought out hybridisation with other non-Spanish musical forms in a creative, yet rebellious, enterprise. The success of this album was both national and international. Camarón thus became a pioneer in working with non-Spanish musicians and with musical forms such as jazz, thereby emphatically placing flamenco in a global context. In so doing, he transgressed norms of musical preservation. A politics of openness, running contrary to the mairenismo of so many singers and flamencophiles in the ‘golden triangle’, underlined his work. Ironically, his very success at liberating flamenco from the shackles of tradition brought immense fame in his lifetime (Lencero, 2004). This was instrumental in turning him into a quasi-religious icon in the course of his own, all too brief, life. The death of Camarón served to further the translation of his memory into myth. Over time, a veritable institution has arisen, based both on remembered events and on imagined myths about him. These are most evident in San Fernando, his birthplace. For example, the Venta de Vargas, the inn where he started his career as a boy singing to guests as they ate their meals, both continues to function as an inn and has turned into a key memorial site, where even the tables where he sang have become priceless tokens of memory. Today, we can eat there, listening to recordings of Camarón, imagining that he is somehow there, singing for us. Statues of Camarón populate the town’s public spaces. Shops sell

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memorabilia, his face framed saint-like in lockets. The memory of Camarón weaves itself through material objects into the everyday (Rodríguez Sánchez, 1998). Indeed, as his brother Manuel Monge Cruz, who makes a brief appearance in Lacuesta’s La leyenda del tiempo, stated, ‘My brother has not died. He guides us in everything’ (Interview, San Fernando, 2010). By centring his film around the music and in the birthplace of Camarón, Isaki Lacuesta makes a deliberate choice. The repeated theme of the loss of the father gains heightened significance in this Andalusian islet, where Catholic religiosity combines with the myths of flamenco as innate to gitanos, for in death, Camarón has become Christ-like. Indeed, a curious parallel emerges whereby images of Camarón found in the shops of San Fernando present him in the guise of both Christ and Che Guevara, revolutionaries and visionaries in their time, as was Camarón himself. His guiding spirit intervenes in the everyday and although his own voice cannot be heard, there are many in San Fernando, especially in his family, who seek to project aspects of his song. ‘Of course he teaches me to sing,’ said Rafael Monge, his nephew, son of Manuel Monge, in an interview (2010). ‘He teaches me, you know, because he’s here. Camarón is in Heaven and that’s why he’s always here with us’ (2010).5 Sanctified, fetishised and mythified, visitors to San Fernando can absorb Camarón’s life in a day via the Ruta Camarón, a guided tour of the places where he lived and sang. Strangely, as the name suggests, to follow this route is both to never find Camarón and to sense that ‘Camarón’ in death is like a road, a journey of unexpected encounters, of moments lived in terms of the double, that which is tangible and the intangible spectre of Camarón – the syncopation of deep song across temporal and spatial frames. Spectrality and iteration, in such a context, are central features of life and music in San Fernando; so too, then, for those who have survived him, such as the characters of Israel and Makiko in the film who experience the splintered temporality of the spaces where spectres hover. The spectre of Camarón touches much more than just the inhabitants of San Fernando or the characters in this film. As viewers and audience who know only too well his voice and his songs, we too enter this film with the weight and the sorrow of mourning. The memory of Camarón is shared. Followers of Camarón from across the world will be given to listening out for iteration in this

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film, as the spectre of Camarón intervenes in how we approach the film. The death of Camarón, like that of iconic singers such as Elvis Presley or John Lennon, affects all flamencophiles worldwide and the film serves this niche market. As María Ángeles Carrasco stated with regard to the death of another iconic singer of flamenco, Enrique Morente, on 13 December 2010, ‘flamenco has been orphaned’ (2010). Camarón’s death provoked much the same sentiment, for he became a legend in his own lifetime, and it is with this sense of being orphaned, of having lost a ‘divine’ master of song, that viewers approach this film. Thus, in following Israel’s story – his conversations with the girl, Saray, his wanderings around town and on the salt dunes with his friends, his fights with his brother, and so on – we wait with bated breath for that moment when he will finally sing. The added knowledge that he is a gitano makes this wait more hopeful. For Lacuesta knows that lurking behind viewers’ expectations is the imbibed essentialist presumption that deep song is somehow ‘natural’ to Gypsies. In the course of following Israel’s story, we listen carefully to the soundtrack, eager to pick up the first signs of Camaron’s cante. After all, Camarón may have left behind a family, but none of his children have taken on his mantle. Perhaps Israel will. Yet he never does. There is in his resolute refusal to sing an element of ritualised theatricality. Like the tattoo of his father’s name on his skin, or the locket that he wears bearing his father’s image, the silence of song is in itself a kind of performance. It creates a complex frisson in that it underlines through non-performance the impossibility of regaining the voice of the dead, even while it is this knowledge that causes him to choose silence. Perhaps in understanding the nature of flamenco performance as seen here (through absence), it is worth recalling that in some palos of flamenco, such as the alegrías so typical of the bay of Cadiz, ‘silencio’ or silence form6 is, in fact, an important counterpoint to the four active aspects of flamenco in performance, namely song, guitar, dance and jaleo.7 The moment of song never comes with Israel and in the last scene of this part of the film, Saray asks him how long his silence and his mourning will last. That, he replies, will last me until the end of my days. For flamenco lovers across the globe, the same is true with regard to Camarón, father of flamenco nuevo (new flamenco). No singer, not even Morente, could replace him. Mourning for Camarón, the inevitability of embracing his spectre through its

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iteration across practice and performance has been a principal feature of flamenco in the last two decades. It is lived by singers, guitarists, dancers, and aficionados alike. His name remains unique and keenly present in every collection of flamenco. His work is more than a repeated trope: it forms a marker, a standard bearer, as the iterative does, which in turn serves to route musical travel and translation across contexts, thereby fostering innovation. As Butler indicates through her theorisation of performativity, for flamenco to stay live, it must be performed and such performance, however individual or innovative, will be released and constrained by that which is iterative. Camarón is the dead father of flamenco nuevo. His spirit helps to keep flamenco alive. Makiko’s travels in search of Camarón’s song offer a glimpse of flamenco as revenant, that which comes back to an origin in order to launch itself anew. At the start of this part of the film, we see her packing her bags in Japan. She is distant from Camarón in every way possible: in terms of location, gender, ethnicity, culture and language. Yet, Makiko is not unusual in travelling to little-known parts of Andalusia to seek out that which is most ‘authentically’ flamenco. Flamenco academies throughout Spain receive Japanese students who come to learn to dance, play the guitar and sing. The contribution of Japanese artists to flamenco is sizeable and growing. Seized by the spectres of flamenco, prey to the contradictions of iteration, they travel from Japan physically and imaginatively in order not merely to learn flamenco, but to ‘be’ flamenco. Often the performance of the art affects imaginations of subjective and collective identity in general. Part of this involves the adoption of a seemingly authentic gitano identity, with attendant versatility across the range of palos. Ethnicity and identity are proven through performance. A prime example of this is that of the singer Masanobu Takimoto, better known as El Cartero. His artistic name – the Postman – aptly foregrounds the delivery of flamenco as an act of translation (i.e. ‘taking across’), both in terms of himself and the song. Like the character of Makiko, he states that ‘I only want to sing like Camarón . . . Nothing else’ (Castillo, 2007). El Cartero is often referred to as ‘el gitano japonés’ (the Japanese Gypsy), a reminder that despite – or perhaps, because of – the iterative myth of authenticity, ethnicity can be gleaned, borrowed or constructed. Most of all, it is imagined. The ethnic identity of gitanos, as ‘innate’ flamencos, becomes both adaptable and adoptable. Like the flag

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of the Rom (draped on Camarón’s coffin at his burial) that portrays the blue sky, the green earth and a turning wheel, ethnicity is migrant and limitless, but it is also harnessed to the trope of that which has gone before. By singing like Camarón, or at least trying to do so, Makiko and El Cartero both refer to Camarón’s name as a touchstone of ‘authenticity’ and yet propel Camarón’s song onto new spatial routes. By translating themselves in terms of Camarón, they translate his memory and his music too. Makiko, of course, never sounds like anyone but herself. That, however, is not the point. Tenuous though her performance may be, carried by her own voice, rendered in her own way, it is yoked nevertheless to the trope of Camarón. What matters in La leyenda del tiempo is the tension and the movement that ensue from such performance, which struggles between iteration and translation. Indeed, silence is what is most notable in the soundtrack of La leyenda del tiempo. This is not for want of sound, or even music. The film is replete with sounds: conversations, the sounds of the ocean, the rustle of the coastal wind, the singing of Camarón’s brothers, Manuel and Pijote, the rich birdsong of Andalusia, the laughter of children, and the recordings of Camarón that Makiko listens to. Silence, however, persists in the midst of these everyday sounds. It is rendered both through Israel’s lack of performance and Makiko’s fledgling attempts at song. It is a silence that emanates from the spectral figure of Camarón, the silence of his haunting. In this context, Israel and Makiko offer two responses to the haunting, the one falling silent, the other struggling to sing. Both are, in their own ways, performative expressions, through the metalanguage of flamenco, of the complications incurred from spectrality. Silence in this film is not obvious and yet few viewers would fail to notice it. Silence shadows sound throughout. The rich vein of realism that manifests itself in this film is evident in this double play of the soundtrack. In the film’s final scene, we witness yet another rendering of La leyenda del tiempo, this time by established names in flamenco nuevo, among them Raimundo Amador. In a jam session, they improvise around La leyenda del tiempo. The song has moved on. This latest version is instantly recognisable, but also recognisably different. The song has survived Camarón’s death; it has also altered somewhat through time. Although the presence of his spectre is almost tangible in this reworked version, it also reveals

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the inevitable and contingent migrancy of flamenco through time and performance. As we watch the scene, Camarón’s voice echoes in our ears in iterative mode. Yet, this last scene in La leyenda del tiempo also reveals the way the song is now reborn, as that which is post-Camarón, in translation. In the tension between iteration and translation, performance comes to life. Notes 1 A canastero is a basket weaver. Basket weaving is a traditional occupation for Spanish Gypsies and this scene serves, therefore, to confirm the supposed ‘authenticity’ of Israel’s gitano roots. It is worth noting also that Camarón’s family made their meagre livelihood from another typically gitano occupation, that of blacksmith. 2 While in Havana in 1930, Federico García Lorca gave a lecture entitled ‘Teoría y juego del duende’, in which he spoke of duende in terms of the artist’s struggle for perfection. The word itself has migrated into English and other languages, but defies translation. No doubt this is because of its reference to a kind of perfection that is only real in part and mythical for the rest. 3 It is generally accepted that nuevo flamenco or ‘new flamenco’ refers to contemporary flamenco (i.e. that which has developed since the end of the Franco dictatorship in Spain). While it is thought to have been initiated by Lole and Manuel in 1975, Camarón de la Isla played a key role in developing new ways of rendering traditional palos (the different musical forms of flamenco), as well as of mixing flamenco with jazz, blues and rock. Another central figure in the recent development of new dimensions of flamenco is, of course, Enrique Morente. 4 Mairenismo has come to signifiy the attitudes to flamenco held by one of its greatest singers, Antonio Mairena (1909–83). Mairena held the view that the art needed to be preserved and that it should not be ‘diluted’ through innovation and change. 5 It was interesting to note that Rafael began and ended the interview by singing bulerías (the most typical flamenco rhythm, with a measure of twelve counts and non-regular intervals between accents) in the style of Camarón (‘eso de la época de cuando le acompañaba Paco’ [that’s from the time when Paco played with him], he said referring to the guitarist Paco de Lucía, who played for Camarón in the early years of his singing career, before the guitarist Tomatito took over), and a version of the alegrías (meaning ‘joys’, these are slower than bulerías) that he said was typical of the island, different from the same palo as sung further inland.

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6 Interestingly, the role of silence in flamenco is often not recognised or is misunderstood by the general public. Very often, an audience will start to clap during the silencio, to show their appreciation, when in fact the silence is an intrinsic part of the piece. 7 Jaleo refers to expressions such as ‘Olé!’, meant to offer encouragement to the performers. Its importance is undervalued, as such cries from the audience help orient the performance and strengthen the sense of community that is forged through performance.

References Butler, Judith Butler (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge. Carrasco, María Ángeles (2010), ‘La Agencia del Flamenco destaca que fue “Un gran conservador de los cantes de todos los tiempos” ’. Online: www. lavozlibre.com/noticias/ampliar/165913/-la-agencia-del-flamencodestaca - que - fue - un - gran - conservador - de - los - cantes - de - todos - los -tiempos (accessed 15 December 2010). Castillo, Juanjo (2007), ‘Singing, dancing and music “made in Japan” ’ (20 August). Online: www.esflamenco.com/scripts/news/news. php?frmIdPagina=732 (accessed 15 December 2010). Clifford, James (1997), Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, London, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1994), Spectres of Marx (trans. Peggy Kamuf), New York: Routledge. Lencero, Carlos (2004), Sobre Camarón: la leyenda del cantaor solitario, Barcelona: Alba Editorial. Lorca, Federico García (1995), Así que pasen cinco años. Leyenda del tiempo, Madrid: Cátedra. Mitchell, Timothy (1994), Flamenco: Deep Song, New Haven: Yale University Press. Sánchez, Andrés Rodríguez (1998), Camarón: se rompió el quejío, Madrid: Nuer Ediciones. Stone, Rob (2004), The Flamenco Tradition in the Works of Federico García Lorca and Carlos Saura: The Wounded Throat, New York and Ontario: The Edwin Mellen Press. Discography DVD La leyenda del tiempo, dir. Isaki Lacuesta, DVD, 2007.

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CD La leyenda del tiempo, Camarón, 1979. Soy gitano, Camarón, 1989.

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Interviews Manuel Monge Cruz, San Fernando, 5 October 2010. Rafael Monge, San Fernando, 5 October 2010.

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Sound moves: immigration and music in Cosas que dejé en La Habana Isabel Santaolalla ‘No digas todo eso sin música, Diego.’ (‘Don’t say all that without music, Diego’) Nancy (Mirtha Ibarra) to Diego (Jorge Perugorría) in Fresa y chocolate (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1993)

Like all forms of sound, music is – in John Connell and Chris Gibson words – ‘inherently mobile’ (2003: 4). And yet, it conjures up in people’s minds a sense of place and, therefore, notions of belonging and allegiance (Wade, 2000: 2; Biddle and Knights, 2007: 1–15). Attention to musical traditions and practices is often an important part of ethnographic or sociological analysis of longestablished or budding communities. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh have referred to the apparent contradiction that music is simultaneously perceived as ‘a medium for marking and reinforcing the boundaries of existing socio-cultural categories and groups’ and ‘a means for the imagining of emergent and labile identities’ (2000: 32). Music’s potential to convey a multitude of meanings, derives – they argue – from its ‘hyperconnotative character, its intense cognitive, cultural and emotional associations, and its abstraction’ (2000: 32). As well as confirming familiar feelings, meanings, and practices, music is also capable of creating new thoughts and sensations. It is a powerful medium through which notions of self are asserted, queried and renewed. Not surprisingly, then, music is often considered a forceful means of expression of/by migrant and diasporic communities.1 Reflection on the role of music in films concerned with questions of ethnicity, migration and diaspora should look beyond, say, composition, dress and performance, to awareness

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of music’s impact as a key element of form that contributes to the overall audio-visual structure of the text. As in any film that relies on music to accentuate thematic complexity, so in ethnicallymarked films on traumatic journeys with their nostalgic glances to the lost place and time and hopeful anticipations of a future in a new location, the soundtrack expresses the corresponding emotional, cultural and conceptual shifts. Whether music is the fundamental element of the storyline itself – as in Young Soul Rebels (Isaac Julien, 1991) and Wild West (David Attwood, 1992), for instance – or, more commonly, allotted a more marginal role, either diegetically or non-diegetically, its significance in films about migration is, arguably, more systematically linked to questions of identity than in other types of films. On some occasions music is used trivially to register ethnicity. Mervyn Cooke comments, for instance, on the fashion, in 1980s Hollywood films, for introducing ethnic instruments and voices, sometimes leading to what he calls ‘timbral exoticism’ (Cooke, 2008: 504–5). The British director Isaac Julien makes a similar point: ‘The use of music can be really exciting, but it can also be embarrassing. I’m thinking of Something Wild – a black person walks into frame and there’s reggae’ (in Romney and Wooton, 1995: 125). What follows is a study of Cosas que dejé en La Habana (Things I Left in Havana, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, 1997), focusing on the way music is used in a film mainly concerned with questions of immigration and cultural allegiance.2 Directed by one of Spain’s foremost filmmakers, Cosas is one of the films that have addressed in recent years the plight of foreigners – Latin Americans, Africans, East Europeans – seeking to make their home in Spain. While not as hard-hitting as other variants of the genre, Cosas points to the ambivalent relations between Cuba and Spain, two countries bound together by historic ties. The narrower focus on a single film here inevitably prioritises detail and nuance over comparison and crossreference, but conclusions drawn from Cosas are likely to apply more widely where music underscores films about immigration.3 Although relatively scarce in comparison with their number in other European cinemas, Spanish films on immigration use music in a variety of ways. While the range of possibilities opened up by the films’ scores, even in this relatively reduced group, is almost limitless, it is nevertheless possible to detect some significant recurrent patterns and strategies. Music in these films sometimes introduces

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leitmotifs of theme or character that reinforce or counteract individual or cultural identities. Thus, for instance, the conventional practice of anticipating or emphasising the appearance of an African character through simple drumbeats is relied on in films like El rey del mambo (The Mambo King, Carles Mira, 1989), Bwana (Imanol Uribe, 1996) and Finisterre (Xavier Villaverde, 1998). Yet, the strategy is adopted here not so much as a crude means of expressing ‘primitive’ cultures, but as an indirect way of highlighting such reductive discursive practices that use musical shorthand to mark characters ‘racially’. Often, films centred on immigrant characters rely on music as an affirmation of minority and/or mainstream identity, echoing through the score the tensions set up elsewhere in the narrative. In Saïd (Llorenç Soler, 2000), for instance, diegetic and non-diegetic North African tunes help reveal aspects of the protagonist’s sensibility and cultural distinctiveness, making him more intelligible to a Spanish audience. Similarly, pivotal scenes in Flores de otro mundo (Flowers from Another World, Iciar Bollaín, 1999) express aurally the emotional and cultural journeys embarked on by the characters. So, for instance, when the coach loaded with a multi-national group of women is seen cutting through the Castilian plain, the non-diegetic accompanying tune is the rumba ‘Es mi soleá’ (My Solitude), sung by Peret, a 1970s exponent of folkloric ‘Spanishness’; when the women alight from the coach in Santaeulalia, the sound of another characteristically Spanish rhythm, the pasodoble, greets them. However, only a few minutes into the film, at the open-air welcome party, a famous Venezuelan llanera song, ‘Caballo viejo’ (Old Horse), serves to define not the incoming Latin American women, but the ageing local males; and, even more explicitly, the lyrics of the song ‘Contamíname’ (Contaminate Me, originally composed by Pedro Guerra, famous for his combination of Spanish, Latin American and African influences) blur frontiers between locals and immigrants, and dictate their common mission. The obstacles to the desirable aim of cultural interaction are sometimes overcome in films where locals, abandoning initial prejudice, dance with the newcomers to foreign tunes, as in En la puta calle (Down and Out, Enrique Gabriel, 1996) and A mi madre le gustan las mujeres (My Mother Likes Women, Inés París and Daniela Fejerman, 2001). El próximo Oriente (The Near East,

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Fernando Colomo, 2006) also endorses the possibility of crosscultural interaction, here emphatically conveyed both through its narrative of miscegenation that leads to the birth of a baby and its use of syncretic music. In its portrayal of a cross-cultural utopia, the baby’s mother and her two sisters rescue their father’s bankrupt Bangladeshi restaurant by staging musical performances that appeal to the multi-ethnic, bohemian inhabitants of the Lavapiés neighbourhood of Madrid. In other films – for instance, Susanna (Antonio Chavarrías, 1996) and Poniente (Chus Gutiérrez, 2002) – the desired cultural fusion is attempted in the narrative and the musical soundtrack, but ultimately not satisfactorily achieved in either. Such tensions are also embedded in the film that is the focus of the remainder of this chapter: Cosas que dejé en La Habana, where diverse Latin American musical genres such as boleros, rumbas, chachachás, contradanzas, guarachas and cumbias are used both diegetically and non-diegetically to help create the bittersweet mood of a story about Cuban immigrants in Madrid. Parallel narratives follow the lives of three sisters – Rosa (Isabel Santos), Ludmila (Broselianda Hernández) and Nena (Violeta Rodríguez) – who visit María (Daisy Granados), their aunt, already settled in Madrid, and those of a Cuban couple who arrive in Spain with their young daughter, only to discover that the promised help from a friend has failed to materialise. The stories are linked through Igor (Jorge Perugorría), who also comes from Havana. He offers his flat to the stranded couple, and eventually meets and becomes involved with Nena. A further bridge between Igor and the Cuban women is Igor’s cheated-on lover Azucena (Kiti Manver), María’s Spanish neighbour and friend. The mainly favourable critical reception of Cosas’s portrayal of immigrant Cuban life in Spain often mentioned Gutiérrez Aragón’s Cuban family ties and the input of the Cuban scenarist Senel Paz, who spent a year interviewing members of the 20,000-strong Cuban immigrant community in Madrid, mostly residents of the Tetuán ‘Little Havana’ neighbourhood (Martín-Lunas, 1997: 52). The use of Cuban actors added authenticity to the film, something further endorsed in Jorge Perugorría’s description of it as ‘my most Cuban Spanish film’ (in Arenas, 1997: 90). Music, too, plays an important role in adding to the film’s ethnic legitimacy. Neither wholly syncretic nor entirely idiosyncratic, the

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music in Cosas hovers between these two extremes. From one point of view the almost exclusively Cuban – rather than Spanish – nature of the soundtrack represents the film’s respect for Cuban culture. At the same time, however, composed by José María Vitier (second only in status, as a Cuban film composer, to Ernesto Lecuona), the music is marked by a blend of serious and popular Cuban music, as well as by rock, jazz, classical and Baroque European traditions – a sonorous palimpsest of cross-cultural negotiations and influences. Almost invariably, music in Cosas functions – as Claudia Gorbman (1987) argues in a discussion of film music in general – to provide ‘anchorage’, by creating mood and setting, in this case to affirm Cuban identity, sometimes as counterpoint to rival affirmations of (Spanish) identity. The earliest example of this occurs at the very start of the film, where, through a guagangó (a type of rumba), the credit title sequence and a montage of shots underscore what the film considers to be the essence of Havana and its inhabitants. The lyrics give verbal expression to views of the city’s famous promenade, el malecón, boys diving into the sea, cyclists, lovers, single passers-by, groups of individuals, the serried ranks of ageing 1950s American cars, faded photos of celebrities, old snapshots of the three sisters, and their aunt, who look at their photos in anticipation of their arrival in Madrid. This hymn to Havana begins with a limited number of instruments, as befits the typical guagangó structure. Accompanied only by the claves (sticks), the soloist hums the diana (wordless melody), and then embarks on the first stanzas of the lyrics that introduce the theme of the song: ‘Me abraza tenue el silencio / por las calles de La Habana / Pálida es la luz que emana / desde el incierto horizonte / Te busco y no encuentro dónde / Te busco y no encuentro dónde’ (I am gently embraced by the silence / on the streets of Havana / Pale is the light emerging / from the uncertain horizon / I look for you and do not find you / I look for you and do not find you). On the completion of this melancholy stanza the full orchestra takes over to emphasise the power held over the singer by his native city. The song is sung by Issac Delgado, probably the most celebrated contemporary interpreter of timba (a Cuban style of salsa). He is an instantly recognisable vocalist who, at the time of the film’s production, was acquiring popularity beyond his native country. The heterogeneity of the song’s Afro-European heritage, its original association with marginality, the hybridity of its arrangement

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(percussion and strings) and its performance by a singer with an increasingly international reputation make it a suitable overture to Cosas que dejé en La Habana. This opening flourish of non-diegetic music – a blend of celebration, yearning and loss – facilitates smooth spatial and chronological transitions from Havana to Madrid, and accompanies images of María looking at old photos of her three nieces in Havana. Her nostalgic, contemplative mood is interrupted by the sound of the doorbell, and the final, lingering notes of the evocative guagangó are superseded by a fast, matter-of-fact announcement from Radio Olé, heard on Azucena’s car radio as María jumps in: ‘¡Buenos días Madrid! . . . son las 8 de la mañana en la capital de España, con un día espléndido’ (Good morning Madrid! . . . it’s 8 o’clock in the morning, we are in the capital of Spain, and it’s a lovely day). María has taken assimilation in her adopted country to extremes. She has opened a furrier’s shop in Madrid, and seems only capable of contempt for her former life. Signs of her unquestioning embrace of ‘Spanishness’ and rejection of ‘Cubanness’ are already evident during her first meal with her nieces: ‘Aquí no se come todo junto como allá. . . . Aquí a almorzar se le llama comer y a comer se le llama cenar’ (Here they don’t eat everything together, as over there. . . . Here elevenses is called lunch and lunch is called dinner). Her caricatured seduction by all things Spanish eventually leads Ludmila to remark, ‘Pa’ mí que ya se le olvidó que nació en Cabaiguán’ (I think she’s forgotten she was born in Cabaiguán). After lunch, the sisters leave their aunt’s flat and, as they walk down a busy Madrid street, the non-diegetic short bolero music played on flute, drums and bass is an early example of narrative cueing, capturing their determination to retain their cultural loyalty in alien surroundings, despite their aunt’s pressure to conform. Significantly, the music is interrupted as soon as the camera, still outside, catches Igor walking on his own elsewhere. ‘Structural silences’ like this are highly significant in sound films (Gorbman, 1987). Where music is expected, its absence is noteworthy. This is not the sole occasion when Igor’s appearance halts the music. Throughout Cosas music is almost exclusively attached to the girls (above all to Nena), and not to the men. Even when Igor or Bárbaro are in bars, it is unrealistically absent, and this persistent reluctance to identify Igor with emotive, nationally-marked music, except on rare occasions, is readable as negative commentary on his questionable, even illegal activities.

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Narrative situations dictate emphasis in the soundtrack. A chord, phrase or single instrument can alert the viewer to thematic or emotional undercurrents. In Cosas percussive sounds are often used to prepare the viewer for affirmations or memories of Cuba. This applies, for instance, to the music that accompanies the rehearsals of the play in which Nena takes a leading role: Santa Cecilia, ceremonia cubana (Saint Cecilia, a Cuban Ceremony).4 The initial drumbeat suggests the play’s indebtedness to a liturgical AfroCuban heritage. This sound provides a counterpoint to emphasise ‘Cubanness’ before Miguel’s sanitisation of the show for Madrid audiences who, in his opinion, would care little for its more overtly political content. The play’s ideological agenda is sacrificed for a storyline with recognisable Cuban types – ‘mulatos bailando y balseros’ (‘dancing mulattoes and illegal migrants’), Miguel explains to Nena – moving to the beat of a conga danced by a gaudily dressed chorus, complete with puffed-up, billowing sleeves, in a type of Latin musical number that appeals to cliché-seeking Spanish audiences.5 Reminders of Cuba accompany intimate moments in Cosas, such as the nocturnal romantic scene between Igor and Nena, which begins, as he waits for her after rehearsals, with a reprise of the ‘La Habana sin ti’ guaguangó of the opening credits. Here, though, the percussive Cuban-marked sounds mix with more dominant European-identified strings to open up a different perspective, typically to overlay desire with sadness. The music mainly defines Nena but, as it is also the background to Igor’s presence on screen, it hints at his possible redemption through her. The prelude then fades into nothingness, its cessation signifying the temporary interruption of the lovers’ tryst. Having no room of their own, their impeded intimacy only resumes when Igor expels Bárbaro and his family from their temporary residence in his flat. Later, as Igor and Nena walk down the street after their rushed love-making, a single viola plays softly and slowly Vitier’s Cuban-inflected celebration of their blossoming love. But the mood is melancholic. The orchestrated music of the theme heard in the credit titles sequence is here repeated in a slower, gentler version, and is eventually carried almost only by the viola, drowning out the other instruments to stress the bittersweet nature of their love. The different connotations of Spanish/European and Latin American music are even more clearly evident in an earlier scene,

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in which the three sisters discuss their aunt’s matchmaking schemes for guaranteeing Spanish citizenship for one of them through marriage to Javier (Pepón Nieto), a wealthy mink farmer. During the sisters’ heated discussion – Nena, opposed to the plan, Rosa weeping at the prospect of a loveless marriage – the diegetic music emanating from the radio tuned in to Radio Olé is a flamenco guitar melody. This changes to a Colombian cumbia soon after the row subsides, as Ludmila cheers up her sisters by talking of Spanish men’s ‘paquetes’ (tackles) and imagining relationships with Spanish bullfighter or footballer types with bulging muscular thighs and firm buttocks. Significantly, this is the only moment in the whole of Cosas where we hear Peninsular Spanish music. The moment recalls a similar instance in Flores de otro mundo, where Carmelo (Pepe Sancho) finds Milady (Marilyn Torres) – his trophy girlfriend transported from Havana – dancing a pasodoble in a Caribbean style as she cooks and listens to Radio Olé in the kitchen. With a superior air – ‘Ven aquí. Tú no has oído un pasodoble en tu vida’ (Come here. You haven’t heard a pasodoble in your whole life) – he seizes her and compels her to follow his instructions and dance to his rhythm. Popular folkloric Spanish music is thus also used there in a scene where an immigrant female is forced to bend to the will of a Spanish male in order to avoid repatriation. Yet, the negative connotations of Radio Olé in these two scenes should not obscure the simultaneously positive meanings carried by the reallife Spanish radio station, Unión Radio, that – broadcasting exclusively Spanish and Latin American music – acts also in both films as a transatlantic musical bridge of potential common interests and tastes between listeners from both continents. The aunt’s attempts at match-making begin to founder when the gay suitor is attracted less to Rosa than to the younger, more boyish Nena who, however, only has eyes for Igor. Taking advantage of these complications, Ludmila turns up unexpectedly at Javier’s home. As she wanders around his room, we hear soft, slow keyboard music alerting the spectator to Ludmila’s intentions. The tune, reminiscent of Francis Lai’s famous theme for Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970), comes to a halt as soon as Javier enters the room. Ludmila approaches him and questions him gently on his sexual experiences, inviting him to fondle her breast, an invitation accepted at first gingerly but with growing intrigue. The scene is, of course, contentious. Even so, however unlikely Javier’s ‘turning’ for Ludmila may

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be, a clear message emerges about Cuba as a life-force that succeeds, in this instance, in animating a listless Spain. The developing union between Ludmila and Javier and, through them, between Cuba and Spain, is further stressed through the non-diegetic music linked to Cuba. At first, music is only identified with Ludmila, but at the end of the scene it is also attached to Javier, as loud trumpet notes comically proclaim Ludmila’s victory and Javier’s sexual surrender. As the non-diegetic music drifts into the following scene in Azucena’s flat, where a party is in full swing, the fanfare gives way to a modern arrangement of a bolero, ‘Fingiendo desamor’ (Feigning Indifference in Love) – an apt title, given the attempt by Igor and Nena to keep their affair secret from Azucena – and we hear some of the guests discussing the rival merits of different bolero composers such as Isolina Carrillo, Orlando la Rosa or Machín. Music is thus presented as the very essence of Cuban life and culture, a synecdoche of the nation, knitting together individuals here connected only by the common experience of immigration, and – given that the party has been organised by the Spanish Azucena – perhaps also bridging gaps between different countries. The contribution of non-diegetic music to the film’s transatlantic theme is paralleled by the few occasions in which diegetic music punctuates the narrative to vary perspective, acting in tandem as a point-d’ecoute (Chion, 1985). A minor example of diegetic music deployed to affirm Cuban identity occurs when, in Azucena’s flat, her lover Igor emerges from his shower singing a few bars of a revolutionary song: ‘Nuestro lema es vencer o morir / Guerrillero adelante, adelante . . .’ (Our motto is triumph or die / onward, onward, guerrilla fighter . . .). Igor here reminds everyone of his country’s recent revolutionary history, but the point is made through sex. Despite his comments elsewhere that he has had his fill of playing the role of the unfailingly cheerful Cuban stud, he seems in this scene prepared to live out the cliché, singing not timba but the comrades’ song, while continuing to take advantage sexually of a local lover, whom he is already two-timing with Nena. Igor’s cynicism is given even more poignant expression through diegetic music when, following his love-making with Nena, he returns to Azucena’s bed and, in response to her sexual overtures, tries to repel her with a lullaby: ‘Duérmete mi niña / Duérmete mi amor / Duérmete pedazo de mi corazón’ (Sleep my girl / Sleep my love / Sleep, piece of my heart), to which an unappeased Azucena replies ‘¡Déjate de nanas!’

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(No more lullabies!), undistracted by Igor’s ruse in her pursuit of sexual satisfaction.6 The shower and lullaby scenes outline Igor’s pragmatic, even expedient approach to Cuban identity, observable through his readiness to resort to its musical lore to manipulate his Spanish lover’s feelings. In other instances, Cuban songs seem to come almost unconsciously to characters’ minds, giving involuntary expression to heartfelt longing and muffled sentiment, as when Nena sings a children’s ditty at her aunt’s shop: ‘Cuando salí de La Habana / de nadie me despedí, / sólo de un perrito chino / que venía detrás de mí. / Como el perrito era chino / un señor me lo compró / por un poco de dinero / ¡Ay perrito de mi vida! / ¡Ay perrito de mi amor!’ (When I left Havana / I said goodbye to no one / only to a little Chinese dog / that came after me. / As the little dog was Chinese / a man bought it from me / for a small amount of money. / Oh, my dear little dog! / Oh, little dog, my love). The song speaks of loneliness and betrayal, to some extent mirroring the circumstances of Nena, the youngest of the sisters, the child-woman lost in an alien world. But ultimately the ditty’s theme of betrayal may apply more generally to all Cuban immigrants to Spain, and more specifically to Nena’s sisters and aunt. The narrator – not the singer – of the song leaves Havana without bidding farewell to anyone. Is this because s/he has no friends or relatives, or because a furtive departure already indicates betrayal and shame at abandoning a native city and a beleaguered nation? A dog (whose Chinese origins make him appropriately another of the film’s exiles) follows and befriends the narrator, but he too, a common symbol of loyalty, is betrayed, sold for a small sum of money and – in the suppressed verses of the complete song – a pair of patent leather boots. The narrator eventually owns up to his or her error, admitting that the boots are worn out, the money spent: ‘Las botas se me rompieron / el dinero se acabó, / voy en busca de mi perro / que valía más que yo’ (The boots were worn out / the money spent / I’m going back to look for my dog / which was worthier than me). Nena’s song is a reminder of life’s enduring values: loyalty and friendship. Material comforts are perishable, while true friendships last. So, while for Nena the song about the abandoned dog sends out danger signals concerning what, to her, are ultimately resistible temptations, its relevance to María, her aunt, in whose shop, after all, the song is being sung, seems clear.

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The film ends with the wedding of Ludmila and Javier, where Cuban music is performed by the Panama-born Eddy McLean, appearing as himself. Distinguished musicians playing themselves in the cinema serve different purposes. The presence of, say, Xavier Cugat in You Were Never Lovelier (William E. Seiter, 1942), José Iturbi in Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945) and Los Panchos in the Mexican film Una gallega baila mambo (A Galician Woman Dances Mambo, Emilio Gómez Muriel, 1951) adds verisimilitude to films prioritising music and performance. In a slightly different way, the inclusion of Eddy McLean in Cosas serves not only to guarantee ethnic authenticity and prestige, but also to sanction the narrative’s transnational love affair through a live performance by an internationally renowned musician, very much in line with the way in which Michel Camilo and Paquito d’Rivera are used at the end of the US-Spanish co-production Two Much (Fernando Trueba, 1995), where their open-air performance accompanies the kiss between Art (Antonio Banderas) and Lis (Darryl Hannah). In Cosas, this merging of nations is further stressed when even the Spanish national anthem is given a rumba rhythm played on bass, trumpets and Latin percussion at Ludmila and Javier’s wedding banquet. Though national anthems are described by Connell and Gibson as ‘the culmination of the role of music in constructions of national identity [and] the embodiment of nation in song’ (2003: 127), the Spanish anthem, here, is appropriated and transformed by the ex-colonial subject.7 The national flags of Cuba and Spain are displayed on the top tier of the wedding cake, and the fusion of the two cultures affirmed. But this ending to what is, to all intents and purposes, a romantic comedy, is not free of complication. The film’s special couple is not the one getting married (Ludmila and Javier), but the one about to be split (Nena and Igor). Nena never loses sight of the virtues of her own Cuban background, an awareness most sharply expressed through her earlier insistence on restoring the political content of her show, jettisoned by the producer. Unlike Ludmila, Nena is not prepared to compromise herself in the interests of material security. Javier, the Spaniard who would guarantee her a Spanish passport to a comfortable life, has no appeal. For all his failings, Igor, the Cuban, is Nena’s true partner and offers the prospect of a cultural symbiosis of mutual interests and values. Furthermore, the harmony of the wedding celebration has been prefaced by an assault on Igor by two henchmen who have come to

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settle scores after his theft of the illegal passports that were being prepared by Adolfo (Paco Merino). So, the fantasy of HispanoCuban cooperation and mutual regard and affection rests on underlying tensions. Even at the wedding itself, with the Cuban music underscoring the message of mutual interests, a return to the homeland is what the special couple crave, their sojourn in Spain a temporary convenience. Igor will be returning sooner than expected, extradited from Spain following Adolfo’s exposure of his illegal activities. His deportation exemplifies the theme anticipated by the guaracha song ‘Calabaza, calabaza’ (Pumpkin, Pumpkin) when played at the Aché pa ti club on the day he met Nena for the first time. The origins of the guaracha lie in the comic theatre in nineteenth-century Spain. The genre became popular in musical theatres and low-class dance halls, often carrying irreverent commentary or socio-political criticism. The lyrics of this specific guaracha refer to a well-known Cuban saying about leavetaking: ‘Calabaza, calabaza, todo el mundo pa’ su casa’ (Pumpkin, pumpkin, everyone go home). The highly appropriate inclusion of the song here is readable as an attempt to offer indirect expression of a generalised anti-immigrant sentiment in Spain. But ‘Calabaza, calabaza’ also gestures to wider cultural meanings, for Nena is a latter-day Cinderella, like whom, at the palace ball, she is obliged to wait patiently before finding everlasting happiness with her Prince Charming. She must rush away before her coach turns into a pumpkin (calabaza), her dreams of love and happiness interrupted. In the meantime, though, while they are still in Madrid, and still in touch, the lovers remain committed to each other, a relationship lyricised through music. Eventually the fully orchestrated music of the wedding party gives way to the sounds of a single flute. All other noise is censored to prepare us, through the flute’s slow and gentle melody, for the couple’s deafness to everything else around them. We see the wedding guests dancing in the background to the rhythm of the orchestrated music, but we hear only the flute and its acoustic insistence on the couple’s mutual fascination. Music, in Cosas, plays an important role in signposting the identity and desires of the characters. The film clearly champions, through the choice of a Cuban composer (as well as Cuban scriptwriter and actors), the right of the minority characters to be in control of their own voices. As Gabrielle Carty points out, in Cosas ‘the music heard is that of the people portrayed’ (2003:

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70). On the positive side this ensures that, in the same way that the lion’s share of screen time awarded to Cubans allows them to be the narrators of their own stories, so the music conveys a predominantly Cuban sound. This sound articulates feelings of nostalgia, loss and hope, on some occasions reaffirming identity, on others varying perspective. Its role is not one-dimensional. Admittedly, in many cases, Vitier’s European-accented music carries elements of sadness or frustration. But Cuban music is not free from negative connotations, as, for instance, when used by Igor cynically in Azucena’s company. In fact, one could even argue that Vitier’s syncretic, nuanced and versatile music is even more representative of Cuban identity than the range of characters (and actors) on the screen, none of whom seems to have African ascendancy, a major feature of multi-racial ‘Cubanness’. His music is a true reflection of the transatlantic nature of Cuban culture and seems, therefore, even more open to miscegenation than the characters in the film, who – with the sole exception of María (who is caricatured) and Ludmila and Igor (whose motives are overridingly pragmatic) – seem unwilling to modify their Cuban loyalties. The soundtrack in Cosas forms part of the film’s strategy for portraying attempts to reconcile Cuban and Spanish historic and cultural interests. These impulses are never unambiguous or free from tension, since the film avoids providing an ideal view of relations between the two countries. Music, characterisation and narrative offer no visions of a utopia in which relations between Spaniards and Cubans are unproblematic. Except for the ambivalent Cuban-inflected performance of the Spanish national anthem at the wedding, no other music directly emerging from the interaction of Spaniards and Cubans in this narrative or, for that matter, in the Madrid of the 1990s, is performed or heard in the film. In Cosas music neither provides nor expresses new forms of character empowerment. It is not the resulting creative product of new, emergent identities or practices. This cannot be read, however, as a failure on the part of the film, but perhaps as a realistic assessment of the trials faced by immigrants struggling to retain continuity with their past in the early stages of life in new environments. In its story of immigrants, Cosas can be counted among those films that not only see clearly the opportunities as well as the pitfalls for outsiders and hosts alike, but that also through music find poignant ways of articulating their collective hopes and anxieties.

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Notes 1 For interesting analyses of music’s potential for expressing and empowering minority communities, see, for instance, Nair on Spanish/Moroccan raï (2007: 65), Simonett on Los Angeles technobanda (2007: 88), and George on rap in French ghettoes (2007: 93). 2 I am grateful to Pedro Pérez Sarduy (London), Bernardo Sánchez Salas and Teresa Rodríguez (Logroño), as well as to Javier Herrera and Margarita Lobo (Filmoteca Española, Madrid), for their help with different aspects of the research involved in the writing of this chapter. 3 For detailed consideration of geopolitical, historical and cultural reasons for Spanish cinema’s delayed coverage of immigration, and comparisons with Italian and Greek cinemas, see Santaolalla (2010). For recent references to the use of music in films about migrant or diasporic communities in European cinema see Göktürk (2010) and Berghahn (2010). For a book-length study of this topic in Spain see Inmaculada Gordillo’s edited book on Spanish-Cuban co-productions (2007). Outside film, shorter studies on the way in which mainstream Spanish pop music of the 1980s and 1990s engaged with the emergent phenomenon of migration include Marí (2007) and, especially, Villamandos (2007) and Bermúdez (2007); see, also, Bermúdez (2001). 4 The film’s version of a real Cuban show written by Abilio Estévez in 1994 for actress Vivian Acosta. 5 Nena’s criticism of the director’s betrayal of his principles recalls the Cuban scriptwriter’s disapproval of the many Cuban stereotypes found in the film-within-the-film under production in Spain in the SpanishCuban co-production Aunque estés lejos (So Far Away, Juan Carlos Tabío, 2000). 6 Another interesting lullaby scene occurs in En la puta calle (Enrique Gabriel, 1997), when a middle-aged, unemployed Spanish male, forced to sleep rough in shared accommodation with a Caribbean illegal immigrant, finds comfort in the latter’s rendering of a soothing song, the first of various other moments in which the music of the Caribbean immigrant will be able to transform the despondent, humourless Spaniard. 7 The effect of the rumba-rhythm Spanish national anthem is comparable to the absurdly slow, non-syncopated version of the ‘Island in the Sun’ calypso played by the English brass band in Playing Away (Horace Ové, 1987) to welcome the West Indian cricketers in the East Anglian village of Sneddington. It is also analogous to the non-diegetic Punjabi, bhangra beat, female version of Cliff Richards’s ‘Summer Holiday’ in Bhaji on the Beach (Gurindher Chadha, 1993), and the Indian version by Amar Mohile of ‘The Power of Love’ in Bend it Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2002).

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References Arenas, José (1997), ‘Gutiérrez Aragón rueda con Perugorría “Cosas que dejé en La Habana” ’, ABC (10 June), 90. Berghahn, Daniela (2010), ‘Coming of age in “the hood”: the diasporic youth film and questions of genre’, in Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg (eds), European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 235–55. Berghahn, Daniela and Claudia Sternberg (eds) (2010), European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bermúdez, Silvia (2001), ‘Rocking the boat: the Black Atlantic in Spanish pop music from the 1980s and the ’90s’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 5, 177–93. Bermúdez, Silvia (2007), ‘Lucrecia Pérez en el imaginario cultural de España: del racismo a la ética del perdón’, in Rosalía Cornejo Parriego (ed.), Memoria colonial e inmigración: la negritud en la España posfranquista, Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 239–50. Biddle, Ian and Vanessa Knights (eds) (2007), Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the Local. Abingdon: Ashgate. Born, Georgina and David Hesmondhalgh (2000), ‘Introduction: on difference, representation, and appropriation in music’, in Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (eds), Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1–58. Carty, Gabrielle (2003), ‘A Cuban perspective from within Spain: Cosas que dejé en La Habana (1997)’, in Guido Rings and Rikki MorganTamosunas (eds), European Cinema: Inside Out: Images of the Self and the Other in Postcolonial Film, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 63–73. Chion, Michael (1985), Le Son au cinema, Paris: Cahiers. Connell, John and Chris Gibson (2003), Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place, London and New York: Routledge. Cooke, Mervyn (2008), A History of Film Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cornejo Parriego, Rosalía (ed.) (2007), Memoria colonial e inmigración:  la  negritud en la España posfranquista, Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra. George, Brian (2007), ‘Rapping at the margins: musical constructions of identity in contemporary France’, in Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights (eds), Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the Local, Abingdon: Ashgate, 93–114.

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Göktürk, Deniz (2010), ‘Sound bridges: transnational mobility as ironic melodrama’, in Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg (eds), European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 215–34. Gorbman, Claudia (1987), Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gordillo, Inmaculada (ed.) (2007), Duetos de cine: Coproducciones hispanocubanas con música de fondo, Sanlúcar de Barrameda: Pedro Romero; Universidad de Sevilla: EIHCEROA. Marí, Jorge (2007), ‘“No somos unos zulús”: música de masas, inmigración negra y cultura española contemporánea’, in Rosalía Cornejo Parriego (ed.), Memoria colonial e inmigración: la negritud en la España posfranquista, Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 81–102. Martín-Lunas, Milagros (1997), ‘Un rodaje es como una olla a presión de pasiones’, El mundo (10 June), 52. Nair, Parvati (2007), ‘Voicing risk: migration, transgression and relocation in Spanish/Moroccan raï’, in Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights (eds), Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the Local. Abingdon: Ashgate, 65–79. Romney and Wooton (1995), ‘Interviews’, in Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton (eds), Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s, London: BFI, 119–46. Santaolalla, Isabel (2010), ‘Body matters: immigrants in recent Spanish, Italian and Greek cinemas’, in Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg (eds), European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 152–74. Simonett, Helena (2007), ‘Banda, a new sound from the barrios of Los Angeles: transmigration and transcultural production’, in Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights (eds), Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the Local. Abingdon: Ashgate, 81–92. Villamandos, Alberto (2007), ‘Paseo con la negra flor: sujetos subalternos en la canción popular de la “movida” ’, in Rosalía Cornejo Parriego (ed.), Memoria colonial e inmigración: la negritud en la España posfranquista, Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 103–23. Wade, Peter (2000), Music, Race, and Nation: Música tropical in Colombia, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

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The Afro-Cuban soundscape of Mexico City: authenticating spaces of violence and immorality in Salón México and Víctimas del pecado David F. García In February 1951 the Mexican newspaper El Universal published an anonymous editorial titled ‘La industria fílmica mexicana’ (The Mexican film industry), which characterised the national cinema as decadent (Anon., 1951). The editorial attributed the decadent state of the Mexican film industry to a ‘group of adventurous businessmen’, claiming that these ‘millionaires’ had ‘monopolised movie theatres’ and, as a result, ‘imposed disastrous economic conditions on producers of Mexican films.’ In ‘cheapening’ their films to meet these expectations, Mexican producers had forsaken ‘good Mexican cinema’ which, according to the editorial, was one of the most important modern vehicles for circulating ideas, knowledge, and emotions among large portions of the population. This editorial was one of many that Mexican newspapers published in the late 1940s and early 1950s during which the Mexican film industry marked one of its most commercially and artistically successful periods of production. Other editorials expressed concerns ranging from the perpetuation of violence and immorality in Mexican produced films to ways of strengthening ties with film distributors internationally. Essayist Rubén Salazar Mallén, for instance, wrote ‘El cine ante el crimen’ (The cinema in the presence of crime) in which he suggests a correlation between the rise in crime in Mexico City and the growing depiction of violence in Mexican films (Anon., 1950). As with the editorial discussed above, Salazar Mallén believed that film was the only educative vehicle for a large part of the Mexican population, ‘a true school where character is forged and morality is purified

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or [otherwise] degraded’. He goes on to identify the ‘macho’ in rancheras (country films) and películas de la ciudad (urban films) as a paradigmatic figure for the easily influenced, rough, poor, and ignorant public. The newspaper Novedades published an interview with Juan Bandera, a representative of Películas Mexicanas, which was an association of Mexican film companies (Filmadora Mexicana, Producciones Grovas, and CLASA Films Mundiales) that formed to better distribute and profit from their films in international markets (Anon., 1949).1 According to Bandera particular countries and continents posed unique challenges for Mexican film companies. For example, Argentina’s racial diversity, including the ‘Europeanised residents’ of Buenos Aires, made it such that the ‘sensibility of their population was diametrically opposed to that of the rest of Latin America’, with the result that they received Mexican films ‘with much reservation’. The European market, on the other hand, was to receive only the best films in order to enhance the prestige of the Mexican national film industry. Furthermore, exotic films were to be sent to Africa and the South Pacific, whose peoples shared ‘no point of spiritual contact with us’, but whose curiosity for Mexican films had continued, and it was predicted that Mexican film stars would soon ‘become idols of those peoples’. From these texts emerge two issues that are key to this chapter’s assessment of the significance of Afro-Cuban music and dance in the Mexican films Salón México (Cabaret Mexico, Emilio Fernández, 1949) and Víctimas del pecado (Victims of Sin, Emilio Fernández, 1951). First, these editors and film critics believed there was a deterministic correlation between popular culture and society. Specifically, they perpetuated an elitist perspective on working-class film audiences in their belief that the portrayal of violence and other immoral activities in films shaped the social mores and world views of the uneducated masses. Advertisements published in Mexico City newspapers certainly sensationalised the realism of these films by underscoring the violence in the plots and the musical sensuality of the urban settings. Moreover, the director of these two films, Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández,2 his co-screenwriter Mauricio Magdaleno, and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa incorporated Afro-Cuban music and dance as crucial mimetic and diegetic devices to authenticate the narratives and spaces of performance of these films, as well as to structure camera shots and scene sequences.3 Whether or not

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they believed their films shaped the minds and actions of their audiences, Fernández and his collaborators did construct Afro-Cuban soundscapes to draw audiences into believable urban and nocturnal spaces of immorality and violence during a time when Mexico City was undergoing rapid urbanisation, industrialisation, and cultural cosmopolitanism.4 Indeed, Figueroa characterised both Salón México and Víctimas del pecado as ‘urban Mexico’; their theme was ‘Mexico City at night’ (Feder and Figueroa, 1996: 12). Second, these film critics, filmmakers, and film company owners conceptualised the Mexican film industry as a nationalist project vital to the nation’s economy and artistic prestige among other modern nations. The expansion of the Mexican film industry, however, led to concerns over the degree of control that theatre owners, and by implication film companies, asserted over filmmakers, the result of which was the restriction of the artistic quality of films screened within the nation and exported abroad. The distribution plans of Películas Mexicanas, in particular, indicate how these film company owners conceived of their films and audiences in marketing and ideological terms, wherein they allocated their ‘prestigious’ films for European audiences and ‘exotic’ films for audiences in Africa and the South Pacific. Moreover, the suggestion that Mexican film audiences (in comparison to Argentina’s) were racially homogeneous provides an interpretive window into Mexican racial constructs of mestizaje and blackness that were reinforced in Fernández’s use of racially mixed casts.5 Because the dominant Mexican definition of mestizaje was based on the miscegenation of the European and Indian, black musicians and dancers were indexed as racially Other and thus non-Mexican, making the nocturnal urban spaces in which they performed not only spaces of violence and immorality but also the imaginary products of the filmmaker’s and audience’s racial desires and anxieties.6 This chapter argues that Afro-Cuban music and dance were integral to the making, narrating, and viewing experience of the films Salón México and Víctimas del pecado. Fernández, Magdaleno and Figueroa did more than merely deploy music and dance as characteristics of the urban cabaret. They adhered to the musical form and choreography of the danzón, exploited the perceived ‘frenetic’ qualities of son, mambo, rumba, and Santería music and dancing, and manipulated the volume levels in the soundtrack’s mix, endowing Afro-Cuban music and dance with mimetic and diegetic

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functions.7 Since the 1990s scholars have adopted usually feminist and postcolonial theoretical perspectives in critically examining these and other Mexican films of the mid-twentieth century. They show how these films critique but more often perpetuate Mexico’s official discourses on modernisation, national identity, race, and gender-specific relations of power (Franco, 1989; López, 1991; López, 1993; Monsiváis, 1993; Hershfield, 1996; Tuñón, 2000, 2006; Hernández Cuevas, 2004; Pulido Llano, 2010). This chapter expands on their interpretive insight by exploring the important ways this music and dance not only articulated these discourses, but also participated in the films’ narratives to vex the sensibilities of the characters as well as to narrate the sounds of the urban nocturnal underworld for the audiences. It also incorporates contemporaneous advertisements and film reviews – materials that are largely absent in the existing literature – in reading the reception of these films in newspapers published in Mexico City. With Mexico’s so-called ‘economic miracle’ of the post-Second World War era came dramatic shifts in the nation’s demographics (the population doubled and waves of migrants moved from rural areas to the cities), increased foreign capital, and a booming film industry of an international scope, all of which challenged and reinforced normative definitions of Mexican national identity (Cohn, 2005; Davis, 1994: 103–21; Muñoz Castillo, 1993). Danzón: the soul of Mexico? Beginning in the nineteenth century, the Afro-Cuban habanera, danzón, rumba and bolero, often referred to collectively in Mexico as música tropical or ‘tropical music’, formed an integral part of local musical traditions throughout the nation (Geijerstam, 1976: 25, 74–5; Stigberg, 1978; Bock, 1992; Flores y Escalante, 1994: 59–98; Martré, 1997: 11–13). Introduced in the late nineteenth century in Veracruz, Villahermosa, Yucatán and Mexico City, danzón quickly became popular throughout Mexican society, but as with most popular musical and dance forms, different styles of dancing danzón and the places in which it was performed and danced lent the music class-based and regional associations. Urban cabarets and brothels, for example, became particularly associated with a less refined danzón style as compared with its adaptations into the Mexican piano salon and, later, symphonic repertories.

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By the 1910s the Mexican danzón ensemble, popularly known as danzonera, emerged to become the primary instrumental format for Mexican-composed danzones such as ‘Nereidas’ and ‘Juárez, no debió de morir’ (Juárez Should Not Have Died). Despite this history of Mexican-produced and performed danzones, Emilio Fernández tended to conflate them with other Afro-Cuban musical styles in his films, choosing instead to use mariachi (traditional style of Mexica son music, originally from Jalisco) music as the sonic index of the nation’s music. Nevertheless, Fernández relied on these danzones and other musical and dance styles to lend his films a sense of realism and sensuality. As such, these films represent significant texts of the popularity and contradictory meanings that danzón and Afro-Cuban music shared in Mexican society of the mid-twentieth century. No other film of this era represents the significance of danzón and Afro-Cuban music in Mexican society more tellingly than Salón México. Produced by CLASA Films Mundiales, Salón México premiered at the Orfeón cinema theatre in Mexico City on 25 February 1949 and ran until 24 March; it was subsequently exhibited at least once more in October 1950. The cast was led by Argentine actress Marga López, who played Mercedes Gómez, and the Mexican actors Miguel Inclán and Rodolfo Acosta, who played the police officer Lupe López and pimp Paco, respectively. In the film, Mercedes works as a prostitute in the cabaret Salón México to pay for her younger sister Beatriz’s education at a boarding school. With the help of Lupe López, Mercedes struggles to keep her work a secret from her sister, the school’s headmaster, and her sister’s fiancé. Fernández, Magdaleno and Figueroa attempted to recreate the musical milieu of the real Salon México, a popular cabaret in Mexico City, by writing danzón and other styles of Afro-Cuban popular music into the film’s narrative.8 Not only does Afro-Cuban music initiate the film’s drama, with Mercedes pleading with Paco to share with her the money that has been awarded to them for winning a danzón dance contest; the music and dancing also lends sonic and embodied realism to spaces that advertisers and critics characterised as violent, immoral, modern and cosmopolitan. The film features three danzones: ‘Almendra’ (Almond), composed by Abelardo Valdés (1911–58) of Cuba; ‘Nereidas’, composed by Amador Pérez Torres (1892–1978) of Oaxaca; and

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‘Juárez, no debió de morir’, composed by Esteban Alfonso García (1888–1950) of Chiapas (Orovio, 2004).9 All three danzones are performed by the Mexican group Son Clave de Oro, which had formed in Veracruz and was known as one of the most popular Mexican groups playing música tropical. What is particularly unique about Son Clave de Oro’s interpretation of these danzones is its instrumentation of flute, trumpets, tres, piano, bass, timbales, güiro, claves, and conga drums.10 This grouping of instruments contrasted with the conventional instrumentation of the Cuban charanga ensemble that was associated with the style of danzón popular at the time in Cuba. Most Cuban charangas in the 1940s featured flute, violins and piano, and rarely included trumpets and tres, whereas the instrumentation of Mexican danzoneras combined trumpets and trombones with saxophones and violins. Son Clave de Oro’s sound, therefore, was a fusion of the Cuban charanga and son group with the Mexican danzonera. Although Son Clave de Oro’s instrumentation was unique to the interpretation of danzón, Fernández and Magdaleno follow the danzón’s conventional rondo-like form (ABACAD) to structure the narrative and determine the sequence of camera shots for the film’s opening scene.11 Immediately following the opening credits, which are accompanied by an orchestral film score, the film’s audience is positioned precariously outside the Salón México with the camera moving diagonally upward to the neon sign that flashes the cabaret’s name overhead against the night sky. The paseo (or introductory section, which functions as the music’s refrain [labelled A] and the dancers’ cue to promenade to the dance floor) of ‘Almendra’ plays as the next shot shows women, including Mercedes, promenading down the street into the cabaret to begin their work as dancers/prostitutes. The very first shot inside the forbidden space of the cabaret coincides with the first musical segment (B), which features a flute solo and signals the start of the dance. Figueroa uses a medium close shot on the güiro player playing the danzón’s trademark cinquillo or five-beat rhythm, then zooms out while panning to the left, showing the smoke-filled cabaret and couples embraced in dance. The second musical section (C) immediately follows, skipping the return to the instrumental refrain, with a long shot of four dance couples competing in front of the judges’ table on a raised stage. Then a medium shot shows Mercedes pleading

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with Paco to share the prize money if they should win. This medium shot allows for a better view of the stage’s back wall, which consists of a fresco depicting musicians and dancers dressed in charros, the stylised clothing of the rural and traditional mariachi, and other garb associated with indigenous musical traditions. After a closeup of the couple’s feet, another medium shot of Mercedes and Paco occurs at the beginning of the third musical section (D), which is the most lively of the danced sections and features a flute solo and sung call-and-response. Shouts from the audience are heard, including ‘¡mulata como goza!’ (mulata, how much she enjoys [dancing]!) and ‘¡vaya!’ (go on!). The next danzón featured in the film is ‘Nereidas’. The scene involves Mercedes admitting to Lupe that she has stolen Paco’s wallet which contained the prize money in order to help pay for her sister’s boarding school. Mercedes and Lupe have their conversation at the entrance to the cabaret as Son Clave de Oro plays ‘Nereidas’ inside. As in the opening scene, the sound of danzón music extends the space of the cabaret beyond its physical setting to envelop the street, all who pass by, as well as the film’s audience. Later, after being beaten by Paco, Mercedes returns to the cabaret where she is met by Lupe, who expresses his unconditional love for her. The scene begins with Mercedes washing her face in a dressing room as the paseo of ‘Juarez, no debió de morir’ begins. She then returns to her table where Lupe notices the bruises on her face as the first musical segment starts. Ashamed, Mercedes kisses his hands, to which he objects, insisting that it is he who should kiss her hands, feet, and the ground that she walks on for the sacrifices she makes for her sister. Named after the Virgin of Guadalupe, Lupe’s gesture exemplifies what Joanne Hershfield and others have identified in Mexican films as the redemption of the La Malinche/whore figure; that is, Lupe’s gesture of devotion transforms Mercedes from a traitor of the Mexican nation/whore into a redeemed mother figure who ‘gave up her own freedom for the future of her sons and daughters’ (Hershfield, 1996: 94).12 Yet, this scene’s signifying does not end with an act of gendered immorality and redemption. As Lupe leaves Mercedes’s table, dejected yet still loyal after she has refused to burden him in marriage with her responsibilities to her sister, the verse of ‘Juárez, no debió de morir’ is sung:

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Juárez no debió de morir, ay de morir / Juárez should not have died, oh not have died Porque si Juárez no hubiera muerto / Because if Juárez had not died Otro gallo cantaría / Another rooster would be singing La patria se salvaría / The nation would save itself México sería feliz / Mexico would be happy.

As the singing continues, the camera follows Lupe as he walks between couples and passes four women waiting for dance partners/customers. Here, the lyrics further support Hershfield’s interpretation of Mercedes and the other women as signifying the collapse of the traditional Mexican family, owing to the transformations in women’s social and economic roles in modern urban Mexico (1996: 95). Similarly, Dolores Tierney interprets the space of the Salón México as ‘explicitly sexualized and patriarchal’, where ‘proper gender roles, male domination and female submission, are emphasized and guaranteed’, as with Mercedes’s capitulation to Paco during their opening dance sequence (Tierney, 2007: 132). Yet, Tierney states that the music in the film ‘never comment[s] on Mercedes’s predicament or state of mind, nor [is it] motivated from her point of view’ (2007: 130). In fact, the lyrics of ‘Juárez, no debió de morir’ articulate both Mercedes’s and Lupe’s rebuke of the modern nation’s contradictions and failures in their desire for redemption and happiness in marriage. Indeed, in the film’s penultimate scene Beatriz graduates and is betrothed to the headmaster’s son, a fighter pilot in the Mexican air force. This scene’s musical score, a triumphant theme performed by a symphony orchestra, is strikingly juxtaposed with the final scene’s return to the singing of ‘Juárez, no debió de morir’, as long and medium shots capture a seemingly endless line of women promenading down the street and into the Salón México to begin another night’s work. The final shot is at a low angle and zooms in to a close-up of Lupe, who is standing at the front door as the women walk past him into the club, and the words ‘Porque si Juárez no hubiera muerto’ (Because if Juárez had not died) are sung. A brief interlude of drumming follows as a demoralised Lupe looks up to the sky and then turns to walk into the club; the remaining lyrics are sung: ‘Otro gallo cantaría / La patria se salvaría / México sería feliz’ (Another rooster would be singing / The nation would save itself / Mexico would be happy). Miguel

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Inclán, who plays the role of Lupe, had played President Benito Juárez in the 1943 film Mexicanos al grito de guerra (Mexicans’ War Cry, Álvaro Gálvez y Fuentes and Ismael Rodríguez), lending this final scene a powerful instance of intertextuality in which Lupe embodies the first indigenous president of a nation who would die before the nation reached its true destiny. The film score signals the end of the film with a dissonant chord (B-flat augmented major seventh chord), reminding the audience one last time of the moral and sonic dissonance that resonates from Mexico City’s nocturnal spaces for dancing to and playing música tropical. An examination of Salón México’s advertisements reveals that the film company marketed the film as a realistic portrayal of the human tragedy unfolding in the city’s nocturnal spaces for music making and dancing. Advertisements included a still of Paco grabbing the arm of a beaten Mercedes, while headings stated the following: La vida tortuosa de una ciudad que se desangra por las noches (The torturous life of a city that bleeds at night); La mas cruda e impresionante realidad llevada a la pantalla por el genial Emilio Fernández (The most raw and impressive reality brought to the screen by the genius Emilio Fernádez); El hampa tenebrosa del México nocturno en una película de grandiosa realidad (The sinister underworld of the nocturnal Mexico in a film of grandiose reality); Totalmente filmada en los lugares auténticos (Totally filmed in the authentic places); ¡Hombres y mujeres de vida nocturna! ¡Fiero despertar de la sensualidad y el crimen! (Men and women of the night! A fierce eye-opener of sensuality and crime); and El verdadero ‘Salón México’ con su música sensual (The real ‘Salón México’ with its sensual music).13 As controversy among film critics and audiences arose over the film, other headings asked film audiences to ¡Conózcala, critíquela usted mismo! (Know it, critique it yourself), while others proclaimed Domingo matinee! Que Dios se lo pague y que Dios me perdone (Sunday matinee! May God reward you and may God forgive me).14 In addition to danzón, Afro-Cuban rumba and son lent sonic and kinaesthetic resonance to the film’s depiction of the sensuality, sinister quality, and criminality that, as the advertisements colourfully stressed, characterised the ‘tortuous life’ of Mexico City. Tierney provides a detailed assessment of the rumba abierta (open-ended rumba) that follows the scene in which Paco refuses

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to share the prize money with Mercedes. Here a woman of African descent dances in a sexually uninhibited fashion ‘free from the bounds of patriarchal and restrictive couple-dom’, as musicians play on conga drums, bongos, bells, claves and other hand percussion (see Tierney, 2007: 127–36). Tierney acknowledges past readings of scenes featuring rumberas (female rumba dancers) in this and other films as projecting liberated sexualities onto exotic women (that is, non-Mexican female others), unattainable by Mexican women in accordance with the nation’s conservative and patriarchal sexual codes. Alternatively, she suggests that these same scenes might be read as highlighting Mexico’s own African heritage which had always been denigrated and disavowed in the Mexican nationalist discourse of mestizaje. Tierney ultimately favours her first reading but mistakenly identifies Son Clave de Oro as a Cuban band. In fact the camera alternates between close-up shots of the dancers and the musicians, the latter appearing to be of mixed Indian and Spanish descent. Extreme close-ups of their hands beating on the bells and heads of the conga drums are also interwoven into the sequence of shots. The fact that Fernández featured a popular Mexican group from Veracruz in a film purporting to be a realistic portrayal of Mexico City’s ‘sinister underworld’ suggests a third reading that conveys the violent and morally corrupting implications of Mexicans’ participation in the city’s Afro-Cuban soundscape. For instance, Son Clave de Oro performs a sequence of three Cuban sones during key scenes foreshadowing the murders of Mercedes and Paco. The first son is ‘El caballo y la montura’ (The Horse and Saddle) composed by Cuban Eduardo Saborit (1912–63) (Orovio, 2004: 192). This scene begins with the group’s trumpet player playing the song’s opening line as he rolls around on the stage, ending with the bell of the trumpet in front of the camera’s lens. At this point the trumpet’s volume is noticeably higher than the other instruments, drawing the audience sonically into the clamours and musical stridency that envelope the cabaret. The next shot captures a beer bottle crashing into other bottles over the head of a startled bartender. Next, a desperate Mercedes begs a man to let her keep the ten pesos she has grabbed from his hand. He responds by throwing her to the ground as the music plays on and the men and women in the room laugh uncontrollably. Paco helps Mercedes to her feet and asks calmly for her to sit down so

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he can have a word with her. As they sit together the lead singer’s and diegetic audience’s shouts of excitement, as well as the trumpet and bongo playing, are prominently heard in the foreground of the soundtrack. With a sincere tone, Paco asks Mercedes to return to him, but she refuses saying: ‘Entre tú y yo nada es posible mientras estemos vivos’ (Nothing is possible between you and me while we are both alive) and ‘No te quieras aprovechar el miedo que te tengo. Acuerdate que tambien por miedo se mata’ (You don’t want to take advantage of the fear I have of you. Remember that one kills out of fear as well). The next son ‘Un meneíto namá’ (A Little Movement That’s All), composed by Cuban Jesús Guerra (1920–95), marks the beginning of another scene in which Paco asks Mercedes to dance (Orovio, 2004: 103). She refuses and walks through the crowd of dancers to the bar as Paco pursues her. Again, the sung call-andresponse of the son’s montuno section is heard in the foreground of the soundtrack. This arrangement of ‘Un meneíto namá’ features the pianist playing a montuno or short, syncopated and repetitive pattern typical of the mambo style that was popular in Mexico, Cuba, New York City, and across much of Latin America in the late 1940s. A woman is even heard shouting ‘¡mambo, mambo, mambo!’ as Paco pleads with Mercedes to join him on his next crime spree. She rejects him; then Paco calls over a woman with whom he dances to the penultimate section of the arrangement, featuring climactic trumpet lines, a flute solo, bongo rolls, and exuberant shouts of approval from the audience. Dancing to modern Afro-Cuban music and conspiring to commit crimes are thus seamlessly interwoven. Exhausted from Paco’s incursive proposals and the seemingly endless succession of Cuban sones, Mercedes stumbles towards the exit, where she meets Lupe, who offers to walk her home safely. Another son, ‘Sopa de pichón’ (Pigeon Soup), composed by Cuban Francisco ‘Machito’ Grillo (1912–84), begins as Mercedes admits to Lupe to having never before felt so in danger as she does this night (Orovio, 2004: 129). When they turn the corner of the exit they encounter a street vendor selling gardenias. Lupe hands over money to the vendor, saying, ‘Toma, veinte por tu flor de muerto’ (Here, twenty for your flower of death). Realising what he has said, Lupe suggests they throw the flower away lest it bring Mercedes bad luck. She accepts the flower, dismissing the gardenia’s signification

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as superstition. The music, as always, is prominently heard on the soundtrack even as the couple walk up the street away from the cabaret and toward Mercedes’s impending death. As these scenes demonstrate, Fernández, Magdaleno and Figueroa deployed Afro-Cuban music to animate dance couples who have immoral intentions, to entertain Paco while he conspires to commit criminal and violent acts, and to exhaust Mercedes as she seeks safety and redemption. Their use of the popular Mexican group Son Clave de Oro and the film company’s marketing of the film as a realistic portrayal of the ‘sensuous’ musical nightlife in a ‘bleeding’ Mexico City gave further resonance to the notion of a morally corrupt capital city. As a result, one critic, El Duende Filmo, considered the film particularly appropriate for young people: ‘to whom’, he proclaimed, ‘is offered an example and a moral of atonement for an offence and punishment of a crime’ (El Duende Filmo, 1949). In addition, the critic suggests that the scenes in the Salón México were among the most dramatic, although he admits ‘not knowing the environment of the Salón México’, stating ‘I don’t know if strident Afro-Cuban music prevails there’ (El Duende Filmo, 1949). Despite his endorsement, El Duende Filmo objected to the movie trailer’s announcement that the film ‘reflects the soul of Mexico’. In a cartoon that accompanies the review the cartoonist depicts the trailer’s announcer as a donkey, the film as a semi-nude prostitute whose heart/body has a price, and the critic as a diminutive camera who replies: ‘Sirs, the soul of Mexico is not in the mud’. The stridency in Afro-Cuban music to which this critic referred was effectively conveyed in Salón México through the music’s prominent volume levels in the soundtrack, the shouts of the singers and dancers, and close-up shots of the musicians playing their instruments. Fernández’s intention for the film, however, was not to present the true Mexico, despite the claim in the trailer, but rather to drown it out with the sound of another Mexico, one with foreign roots and modern and urban sensibilities, the songs ‘Nereidas’ and ‘Juárez, no debió de morir’ notwithstanding. Fernández signalled the foreignness, sensuousness, and threat of the city’s Afro-Cuban soundscape in another film, Víctimas del pecado (Victims of Sin), using many of the same diegetic and mimetic devices that made Salón México an indictment of the urban and transnational soundscape of the nation’s capital.

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Changó in the underworld Produced by Cinematográfica Calderón SA, Víctimas del pecado premiered at the Orfeón cinema theatre in Mexico City on 2 February 1951. The film featured the Cuban actress Ninón Sevilla in the role of cabaret dancer and prostitute Violeta; Rodolfo Acosta again playing a pimp and gangster; Cuban singer and actress Rita Montaner as a cabaret performer and Violeta’s artistic mentor; and Mexican actor Tito Junco as Santiago, the owner of the cabaret La Maquina Loca (The Crazy Machine) and Violeta’s love interest. The plot involves Violeta saving a baby boy from a city rubbish bin, where his mother Rosa, a prostitute and dancer at the cabaret Changoo, was pressured to abandon the infant by his father Rodolfo. Violeta raises the child and with the help of Santiago protects the boy from Rodolfo. As with Salón México, advertisements sensationalised the realism of Víctimas del pecado with the following captions: La película más realista! (The most realistic film); Un poema de amor humana en el bajo mundo donde imperan el crimen y el odio! (A poem of human love in the underworld where crime and hate reign); Conozca usted los autenticos barrios bajos de nuestra gran ciudad, sus mujeres, sus hombres, sus pasiones (Come to know the authentic slums of our great city, its women, its men, its passions); and Madres que no merecen serlo, hijos que no debían haber nacido, hombres sin fe y sin dignidad (Mothers who don’t deserve to be mothers, children who shouldn’t have been born, men without faith or dignity).15 Fernández, Magdaleno and Figueroa represent Afro-Cuban music and dancing, as they did in Salón México, to animate the characters and authenticate the spaces in the film where crime, hate and passion were said to reign. Moreover, they coordinated the camera shots and narrative with the musical arrangement of ‘Almendra’, the same danzón that initiated the plot of Salón México, for one of the film’s most important scenes: Rodolfo’s rejection of Rosa and their child in the cabaret Changoo. ‘Almendra’ is also heard during Santiago’s confrontation with Rodolfo, precipitating the former’s murder by the latter, in the cabaret La Maquina Loca. The Orquesta Aragón, one of the most popular Cuban charangas at the time, performs ‘Almendra’ in both scenes.16 The scene in which Rodolfo rejects Rosa and the baby features a minimum of dialogue, allowing the narrative to operatically reveal

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itself through the actions of the actors and the mood conveyed in the music, almost as if it were a silent film. This scene begins with the opening of the A section of ‘Almendra’ in the key of G major as an overhead shot of an alley captures a shadowy figure walking toward the Changoo. Then the camera shot changes to a close-up of Rosa, who pauses in front of the cabaret looking hesitant. This shot is followed by a long shot that captures Rosa with her infant wrapped to her chest as she takes her first step toward the entrance precisely on the first beat of the first segment of dancing. This section is actually the C section of the standard arrangement, the B part having been skipped over in this instance. Once in the cabaret she and her infant are happily greeted by her co-workers as the C section (still in G major) is repeated. Then the D part begins in a new key, G minor, which conveys a more sombre mood, as one of her co-workers turns her head toward the balcony where Rosa can find Rodolfo. She places her arm around Rosa’s back and leads her toward the balcony. The D part is repeated when Rodolfo sees Rosa with the infant and his mood changes from enjoyment to shock as he steps back speechless. Then the A section triumphantly returns as Rosa holds the infant up to Rodolfo, hoping he will accept the boy as his son. Instead he skirts past Rosa, rejecting them both. The next shot captures a distraught Rodolfo at the bar ordering a bottle as the A section is repeated. Couples dance behind Rodolfo, who drinks straight from the bottle at the beginning of the final and most danceable section. Soon after a police officer tells a weeping Rosa that she has to leave the cabaret. She responds that he will have to kill her if he wants her to leave. She begs the cabaret owner, Don Gonzalo to let her stay, but he demands that the police officer take her away. She then begs Rodolfo to tell the police that they are not fighting and that she wants to work. He too refuses and marches out of the cabaret into the alley, where the piano and flute solos can still be heard. Rosa runs after Rodolfo, who in a following scene will suggest to her that she get rid of the child if she wants him to take her back. Two other scenes feature folkloric Afro-Cuban singing, drumming, and dancing. The first of these scenes, which occurs two minutes into the film, features Rita Montaner singing chants to the Santería oricha Changó (the god of fire, thunder, lightning and war), a Cuban big band directed by Dámaso Pérez Prado playing an arrangement based on a common rhythm of the Santería batá

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drum repertory, and Violeta and a group of women performing a choreographed dance for Changó. After her introductory supplication to Changó, Montaner sings the first chant in the Yoruba language: Oba sere Changó iloro. Oba sere Changó iloro (King of the gourd rattle, Chango is wealthy. King of the gourd rattle, Chango is wealthy).17 The maraca, bongo and conga percussionists accompany the singing with chachalokafún, a rhythm that is played for any oricha and is known for inciting people to dance (Hagedorn, 2001: 124). As the chant and playing begin, Violeta dances on to the dance floor in between two rows of female dancers, all of whom are wearing long flowing skirts and blouses with ruffled sleeves, leaving their midriffs uncovered. The women are also wearing headdresses that appear to be large bows shaped like Chango’s crown, which signifies his status as the king of kings. The music continues with a second chant: Changó l’ara mi. Changó l’ara mi (Changó possess my body. Changó possess my body) (Mason, 1992: 189). In accordance with the chant’s meaning, the drumming picks up in intensity and tempo while Violeta thrusts her hands upward into the air, then abruptly lowers them in a chopping motion as if in combat with an enemy.18 Montaner concludes this chant with an ululation, and then after a brief pause she begins the routine’s climax with a third chant: A ina bu kaka, Changó. A ina bu kaka (The fire roars violently, Changó. The fire roars violently) (Mason, 1992: 193). The drummers, changing to a rhythm more characteristic of a rumba, increase the tempo as Violeta spins, head down, and Montaner adds more ululations and shouts. The routine ends with the big band blaring out a dissonant F augmented chord and Violeta standing triumphantly with raised arms surrounded by the other dancers, who are hunched to the ground. Although this performance is presented as a stylised version of Santería singing, drumming and dancing, it is clear that Fernández and Magdaleno featured Changó because of the resonance that this oricha’s characteristics have with the Rodolfo character and the broader soundscape of the city. Changó’s favourite activities include partying, drinking, womanising and fighting. He shows no pity or compassion, and his dancing is described as violent, licentious, erotic, arrogant and defiant.19 These characteristics define Rodolfo, the zoot suit-clad pachuco (youth associated with gang activities and the defiance of conventional authority), who

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is shown in four cut-away shots during the Changó dance routine enjoying Violeta’s dancing while surrounded by women and flirting with another woman, despite the fact that she is accompanied by her date. Rodolfo also demonstrates his defiance of customary Mexican dance traditions by dancing a pseudo-jitterbug to the accompaniment of Pérez Prado’s big band. In her assessment of the categories of Mexican maleness and machismo, Hershfield argues that Rodolfo Acosta’s other pachuco character, Paco in Salón México ‘represents all that is wrong with Mexico: the lower-class male’s rejection of his indigenous roots, his adoption of foreign dress and mannerisms (specifically those of the United States), and his penchant for violence’ (Hershfield, 1996: 98). Indeed, Acosta’s pachuco characters in both films embody the qualities of the transnational city. In Víctimas del pecado Rodolfo not only takes pleasure in the Changó dance routine, he also instructs his female hangers-on to ask Violeta how they can ‘make it’ like she has done, to which one woman replies: ‘She was a whore like all of us, but she is an artist.’ More than just adopting foreign dress and mannerisms, this scene suggests that becoming an entertainer in Afro-Cuban music and dance is one sure way for ficheras or prostitutes to become artists and make it out of the city’s slums. Moreover, dancing to North American music, that is the popular music of African Americans, reaffirms one’s manhood and sophistication. From another perspective, however, these displays of foreign music and dance further signify the city’s cultural decadence and racial sickness. For instance, two days before the premiere of Salón México, the newspaper Novedades published a photograph of the famed director with the following caption: ‘No. Emilio Fernández no se está riendo de todos los escritores que lo han demandado por plagio de argumentos. Rie tan sabrosamente provocado por las contorsiones de nuestros “pachucos y carnales” en un reciente concurso de epilepsia denominado Jitterbug’ (No. Emilio Fernández is not laughing at all the writers who have sued him for plagiarism of screenplays. He laughs so deliciously because of the contortions of our ‘pachucos and carnales’ in a recent epilepsy contest called Jitterbug).20 Unlike the Changó dance scene, with its use of actual chants and rhythms from the Santería repertory, the jitterbug dance scene is a parody of actual swing dancing intended to mock those very dancers who Fernández observed at this contest. In addition,

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Violeta never realises her promise as an artist or entertainer but instead finds herself imprisoned for murdering Rodolfo. The second scene that features Afro-Cuban folkloric drumming and dancing is strategically juxtaposed with another scene that features mariachi music performed in a religious setting, thereby making as clear as possible the distinction between non-Mexican and Mexican soundscapes. After taking a new job at the cabaret La Maquina Loca, Violeta offers to substitute for a dancer and performs a fast rumba abierta accompanied by conga and bongo drummers. Unlike the danzón’s multi-sectional structure, this rumba abierta is structurally open-ended and cyclic, involving the repetition of short rhythmic patterns and extemporaneous playing. Accordingly, Figueroa shot the scene from various angles and lengths, and these different shots were edited to follow each other in rapid succession, visually conveying the rather frenetic nature of the drumming and dance. He includes a high angle shot of the dance floor; extreme close-ups of the percussionists’ hands playing on the drums; close-ups of the drummers, Violeta, and a male dancer; long shots at eye level and low angle of the playing and dancing; shots that follow Violeta dancing around the dance floor; and medium shots of Santiago, the club owner and Violeta’s partner. The nationality of the black musicians who accompany Violeta is unspecified in the film, and the musicians themselves have no speaking roles and are uncredited. ‘Chimi’ Monterrey is the dancer who joins Violeta, and the other Cuban musicians include Modesto Durán, Ramón Castro and Clemente ‘Chicho’ Piquero.21 What is most revealing of the gendered and racialised dynamics of this scene is Violeta’s execution of dance steps that are otherwise the domain of male rumba dancers. Soon after Monterrey joins Violeta on the dance floor, he executes a vacunao, the male’s signature step in rumba guaguancó dancing, which involves any kind of physical gesture toward the female’s midriff. Violeta responds by delivering her own vacunaos toward Monterrey. Because this dance move is a signifier of sexual domination and conquest in rumba dancing, we can interpret Violeta’s vacunaos as a sign of her sexual empowerment at the expense of the black male dancer’s emasculation. In effect, the white female neutralises the black male’s masculinity and virility, turning Mexican gendered relations on their head while simultaneously reinforcing the inferiority and otherness of the black male in Mexican conceptions of mestizaje and national identity.

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The next scene shows Violeta and Santiago carrying her adopted baby to be baptised, all the while accompanied by a mariachi playing the huapango ‘El tren’ (The Train).22 With these quintessential sonic and visual signifiers of urban and rural Mexico, Fernández and Magdaleno bring back the classic dichotomy of La Malinche and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Violeta dances rumba with a black man in a nocturnal urban space and, thus, evokes the figure of La Malinche, which Ana López characterises as ‘the violated mother of modern Mexico’ (López, 1991: 33). Violeta’s honour, however, is restored, if only momentarily, when she takes on the traditional role of the nation’s Virgin mother as prescribed by the patriarchal Catholic Church and signified by the sound of mariachi music as performed by the nation’s true mestizo sons. Conclusion This chapter has assessed how Mexican filmmakers Emilio Fernández, Mauricio Magdaleno and Gabriel Figueroa utilised Afro-Cuban music and dancing to convey believable spaces of immorality and violence for their audiences. They deployed the music and dancing diegetically to animate, entertain and exhaust the characters, and mimetically to construct an underworld of nocturnal urban spaces that defied the conventions of Mexican national identity. They constructed these subversive spaces, however, in ways that reinforced normative Mexican conceptions of gender and race. In Salón México and Víctimas del pecado male anxiety towards women’s new roles during the nation’s ‘economic miracle’ is encoded not merely in the representation of fallen women as prostitutes in the urban cabarets, but also in the sounds and movements of Afro-Cuban music and dance, which serve as the circumstantial causes of violent deaths. Just as some critics believed that the ‘macho’ served as a paradigmatic figure of violence for film audiences, these filmmakers represented Afro-Cuban music and dancing as paradigms of sexual deviance and racial otherness as well as violence. In short the city’s transnational soundscape posed a threat to the nation’s official notions of its own racially homogeneous identity born of mestizaje. The Afro-Cuban soundscape encompassed, in Hershfield’s (1996: 98) words, ‘all that [was] wrong with Mexico’.

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Notes 1 For more information on Películas Mexicanas see Saavedra Luna (2006). 2 Fernández was of indigenous descent and, thus, was known as ‘El Indio’ or The Indian. 3 For an explanation of diegetic uses of music in film see Buhler (2001). In an interview Gabriel Figueroa explained that Emilio Fernández allowed Figueroa to compose a scene any way the cinematographer wanted (Feder and Figueroa, 1996). 4 For information on the economic policies of the administrations of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46) and Miguel Alemán (1946–52) see Davis (1994: 102–36). 5 The dominant conception of national identity throughout Latin America of the twentieth century was based on the ideology of mestizaje, which posited a monocultural and racially homogeneous national identity. In advocating the ideology of mestizaje Latin American intellectuals neutralised their respective nation’s culturally and racially pluralistic society (Martínez-Echazábal, 1998). 6 Homi Bhabha’s theorisation of racist stereotypes in colonial discourse is helpful in interpreting these uses of Afro-Cuban-derived music and dancing as articulations of the Mexican male’s anxieties toward black racial difference and African-Spanish miscegenation. Bhabha argues that recognition of racial difference has produced anxiety in the ‘colonist’ who has then displaced his anxiety in racist stereotypes concerning skin colour, racial phenotype, or simply the body of the Other. Underlying the anxiety of racial difference, according to Bhabha, is the desire for racial and cultural purity, a racially and culturally undifferentiated origin, and a culturally, moralistically, and racially homogeneous nation (Bhabha, 1994: 106–8). 7 Danzón and son are Cuban forms of social dancing that developed  initially among the black middle and working classes. Santería music and dance accompany rituals of the Santería religion,  which consists of Yoruba practices mixed with aspects of Catholicism. 8 Carlos Monsiváis indicates that the Salón México dance hall opened its doors on 20 April 1920 and was located on the street Calle Pensador, Mexico City (Monsiváis, 1978). 9 According to one source the lyrics of ‘Juárez, no debió de morir’ were originally ‘Martí, no debió de morir’ (Martí should not have died, which refers to José Julián Martí Pérez [1853–95], a writer, political activist and national hero to Cubans) and composed for a clave (Cuban genre in 3/4 time) by a Cuban composer. See http://78rpm33rpm.blog

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Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema spot.com / 2009 / 03 / juarez - no - debio - de - morir - hay - de - morir. html. (accessed 17 March 2011). Tres is a Cuban folk guitar associated with Cuban son groups. The timbales is a Cuban percussion instrument consisting of two drums with metal frames set on a stand. Güiro is a Cuban scraper instrument usually made from a gourd. Clave is a Cuban percussion instrument consisting of two resonant sticks made of hard wood. The rondo is a rounded musical form of western European origin. Sections of this form are conventionally represented as ABACAD in which the A section functions as a refrain. La Malinche or Doña Marina is the indigenous woman who was given to Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés by a Tabascan tribe and who became his mistress. After independence she came to symbolise the humiliation – the rape – of the indigenous people and the act of treachery that would lead to their oppression (Franco, 1989: 131). Advertisements published in Excelsior, 20 February–18 March 1949; El Universal, 23 February–18 March 1949; Novedades, 23–25 February 1949. Advertisement published in Excelsior, 4–13 March 1949. Advertisements published in El Universal, 1–8 February 1951. Marco Salazar, personal communication. Translations of these chants are from Mason (1992: 201). Hagedorn (2001) and Frutos (1990) provide descriptions of the typical dance choreography for Changó and other orishas. Frutos (1990: 103–5) and Pedroso (1995: 41–2). Image published in Novedades, 23 February 1949. Marcos Salazar Gutiérrez and Jorge Coya, personal communication. Huapango is a music and dance tradition associated with the Huapango region of North Eastern Mexico.

References Bhabha, Homi K. (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Bock, Philip K. (1992), ‘Music in Mérida, Yucatan’, Latin American Music Review, 13: 1, 33–55. Buhler, James (2001), ‘Analytical and interpretive approaches to film music (II): analyzing interactions of music and film’, in Kevin J. Donnelly (ed), Film Music: Critical Approaches, New York: Continuum, 39–61. Cohn, Deborah (2005), ‘The Mexican intelligentsia, 1950–1968: cosmopolitanism, national identity, and the State’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 21: 1, 141–82. Davis, Diane E. (1994), Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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El Duende Filmo (1949), ‘Nuestro cinema’, El Universal (4 March). El Universal (1951), ‘La industria fílmica mexicana’ (5 February). Excelsior (1950), ‘El cine ante el crimen’ (14 October). Feder, Elena and Figueroa, Gabriel (1996), ‘A reckoning: interview with Gabriel Figueroa’, Film Quarterly, 49: 3, 2–14. Flores y Escalante, Jesús (1994), Imagenes del danzón: Iconografía del danzón en México, Mexico City: Asociación Mexicana de Estudios Fonográficos. Franco, Jean (1989), Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, New York: Columbia University Press. Frutos, Argelio (1990), Panteón Yoruba: Conversación con un santero cubano, Havana: Ediciones Orishas de Cuba. Geijerstam, Claes af (1976), Popular Music in Mexico, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Hagedorn, Katherine J. (2001), Divine Utterances: The Performing of Afro-Cuban Santería, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hernández Cuevas, Marco Polo (2004), African Mexicans and the Discourse on Modern Nation, Dallas: University Press of America. Hershfield, Joanne (1996), Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman, 1940– 1950, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. López, Ana M. (1991), ‘Celluloid tears: melodrama in the “old” Mexican cinema’, Iris, 13, 29–52. López, Ana M. (1993), ‘Tears and desire: women and melodrama in the “old” Mexican cinema’, in John King, Ana M. López and Manuel Alvarado (eds), Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, London: BFI, 147–63. Martínez-Echazábal, Lourdes (1998), ‘Mestizaje and the discourse of national/cultural identity in Latin America, 1845–1959’, Latin American Perspectives, 25: 3, 21–42. Martré, Gonzalo (1997), Rumberos de ayer: Músicos cubanos en México (1930–1950), Veracruz: Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura. Mason, John (1992), Orin Òrìs˙à, Songs for Selected Heads, Brooklyn: Yoruba Theological Archministry. Monsiváis, Carlos (1978), ‘Notas sobre cultura popular en México’, Latin American Perspectives, 5: 1, 98–118. Monsiváis, Carlos (1993), ‘Mexican cinema: of myths and demystifications’, in John King, Ana M. López and Manuel Alvarado (eds), Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, London: BFI, 139–46. Muñoz Castillo, Fernando (1993), Las reinas del tropico, Mexico City: Grupo Azabache. Novedades (1949), ‘Las películas mexicanas invaden el mercado externo’ (4 March), 1.

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Orovio, Helio (2004), Cuban Music from A to Z, Durham: Duke University Press. Pedroso, Lázaro (Ogún Tolá) (1995), Obbedi, cantos a los orishas: traducción e historia, Havana: Ediciones Artex. Pulido Llano, Gabriela (2010), Mulatas y negros cubanos en la escena mexicana, 1920–1950, Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Saavedra Luna, Isis (2006), ‘El fin de la industria cinematográfica mexicana, 1989–1994’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe [e-journal], 17:2. Online. Available through: Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals. Stigberg, David K. (1978), ‘Jarocho, Tropical, and “Pop”: aspects of musical life in Veracruz, 1971–1972’, in Bruno Nettl (ed.), Eight Urban Musical Cultures: Tradition and Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 260–95. Tierney, Dolores (2007), Emilio Fernández: Pictures in the Margins, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Tuñón, Julia (2000), Los rostros de un mito: Personajes femeninos en las películas de Emilio Indio Fernández, Mexico City: Conaculta. Tuñón, Julia (2006), ‘Femininity, Indigenismo, and nation: film representations by Emilio “El Indio” Fernández’, in Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan and Gabriela Cano (eds), Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, Durham: Duke University Press, 81–98.

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Blues traveller: Habana Blues and the framing of diasporic cubanía Susan Thomas

Emigration has marked too strongly the artistic level on our stages. Not only have my colleagues from the university and my contemporaries from the neighborhood left en masse, but Cuban culture has a percentage of its representatives – some would say a majority – outside our borders. (Sánchez, 2010)

Writing from what is arguably the most influential blog coming out of Cuba, Yoani Sánchez speaks for a generation born in the 1970s and 1980s, a generation that, she notes, can be identified by the preponderance of names ending in, or containing, the letter ‘y’ (Yoani, Yanisleidi, Yusimí, Yosvany, and so on). It is more than unusual names, however, that mark this generation. It is also marked by the experience of dispersal. Its members have scattered around the globe, settling in countries such as Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Venezuela and Israel, as well as in the United States. The ‘Y Generation’ did not experience the first large-scale Cuban emigration, of course. In the decade and a half following the 1959 revolution, nearly 400,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States, with entire households leaving the island. Since the mid-1990s, however, it is largely the talented and educated young who have departed, leaving their families behind. Economic concerns lie at the forefront of individuals’ decisions to emigrate, overshadowing the politics that precipitated previous generations’ departures. In the contemporary Cuban diaspora, exiles have been joined by émigrés who maintain much closer and more complex contact with their home country than did previous generations. Music has played a prominent role in this shift in human geography not least because, as a group, musicians are disproportionately represented in the diaspora. The ranks of singer-songwriters, especially those pertaining to the hybrid and avant-garde movement of alternative popular music,

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have been decimated in Cuba, with only a handful of those born between 1965 and 1985 remaining. Concentrated in cities such as Madrid, Miami and Mexico City, émigré singer-songwriters have played an important role in giving voice to a new diasporic Cuban sensibility, offering their compatriots a visible – and audible – model of Cuban national identity, or cubanía,1 that is rooted in shared culture and common vision rather than previously held political orthodoxies. Their songs speak to the realities and contradictions of their generation, exploring displacement, identity confusion, homesickness, frustration with the status quo, and the experience of cultural change. Musical collaborations take place across oceans, not only linking émigré with émigré, but also linking émigré with national resident, providing engaging and danceable evidence for an inclusive and borderless cubanía (see Thomas, 2005; Silot-Bravo, 2010). Émigré musicians’ decisions to maintain professional as well as personal ties to the island have influenced state policy as well as public sentiment, with events such as the Cuban Ministry of Culture’s official invitation to Madrid-based collective Habana Abierta to perform in Havana in 2003 serving as a watershed moment in Cuba’s evolving relationship with those who have left (see Thomas, 2005). Film has been a powerful disseminator of music – and its new, transnational message – both on the island and off. Since Wim Wenders released his hit documentary, Buena Vista Social Club, in 1999, Cuban music has been the subject of a plethora of films produced by both Cuban filmmakers and international directors. These films include full-length documentaries and feature films as well as film shorts, such as Habana Abierta (Open Havana, Arturo Soto and Jorge Perrugoría, 2003), La Fabri-K: The Cuban Hip-Hop Factory (Lisandro Pérez, 2004), East of Havana (Emilia Menocal and Jauretsi Saizabitoria, 2007), Toda una Vida – Cuban Masterworks (Joe Cardona, 2010), and Andy García’s The Lost City (2006). They reach their Cuban viewers not only through traditional means such as cinemas and DVDs, but also through file sharing and increasingly via the internet, with entire short films and excerpts from longer films widely available – and commented upon – on YouTube and Cuban-oriented websites and blogs.2 No recent Cuban music film, however, has had the international reach of Spanish director Benito Zambrano’s Habana Blues, which was released by Warner Bros on 18 March 2005. A fictional drama

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rather than a documentary, the film is aimed at a general audience, and it addresses the curiosity and desires of non-Cuban viewers at the same time that it speaks to the generation that it seeks to represent. This chapter examines Habana Blues within the context of the increasingly transnational scope of Cuban culture. Of particular interest is how the film, and its music, participates in the ongoing discourse surrounding diasporic Cuban identity. The Cuban musical diaspora Throughout this chapter, the term diaspora is used to describe the diverse and multivalent Cuban community that extends across national and territorial boundaries. Understood as a term that allows for, and even embraces, fragmentation, hybridity and difference, diaspora is, Tanya N. Weimer states, ‘not only an inclusive experience but also one that admits the differences that are manifested when the terms of hybridity vary from one circumstance to another’ (2008: 18). Diaspora, with its recognition of a multi-sited, multigenerational community that shares a relationship with a homeland, either real or imagined (Butler, 2001: 192), has the advantage of moving the discourse away from the polarity of a Cuban-Miami axis. The term’s usage has been bolstered by its ability to embrace a more nuanced and diverse reality of contemporary Cuban identity, a reality that encompasses multiple generations, economic classes, racial identities and political affiliations. For Cuban musicians struggling to forge careers in the 1990s, the frustrations were manifold. It was difficult to obtain basic equipment and nearly impossible to record. The Cuban state recording industry was notoriously backlogged, had poor domestic distribution, and was divorced from popular demand. If they could record at all, musicians were paid a pittance, and that in national pesos rather than hard currency. Furthermore, alternative music was rarely promoted by state-run media, a quandary that singer-songwriter Vanito Caballero critiqued in his 1995 song, ‘Rockasón’, when he relays his grandmother’s criticism that she never sees him on television: ‘Why don’t you play salsa or folklore instead?’3 Faced with so few opportunities and so many barriers, many musicians entered into an ambivalent identity limbo that Gerardo Mosquera categorises as being either ‘no longer islanders’ or ‘low intensity exiles’, the latter category distinguished not so much by

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politics but by an individual’s ability to finance visits home (2003: 240–1). The impact of those who left is difficult to overstate. Indeed, to compose a list of singer-songwriters who left Cuba during the 1990s and early 2000s is to slice through an entire generation of musical culture, precisely at the moment that it was coming of age. The list includes the duo Gema Corredera and Pavel Urkiza, Descemer Bueno, Julio Fowler, Raúl Torres, Athanai Castro, David Torrens, Raúl Paz, Amaury Gutiérrez, Alex Cuba, Telmary Díaz, Vanito Caballero Brown, Alejandro Gutiérrez, Kelvis Ochoa, José Luis Medina, José Luis Barbería, Boris Larramendi, Andy Villalón, Pepe del Valle, Alejandro Frómeta, Raúl Ciro and Carlos Santos. The last eight of the artists listed arrived in Spain together in 1996 to record the album Habana Oculta (Hidden Havana) for the Nube Negra (Black Cloud) label, resulting in an experience that bears a close resemblance to the plot of Habana Blues. Out of that project emerged the collective Habana Abierta (Open Havana) which, with shifting personnel, has since recorded three albums.4 Several members of Habana Abierta are personal acquaintances of Zambrano, and he consulted them, as well as other musicians, while making the film.5 Kelvis Ochoa, a member of both the Habana Oculta and Habana Abierta projects, returned to Cuba in 2004 to participate in the filming. In recent years, the situation has improved somewhat for musicians who remain on the island. The establishment of an office of the Spanish artists and writers union (SGAE) in Havana in 1998 has given musicians the possibility of licensing their own songs and collecting royalties, and artists have been allowed to sign contracts with international promoters. There is greater freedom to travel and record, both with Cuban and international labels. In recent years, the state has taken a more proactive, if still limited, role in promoting alternative music performers, arranging for concert venues and organising national tours. Artists such as Yusa, X Alfonso, Haydee Milanés, Free Hole Negro, the funk-fusion collective Interactivo headed by Robertico Carcassés, Francis del Rio, Rochy, William Vivanco, Telmary Díaz (who departed for Toronto in 2007) and others have performed considerably more in state venues in recent years than is true of alternative artists in the previous decade. Some artists, such as Kelvis Ochoa and David Torrens, have taken advantage of these new opportunities and have returned to live in Cuba. Significantly, the new millennium has also witnessed a shift in the treatment of

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émigré musicians by the Cuban state and the Cuban public. The aforementioned 2003 state-supported concert by Habana Abierta took place in the sold-out Salón Rosado de la Tropical venue for an estimated 8,000 fans. The concert featured an anthologetic reunion of nearly every member of Havana’s alternative music scene, including other artists, such as Athanai Castro, who also no longer lived in Cuba. During their stay, individual members of Habana Abierta also gave solo concerts, beginning a continuing trend of musicians returning home to perform and collaborate. Some musicians, like Miami-based Descemer Bueno, spend a significant amount of their time on the island, performing and actively collaborating with artists there (see Ochoa and Bueno, 2008). Habana Blues Habana Blues was a box-office hit in Spain, where over 600,000 people saw it in its opening weeks. Screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the Spanish-Cuban-French co-production went on to win two Goya awards for best production and best musical score.6 The film tells the fictional story of two musicians, Ruy (Alberto Yoel García) and Tito (Roberto Sanmartín) and their struggles to promote their musical careers on – and preferably off – the island nation. The characters are introduced to two Spanish talent scouts who are looking for undiscovered Cuban artists to come to Spain and record for their label. Ruy and Tito take them on a tour of Havana’s underground music scene, visiting home studios, heavy metal and hip-hop concerts, and spontaneous rooftop parties. They attract the producers’ interest, but at a price. Together, the two friends and their musician colleagues must face a choice between professional stagnation in Cuba and economic and political exploitation by a multinational label. This plot occurs against the backdrop of Ruy’s failed marriage and his wife’s decision to take their two young children, and risk the dangerous crossing of the Florida Straits, to begin a new life in Miami. In many ways, the reality that the film constructs more closely resembles the experiences of musicians who left in the 1990s than it does those of musicians in 2005 when the film was released. The 1990s are, of course, the period of Cuban history that Zambrano knows most intimately, having spent two years at the Cuban film academy in Antonio de los Baños from 1992 to 1994. In an

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interview, the director recounts that near the end of his studies he went to a concert and had the idea for Habana Blues, writing the first drafts of the screenplay between 1994 and 1996 (CHC, 2005). The most dramatic element of the film’s plot, Caridad’s decision to attempt a crossing of the Florida Straits with her two young children, references a practice that still takes place today but came to international attention during the balsero (raft) crisis of 1994, when tens of thousands of refugees attempted the crossing on a variety of makeshift vessels. Glowing reviews in the international press followed the film’s premiere, applauding its authentic portrayal of contemporary Cuban life. Others praised it for unveiling Cuba’s underground music scene, describing the fictional Habana Blues as a younger, hipper follow-up to Wenders’s Buena Vista Social Club, a film that, for better or worse, frames the reception discourse of any Cuban music film, whether documentary or fiction (see Holland, 2005; Baker, 2011). Not all criticism has been positive, however, particularly in the alternative press, where critics largely dismissed the film as another example of what Christina Venegas dryly refers to as yet another film ‘about Cuban culture from a vantage point outside Cuba’ (2009: 37, emphasis in the original). They complain that Zambrano falls back on tropical stereotypes while indulging voyeurism with promises to provide a glimpse into Cuba’s hitherto unexplored underground. The film’s racialised portrayal of sexual promiscuity has received particular attention. One online critic scathingly describes the film as ‘a bittersweet mixture of semi-documentary and mailing brochure of the steamiest type of tourism’ (La Maga, 2006). Critics also charge that the film simply applies a postsocialist spin to tired plot formulas. Maldito Bastardo, a film blogger writing from Getafe, a suburb of Madrid, berates the film’s lack of originality, claiming that it is simply another mediocre band film where local boys trying to get out of a dead-end town must choose between the integrity of their music and selling out to amoral record executives (2006). Among Cubans in the diaspora, the film has also elicited strong personal responses. At the time of the premiere, I was in Madrid researching the Cuban expatriate music scene. The film was eagerly anticipated within the Cuban community and several local musicians were invited to the premiere. A few days later, I joined a large group of musicians and other members of the Cuban commu-

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nity to see the film in the Cine Ideal just off the Puerta del Sol square in the centre of the city. When the film ended, my companions walked out of the theatre in a heavy silence, several of them wiping tears from their eyes. We talked about the film late into the night, in a conversation that was revisited several times in the coming days. Many of them were musicians and saw their own experience reflected on the screen. Additionally, the knowledge that several of their friends and colleagues in Madrid’s Cuban music community had shared their stories with Zambrano raised questions about how closely the film’s plot adhered to individual biographies. They tended to see the film as a pseudo-documentary about prominent local musicians, especially the members of Habana Abierta. They appreciated the film’s showcasing of contemporary musicians on the island and they seemed to regard the fictional framework of the film as largely a vehicle to promote their favourite artists. They were also critical, although grudgingly accepting, of the film’s use of actors, rather than musicians, to play the protagonists. Over the next several weeks, the film became the topic of a lively debate, as members of this community of artists, writers and musicians saw themselves and their world view both reflected and challenged on screen. Several found the protagonist Ruy’s ultimate decision to stay in Cuba utterly unrealistic and too ‘Hollywood’. Their reactions were angry, often defensive, suggesting, in some cases, that they viewed Ruy’s decision as a rebuke of their own life choices, while others charged that it showed the director’s ultimate lack of understanding of the challenges faced by their generation. Such conversations were not limited to the Madrid community. In Cuban-oriented blogs and online forums, response to the film has been highly personal, leading commentators to reflect on their own departures, their identification with the film’s protagonists, and the film’s ability to stoke their own nostalgia, not only for Cuba, but also for their young adulthood and a time when their generation remained geopolitically intact (see Rey, 2010). Documenting diaspora: questions of genre One of the most interesting aspects of Habana Blues is the way it blends several filmic genres – documentary, historical biography, and music video – with the dramatic demands of its fictional narrative. Most apparent in the discourse surrounding the film is the real

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and perceived influence of documentary, and it is often compared to other Cuban music documentaries such as Buena Vista Social Club and Arturo Soto and Jorge Perrugoría’s Habana Abierta (2003), which documents Habana Abierta’s 2003 homecoming concert in Havana (see Thomas, 2005). Sometimes, the fictional aspect of Habana Blues is forgotten entirely, as evidenced by the New York Times’s description of it as a ‘documentary about a flourishing underground music movement on the island’ (NYT, 2008). Curiously, Zambrano’s film is rarely discussed alongside other fictional Cuban or Cuban-themed films with which it shares topical, critical, or ideological themes, such as Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1994), Before Night Falls (Julian Schnabel, 2000), and Suite Habana (Havana Suite, Fernando Pérez, 2003). The film does blend real and fictional elements. While the protagonists are played by actors, Zambrano showcases actual musicians throughout the film. The different ‘underground’ bands that perform on screen are well-known figures in the Cuban alternative music scene, and while Ruy and Tito’s musical tour of Havana is in itself a fiction, its anthologetic show-and-tell of Havana’s musical underground is (mostly) legitimate, presenting a variety of contemporary Cuban music acts that run the gamut from hip-hop to punk to heavy metal. While the film infers that all of the performers shown are undiscovered artists, this is not the case. Kelvis Ochoa, for example, had been living and working in Madrid for the better part of a decade as a member of Habana Abierta and had also recorded a solo album. Additionally, Gorki Águila, the lead singer of the band Porno Para Ricardo (Porn for Ricardo), was played by actor Ismael de Diego owing to the real lead singer’s arrest and imprisonment on drug charges just before filming was to begin.7 The veracity of the musical performance lends a journalistic air to the film, an effect that is amplified by Zambrano’s midrange and hand-held camera shots. Such scenes contrast markedly with the MTV-like production of Kelvis Ochoa and Telmary Díaz’s performance of ‘Sedúceme’ (Seduce me) and of the concert scenes featuring the lip-synching protagonists, which utilise fastpaced and rhythmically timed editing, expressive lighting, and scopophilic framing of the body. The inclusion of these extended musical performances thus not only blurs the line between fiction and documentary but also recalls promotional music videos. In the

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case of ‘Sedúceme’, the fact that Ochoa and Díaz are themselves transnational musical figures (Díaz still lived in Cuba at the time the film was made) adds an extra dimension for those watching the film with insider knowledge. The professional, glossy production of these already ‘discovered’ artists makes them stand apart from those still presumably in search of discovery. One of the most important sonic, as well as visual, features of the film, is provided by comic actor Osvaldo Doimeadiós in the role of Rober, a rock disc jockey in a Havana radio station. From the perspective of the plot, Rober is simply the guy to whom musicians give their demo recordings to with the hope of getting air time. Dramatically, his character serves to introduce the protagonists to the Spanish talent scouts. Yet Doimeadiós’s performance is a dead ringer for a voice (and a person) well known in Havana: Juanito Camacho. Camacho, one of the most important figures in the history of rock and alternative music in post-Revolutionary Cuba, has run the ‘Disco Ciudad’ (City Album) morning radio show in Radio Ciudad de la Habana (Radio Havana City) since the late 1980s (see Rodríguez Quintana, 2001: 90–6). For the generation of Cubans that grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, Camacho was the channel through which Cubans could ‘officially’ hear international rock acts, and his show was the most important vehicle for local groups to get their music heard by a wider public. Camacho’s characteristic voice and breathtakingly fast delivery, which Doimeadiós captures perfectly, has been a constant part of the Havana soundscape for Cuban youth for two decades, and his rapid-fire articulations and reedy timbre are as much a part of the aesthetic listening experience as have been the different stylistic trends that his voice has narrated over the years. Few voices in the multi-media capitalist culture outside Cuba have the instant recognisability and elicit the same visceral reaction among listeners as Camacho’s, a voice that has come to represent youth culture, innovation and alternative expression. For non-Cubans, the Rober/Camacho role is a bit part in the film, merely serving to make the introduction between the protagonists and the Spanish record producers. For Cubans, however, it is not a bit part; rather it is a cameo, and it brings to mind the real Camacho’s cameo in the 2003 Habana Abierta documentary. At the earlier film’s premiere on 1 August 2003, the packed Chaplin cinema in Havana exploded with applause when Camacho

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appeared on screen. Doimeadiós’s performance is the first in the film to cross the divide between fictional and actual representation, and the ‘insider recognition’ generated by that performance opens a door into a different way of experiencing the film, turning it from an etic and ultimately rather folkloric ‘film about Cuban culture from a perspective outside Cuba’ into an insider narrative about shared experience and identity. Connections to earlier documentaries are also heard in the soundtrack of Habana Blues. The retro bolero ‘Sé feliz’ (Be Happy), for example, features cascading vocal lines and modal shifts that recall the early twentieth-century classics showcased in Buena Vista Social Club and the subsequent recordings that it inspired. However, the composition is actually the work of Descemer Bueno, a Miami-based singer-songwriter who frequently returns to Cuba, where he collaborates and performs.8 The song’s arrangement prominently features resonator steel guitar, aurally citing Ry Cooder’s use of similar slide techniques on the soundtrack to the earlier film. Performed by elderly actress Anaís Abreu singing in a makeshift recording booth in a tiled bathroom, ‘Sé feliz’ is the first musical number that we hear in the film, following the opening sequence where we hear Ruy and Tito’s band. The image of an elderly grandmother, recording with antiquated equipment, singing an old-school bolero with a slide guitar accompaniment makes the reference to Wenders’s film especially transparent. This is, however, the end of the similarity and, in many ways, Habana Blues calls up the ghost of Buena Vista Social Club in order to critique it. Rather than emphasising a technological infrastructure frozen in time and lovingly preserved, as Wenders had done, the retro microphone and improvised studio highlight the barriers facing musicians struggling to produce music on the island and the creative ingenuity of Cubans seeking solutions to complex problems. The song becomes the soundtrack to shots of Havana’s cityscape. They are not shots of historic buildings and the picturesque seafront promenade, the Malecón, however, but of the black market trade in groceries and a transvestite club. This is definitely not Wenders’s Havana. The scene also contests the earlier documentary’s artificial isolation of older Cubans by showcasing inter-generational relationships in all their complexity, social as well as musical. Abreu plays Tito’s grandmother, and the short scene speaks volumes about the depth of their relationship. That

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young, alternative musicians were shown as the catalyst for this ‘old school’ performance, giving up their studio time to record a grandmother, disputes the myth that younger generations had rejected or were simply unaware of older, ‘classic’ Cuban music. The insider knowledge that the piece is not a recovered classic but a new composition by Bueno shatters that myth by evidencing the depth of younger Cubans’ knowledge of earlier traditions and their creative engagement with them. For those familiar with the musicians who appear on screen and their personal histories characterised by isolation, professionalism and emigration, the film’s reconstruction of recent history is transparent. Among the Cuban community in Madrid, for example, there was little question that the film’s content was biographical, and in the days following the premiere, several people questioned individual musicians about whether certain events in the film were really true. For some viewers, Habana Blues strayed too far from reality. Emilio Ichikawa, who resides in Miami where he blogs and is a commentator for the Miami Herald, reads the film through the lens of both music documentary and fictional biography, and he cites Walk the Line (James Mangold, 2005) and Ray (Taylor Hackford, 2004) as models of this latter genre, models against which Habana Blues does not measure up. For Ichikawa, the film’s lack of a focused, ‘real’ story is to its detriment: ‘It seems that it doesn’t recount anything. It contains an avalanche of happenings and events, each one of such strong significance that [they] merit their own history. In the work [Zambrano] does everything halfway, as if he either doesn’t want to [do it], can’t [do it] or doesn’t know how to get there’ (Ichikawa, 2006). Singing the diasporic blues The music of Habana Blues amplifies the issues of diaspora and identity foregrounded by the film’s plot and highlighted by Zambrano’s casting choices and filmic techniques. The musical selections highlight the diversity and cultural cosmopolitanism inherent in the Cuban alternative music scene and draw attention to both Cubans’ artistic engagement with, and exclusion from, global trends. The main body of songs heard in the film were co-written by the Habana Blues Band collaborative team that included X Alfonso, Dayan Abad, Juan Antonio Leyva and José Luis Garrido.

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The songs contain lyrics that speak unequivocally of the diasporic reality of Cuban youth, the emotional pain and frustration caused by separation from loved ones, and the economic and political difficulties that force that separation. ‘Habaneando’ (Havana-ing) and ‘Cansados’ (Tired), for example, take on the frustrations of Cuban young people and the under-the-table hustle that is necessary for people to get by. Over a highly energetic and danceable arrangement, the lyrics offer a critical assessment of the efficacy and ethics of the current system and a pragmatic appraisal of the people’s response: ‘The system squeezes and doesn’t want to let go / and the black market arrives to resolve what’s needed.’ In the style of other Cuban socially-conscious songwriters such as Carlos Varela and Gerardo Alfonso, ‘Habaneando’ critiques the tourist-driven Cuba of ‘rum and tobacco, prostitutes, Varadero, [and] Cayo Largo’ and points out that there is a Havana that ‘tú nunca ves’ (you never see) in which there are people working hard, from sun up to sun down, for a better future. ‘Cansados’ similarly deals with the theme of frustration with the lack of options and people’s pragmatic need to take whatever solution presents itself – without looking back. After all, Ruy sings, ‘money is short, and rock and roll is expensive.’ The de-territorialisation resulting from Cuba’s economic and political malaise is the focus of several songs in the film, including ‘Habana blues’ and ‘En todas partes’ (Everywhere). ‘Habana blues’ is sung by Ruy at the rooftop dinner party he throws with Caridad near the end of the film in which they announce their separation and Caridad declares that she is leaving for the United States. As Ruy takes out his guitar and begins to sing, the scene balances the other rooftop moment of the film, when Ruy joins Kelvis and Telmary to perform the orgiastic montuno of ‘Sedúceme’.9 Over a descending bass line, the song’s opening at once conflates the city, the lover, and the nation: Today I see in you The streets of my Havana Your sadness and your pain Are reflected in her façades Your lonely soul is the voice The voice of this tired nation.

This opening immediately places the song within the genre of ‘Havana songs’ composed by other prominent Cuban songwriters

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in which the city is frequently personified as a tragic female love object whose body/topography is lamented as degraded even as she is recognised for her procreative gifts. The feminised and sexualised city thus becomes the site for social critique as well as nostalgia. Examples include Carlos Varela’s ‘Habáname’ (Havana Me) and ‘Detrás del cristal’ (Behind the Glass) as well as Geraldo Alfonso’s ‘Sábanas blancas’ (White Sheets). In the first, Varela credits the city’s promiscuous fecundity for his own existence, singing of his father’s arrival in her harbour: ‘Havana opened her legs and because of that I was born.’10 ‘Habana blues’ similarly constructs Havana as the woman/city whose suffering viscerally stands in for the pain of those who are ripped from her womb or of those who remain and share the experience of miscarriage. The lyrics protest against the trauma of separation and the musical setting is almost painful, suggesting childbirth. Alfonso’s voice becomes tenser, higher, at times a guttural shriek. His last, cathartic push of effort on ‘y con Diós?’ (and with God?) leaves the song hanging, and its listeners breathless: And I have to let you go, putting the sea between us, Paying the price of all of us that live off contraction. Another family that’s left marked by separation. How to struggle on, with this sun, with politics, and with God?

The last musical number in the film is ‘En todas partes’ (Everywhere) which plays during the film’s closing credits. The song begins with the unlikely sound of bagpipes, accompanied by a rumba-inflected groove. The performance is confrontational; the juxtaposition on screen of bagpipes and Afro-Cuban ritual batá drums demands for a final time that Cuban music not be pigeonholed into the traditional dance music that outsider consumers might have come to expect. At the same time, however, the bagpipes serve as a powerful musical sign for migration, dispersal and nostalgia. By calling up the Celtic anthem, and all its attendant semiotic freight, ‘En todas partes’ links its calls for an inclusive vision of borderless citizenship with another island nation’s history of economic despair and diaspora and with another musical tradition of longing for a ‘green isle’ that for many can only be visited in song. The lyrics of ‘En todas partes’ speak directly to the diasporic condition: ‘Everyone looking for a dream / we change our path

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/ distance is profound, separation is profound / for a wandering soul / there is no citizenship.’ And if there was any doubt about the song’s political project: ‘The flag is a dilemma, country and geography / wherever I find myself / I feel that it’s my land / yours and mine.’ The Celtic anthem aesthetic is strengthened by the addition of a recorder, sounding suspiciously like a penny whistle, which soars upward at the harmonic shift at the start of the bridge, and by the lush piano vamp that accompanies the chorus. This change in texture is exacerbated by a timbral change in voice. Alfonso’s voice, produced to sound grainy and intimate at the song’s opening, is replaced by that of Amilcar Pérez Chaviano, who sings in a nasal sonero style associated with early twentieth-century son and trova,11 with lilting uplifts at the end of notes that recall the articulation of earlier singers, such as Bene Moré. The second verse, sung by a third singer, celebrates a cosmopolitan and globalised Havana that the protagonists themselves do not yet inhabit: ‘Havana is everywhere / because you carry it with you / without fear of uprooting yourself.’ The unison voicing of the chorus, first separated by interjections by Alfonso, then reiterating ‘I want to be your protection’, invites the swaying audience to join in, in the tradition of good pub anthems everywhere. Thus the song evokes the ‘moving participation’ that has made Irish music an effective vessel for nationalist nostalgia in other, far-removed cultures (see Williams, 2006: 101–19).. The music and musicians showcased in Habana Blues narrate the effects of emigration on the contemporary Cuban music scene. In their lyrics, musical cosmopolitanism, and even in their personnel, the songs on the film’s soundtrack document the increasingly transnational state of Cuban music-making, although in many respects this documentation requires insider knowledge to be recognised. Thus there is an inherent tension in Zambrano’s film between an entertaining, voyeuristic romp through Havana’s underground and a critical and nuanced commentary on contemporary Cuban society that relies on coded references and contextual semiotic fluency to be fully appreciated. The movement of so many musicians off the island in recent years has led to a restructuring of how Cuban music is made, how it is consumed, and even how it is imagined. Habana Blues grapples with the parameters of this reimagining even as it attempts to codify and showcase Cuban talent for outside viewers.

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Notes 1 ‘Cubanía’ is a term introduced by Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortíz in a lecture delivered on 28 November 1939, which was later published (Ortíz: 1940). Ortíz’s term refines the more pedestrian ‘cubanidad’, which Ortíz defines as the ‘generic condition of being Cuban’ (Ortíz, 1940: 166). Cubanía represents a wilful, conscious cubanidad, one that is constructed by the desires of the individual. It is, as Gustavo Pérez-Firmat has noted, perfect for describing ‘nationality without a nation’ (1997: 8). 2 The online site for the journal, Encuentro, for example, frequently posts clips from new music documentaries. A fairly inclusive list of Cubanoriented blogs can be found on Yoani Sánchez’s ‘Generación Y’ blog, at: www.desdecuba.com/generaciony/?p=3086 and on blogssobrecuba. blogspot.com/. 3 The song was first recorded by Caballero and Alejandro Frómeta’s duo, ‘Lucha Almada’, on their recording, Vendiéndolo todo (Selling it all) (EGREM, 1995). They later recorded it on Habana Abierta’s eponymous album (BMG Ariola, 1997). 4 Vanito Caballero Brown and Alejandro Gutiérrez were not able to take part in the Habana Oculta project as they were in Ecuador at the time. They later moved to Spain and became part of Habana Abierta, which went on to record four albums. The members of Superávit (Frómeta, Ciro and Santos) who appear on Habana Oculta did not participate in the new collective. Since then, Habana Abierta’s membership has fluctuated. Currently, it includes Barbería, Medina, Caballero Brown and Gutiérrez. 5 The biographical nature of the film has been the subject of intense speculation among different groups. There has even been some degree of controversy, as when Paris-based Yotuel, a member of the hip-hop group Orishas, claimed that the story was based on his life and that he had been considered for the lead role, claims that Zambrano later refuted (see Nava, 2005). 6 The film was co-produced by Spain’s Maestranza Films in collaboration with the Cuban film institute ICAIC, the French production firm Pyramide Productions and Warner Brothers España. 7 Band members claim that Águila’s arrest was intended to prevent the band from appearing in the film. 8 ‘Sé feliz’ has been recorded by multiple artists including Fernando Álvarez, Gema and Pavel, Luz Casa and Bueno himself, with his band Siete Rayo. 9 The term montuno refers to a fast-paced repetition of rhythm and melodic cells that features call-and-response and typically occurs near

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the end of a composition. It is most frequently found in Cuban son (See endnote 11) and son-derived music, such as salsa. 10 ‘Habáname’ appears on Varela’s album, Como los peces (Like the Fish, 1994) and ‘Detrás del cristal’ was released on Siete (Seven, 2003). ‘Sábanas blancas’ is the title song from Alfonso’s 1995 EGREMproduced album. For more on the ‘Havana song’ phenomenon and its relationship to the construction of diasporic culture, see Thomas (2010). 11 The son is a form of Cuban dance music that first developed in rural areas in eastern Cuba and became a rage in Havana in the 1920s. Trova, or vieja trova, refers to a large repertory of guitar-accompanied songs that were performed throughout Cuba in the first half of the twentieth century by travelling musicians, known as trovadores.

References Baker, Geoffrey (2011), Buena Vista in the Club: Rap, Reggaetón and Revolution in Havana, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Butler, Kimberly (2001), ‘Defining diaspora, refining a discourse’, Diaspora, 10: 2,189–219. Como hacer cine [CHC] (2005), ‘Rodajes: Habana Blues de Benito Zambrano’. Online: www.comohacercine.com (accessed 15 February 2011). Holland, Jonathan (2005), ‘Habana Blues (Spain-Cuba-France)’, Variety, 31 March. Online: www.variety.com/review/VE1117926696/ (accessed 4 April 2011). Ichikawa, Emilio (2006), ‘Habana Blues: mil verdades y una mentira’. Online: www.eichikawa.com/critica/Habana_Blues.html (accessed 4 April 2011). La Maga (2006), ‘Operación salir de Cuba’. Online: www.filmaffinity. com/es/review/16236189.html (accessed 4 April 2011). Maldito Bastardo (2006), ‘OT llega a Cuba’. Online: www.filmaffinity. com/es/review/72162841.html (accessed 4 April 2011). Mosquera, Gerardo (2003), ‘The New Cuban Art’, in Ales Erjavec (ed.), Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 208–46. Nava, José A. (2005), ‘Zambrano niega que la historia de “Habana blues” esté inspirada en la vida del cantante de Orishas’, El Mundo, 10 July. Online: www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2005/07/20/.../1121858000.html (accessed 1 April 2011). New York Times (NYT) (2008), ‘Trial set for Cuban punk rocker’, 28 August. Online: www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/world (accessed 15 January 2011). Ortíz, Fernando (1940), ‘Los factores humanos de la cubanidad’, Revista Bimestre Cubana, 21: 165–9.

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Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo (1997) ‘A willingness of the heart: cubanidad, cubaneo, cubania’. Cuban Studies Association Occasional Paper, Paper 8. Online: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cas/8. Rey, Amalio (2010), ‘Habana Blues (post-185): Reflexiones sobre inovación y la vida en clave 2.00’. Online: www.amaliorey.com/2010/08/09/ habana-blues-post-185 (accessed 4 April 2011). Rodríguez Quintana, A. (2001), ‘Crudo: El rock cubano de los 90’, Encuentro, 20, 90–6. Sánchez, Yoani (2010), ‘Generación Y’. Online: www.desdecuba.com/ generaciony/?p=3086 (accessed 1 November 2011). Silot-Bravo, Eva (2010), ‘Rumbeando: Identity across the Cuban Diaspora’, in Proceedings of the Latin American Studies Association. Online: http:// lasa . international . pitt . edu / members / congress - papers / lasa2010 / .../5815.pdf (accessed 10 December 2010). Thomas, Susan (2005), ‘Cosmopolitan, international, transnational: locating Cuban music’, in Damián Fernández (ed.), Cuba Transnational, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 104–20. Thomas, Susan (2010), ‘Musical cartographies of the transnational city: locating Havana in song’, Latin American Music Review, 31: 2, 211–40. Venegas, Cristina (2009), ‘Filmmaking with foreigners’, in Ariana Hernandez-Reguant (ed.), Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 37–50. Weimer, Tanya N. (2008), La diáspora Cubana en México: Terceros espacios y miradas excéntricas, New York: Peter Lang. Williams, Sean (2006), ‘Irish music and the experience of nostalgia in Japan’, Asian Music, 37: 1 (Winter–Spring), 101–19. Discography Alfonso, Gerardo (1995), Sábanas blancas [CD], Cuba: EGREM. Habana Abierta (2011), 1234 [Digital album], Spain: Habana Abierta. Online: http://habanabierta.bandcamp.com/album/1234 (accessed 5 April 2011). Habana Abierta (2006), Boomerang [CD], Spain: EMI Latin. Habana Abierta (1997), Habana Abierta [CD], Spain: BMG Ariola. Habana Abierta (1999), 24 Horas [CD], Spain: BMG Ariola. Habana Oculta (1996) [CD], Spain: Nube Negra. Lucha Almada (1995), Vendiéndolo todo [CD], Cuba: EGREM. Ochoa, Kelvis and Bueno, Descemer (2008), Amor y música [CD], USA: Descemer Bueno. Varela, Carlos (1994), Como los peces [CD], Cuba: Graffiti Music Records/ SGAE. Varela, Carlos (2003), Siete [CD], Cuba: Graffiti Music Records/ SGAE.

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Dancing in the dark: Saura’s Tango Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Peter William Evans

Carlos Saura has made some of the most striking musicals in the recent history of Spanish cinema.1 They are musicals with a difference. Nothing like the films showcasing Spain’s iconic folklóricas,2 they often seem like chamber pieces, studio-bound vehicles for the display not only of musical virtuosity – and above all dance – but also for recovery of the creative energy of popular art forms. As Saura himself has stated, in this respect Tango (1998) resembles his own Carmen (1983), a sort of cinematic essay on the wellsprings of flamenco, a reminder of an art form that under Franco had often been limited to pale imitations of its true nature, tailored to appeal to the tourist audiences wooed by the regime.3 Through the flamenco-ised music of Bizet’s opera, Carmen offered vintage Saura: gender, the relations between the sexes, the rival claims of love and art, the blurred contours of fantasy and reality, the sabotage of chronology. These are all there in Tango. Carmen’s Laura Del Sol in Tango is Mia Maestro. As in the earlier film, the director of the show, here played by Miguel Ángel Solá, casts a newcomer as a principal, though not one straitjacketed by the need to live up to the fantasy of a literary and operatic femme fatale. In Tango, above all, Saura celebrates his own and his father’s love of Carlos Gardel and Imperio Argentina and many other exponents of Argentinian tango (Ponga, 1998: 95).4 Yet, despite its fond acknowledgement of these and other historic monstruos, the film is no museum piece, its focus aimed directly at music and dance as distillations of identity and desire. Tango was the brainchild of the Argentinian producer Juan Carlos Codazzi. The creative team is a star-studded cast that includes Lalo Schifrin (1932–), composer, pianist and conductor, whose commissioned work includes the scores for Cool Hand Luke

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9 Darkness of the dance in Tango: Elena (Mia Maestro) and Ernesto (Carlos Rivarola) rehearse a passionate tango (1998), dir. Carlos Saura, prod. Adela Pictures, Alma Ata International Pictures S.L., Argentina Sono Film S.A.C.I., Astrolabio Producciones S.L., Beco Films, Hollywood Partners, Pandora Cinema, Saura Films, Terraplen Producciones. Courtesy of Alma Ata International Pictures.

(Stuart Rosenberg, 1967), Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968), and Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), and also the dancing maestros and choreographers Juan Carlos Copes, Carlos Rivarola and Julio Bocca. An Argentinian-Spanish co-production, Tango was nominated by the Argentinian film industry for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film; it won best cinematography (Vittorio Storaro) at Cannes in 1998, and a Goya in 1999 for best sound (Jorge Stavropulos, Alfonso Pino and Carlos Faruolo).5 The film has a self-conscious structure: Mario, a writer/director whose relationship with Laura (Cecilia Narova), a dancer, has recently collapsed, is writing a film script about a director putting on a tango show (espectáculo). Script, show and private life overlap over indistinct boundaries. Overcoming feelings of jealousy towards his wife’s new lover, Mario finds consolation not only in his work on the screenplay, but also in the form of a new dancer, Elena (Mia Maestro), the mistress of Ángel Larroca (Juan Luis Gallardo), a local gangster, and a majority shareholder in Mario’s show. Ángel and his fellow investors express concern when the show becomes politicised, representing through tango the ‘dirty war’ history of the military dictatorship under Jorge Rafael Videla (1976–81). One of the backers exclaims that the show will be incomprehensible to audiences, and that the formal beauty of tango should alone be its

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raison d’etre. Mario is unmoved by these pleas and does not restrict himself to recent Argentinian history. The history of turn-of-the-twentieth-century immigration is also commemorated. Here the more autobiographical aspects of the story of love rivalry and jealousy take centre stage with the fatal wounding of the Elena character in the show’s climax by an unidentified individual who conflates the characters of Mario and Ángel. The spectator is tempted to believe that Elena has truly been murdered, especially as from his seat in the audience Ángel cries out in despair at the sight of her lifeless body. Moments later, though, Elena opens her eyes, comes to life, and Ángel asks Mario whether he too has played his part well. All is play-acting. The actors are only – watched by us – rehearsing their roles in Mario’s film. And yet as Mario and Elena walk off the sound stage, their desperate embrace, and the anxiety engraved on their faces, unsettle our distinctions between fiction and reality. This constant undercutting of the audience’s assumptions and support systems is a running feature of Saura’s work: examples abound in all his films, such as in Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens, 1976), where images of Ana’s aunt dissolve into those of her mother, or Elisa vida mía (Elisa, My Life, 1977) where past and present often merge indiscriminately. Elena’s revival after her fatal stabbing is prefigured in Carmen, where the protagonist’s violent death is no obstacle to her sudden recovery. These blurred levels of reality recall, especially in view of the film’s Argentinian inspiration, comments by Borges, acknowledged by Saura as a key influence.6 Homage is paid both directly through photography and indirectly through the film’s pattern of parallel realities. Borges’s own comments on the effects of such strategies on readers seem appropriate to discussion of their relevance in Tango: Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833 Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written. (Borges, 1962: 231)

In Tango, as in Carmen, doubt shakes all certainties. The philosophical undercurrent of these films derives from the characteristic

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impulse prevalent in Borges’s work where all claims to knowledge about self and others are founded on illusion. Authenticity is undermined as the artist figure struggles to make sense of his life through art. Awareness that behaviour is determined by inherited universal feelings and values pervades his writing. The viewer’s appreciation of the protagonist’s attempts to achieve authenticity is in no sense diminished by the futility of his efforts. Saura’s art, bringing together the talents of his creative team, succeeds in producing through aestheticisation a masterful account of the artist’s pursuit of authenticity and relief from the pain and frustrations of daily life through art. Through tango – above all through danced tango – the film becomes another of Saura’s portrayals of interiority, of the artist figure’s pursuit of transcendence in an unforgiving world. But unlike, say, the artist figures of the Hollywood musical and, in particular, its ‘backstage’ variant, Saura’s equivalents find no happy resolution to their life and art. Saura’s stories of individual lives are invariably linked to wider contexts. Also, characteristically, the film relies on the past to comment on the present, here in a pattern of double displacement, as the past is invoked to make sense not only of Argentina’s but also perhaps of Spain’s recent history. In this process memory plays a vital role, with some characters anxious for the repressed to return, while others remain gripped by amnesia. Mario attempts to show through art, in ways that illustrate comments by Paul Grainge (2003: 2), that memory is a potential force of resistance, a prelude to the reconstruction of damaged societies. Tango is Mario’s two-way mirror – in a mirror-obsessed film – into the past and future of his private and public preoccupations and, as in the best musicals, the numbers – here the couple or choral tangos – poeticise the prosaic themes of the narrative. The film begins with a panoramic view of Buenos Aires. The opening shot of the city is a slow pan, accompanied by the soft sounds of a leisurely paced tune played on a bandoneón (a type of concertina), of the mouth of the river Plate, the cityscape bathed in the warm copper colours of dawn. Next come the credits to Saura as writer and director, the privileging of his name in this way underlining the links between creator and character. Eventually, a cut reveals a screenplay for a film entitled ‘Tango’, and the hand of a man sitting at a desk, holding a pen over the typescript. We next hear the words: ‘Who is Mario Suárez, the protagonist of

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this story? Perhaps it’s not as important to know who he is as to see what happens to him. What does he do?’ This is followed by the sounds of a woman, Adriana Varela, singing a plangent tango about a failed love affair (‘¿Quién hubiera dicho?’ [Who Would Have Said?] written by I. C. Amadori and R. Sciammarella) only seconds after Mario has supposedly written the scene into his screenplay. Mario now glances at a photo of himself beside a woman, both of whom are making funny faces at the camera, capturing a moment of past happiness. Later in the scene, we see him rising from his bed, and a dissolve converts his face into a camera lens, while the song remains audible, before attention switches to a man and woman dancing a tango. Art and life merge through this identification of Mario’s face with the camera. The dancers become not only a projection of the song’s lyrics, but also an illustration of the feelings of the artist abandoned by his lover. We later identify the woman as Laura, Mario’s wife, her partner as Ernesto, the man replacing him in her affections. They dance to the music of Lalo Schifrin’s ‘Tango del atardecer’ (Evening Tango), against a background of cold blue and velvet colours that herald, along with the title song’s reference to the onset of dusk, the end of a relationship and Mario’s despondent mood. A large elongated silhouette and a close-shot of Mario – previously caught imagining the scene while lying in bed – occupy the background but, as he begins to move into the foreground, the blues fade and give way to shades of red. Mario watches the dancers, moves closer to them, takes out a knife, and stabs Laura, who collapses in a heap, before he rushes towards the camera, a look of horror etched on his face. Seemingly in keeping with Borges’s view that the self is ultimately unknowable, the autobiographical aspect – here the connection between Saura and Mario, his onscreen double, more developed than, say, in Saura’s own Dulces horas (Sweet Hours, 1982) – interestingly prioritises action over identity. Mario expresses this idea verbally before we see him visualise a scene that may eventually find its place in his tango production, a voluptuous dance by his two principals, inspired by jealousy and violence. He becomes in his fantasy the projected cliché of Argentinian virility, another of Borges’s knife-wielding machos, someone whose actions, even if only in fantasy, are motivated by inherited notions of masculinity, rather than by any personal response to unhappy circumstances.

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Schifrin’s wordless music develops through orchestration, rhythm and key, the characteristic features of tango already heard in the melancholy chords and sentiments of the earlier song. For Tango he not only composed the soundtrack but a host of other pieces for the musical numbers. As well as ‘Tango del atardecer’, he composed ‘Tango bárbaro’ (Terrific Tango), ‘Tango lunaire’ (Lunar Tango), ‘Los inmigrantes’ (The Immigrants), ‘La represión’ (Repression), and ‘Tango para percusión’ (Tango for Percussion). These were interspersed among famous tangos composed by others, including ‘Calambre’ (Shock) by Astor Piazzola, the ‘Cumparsita’ (The Procession) by G. Matos Rodríguez, E. Maroni and P.  Contursi, and ‘Caminito’ (Little Road) by J. D. Filiberto and G. Coria Peñaloza, covering the full range of mainstream tango and its milonga and waltz variants.7 The music for ‘Tango bárbaro’ complements the choreography of desire. As the two figures enter the frame, the woman from the left, the man from the right, the music is carried by stringed instruments, beating a steady, insistent rhythm before the sounds of the bandoneón make their first entry. In contrast to the vehemence of the strings, the bandoneón provides a flurry of shrill high notes. Together the strings and bandoneón announce the tango’s combination of gravity and light-heartedness, its characteristically bittersweet melody and lyrics. Tango is also perhaps the most passionate of all popular musical forms, a truism celebrated by this early number. The dancers seek and alert each other to their presence through pose, gesture and, additionally here, in the case of the woman stamping her foot to demand her partner’s attention. The dancers are seen at first in silhouette, their shadowy forms perhaps early indications of their doomed passion. As they approach each other, they begin to gyrate, placing hands and legs in compromising positions, at times touching, at others avoiding contact, sometimes bending together, crouching and rising, the woman stretching her leg and then encircling her partner with it, the man placing his foot between her legs, bending over her, peering down at a responsive face. At one point the dancers are entwined with each other in a way that makes them seem like a single amorphous creature, with duplicate heads and limbs. Unlike Anglo-Saxon variants of tango and other dances that demand respectful distance between the partners, Argentinian tango aims for fusion, the immersion of the dancers in each other.8

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It is precisely at this point, where fusion has as if literally occurred, that the onlooker approaches, while Vittorio Storaro’s beautifully lit background colours turn from blue to the reds of passion and of danger, and jealousy begins to overwhelm the forsaken lover who moves inexorably now towards his female victim. The climax of this scene of revenge is accompanied by the intensifying sounds of stringed instruments and bandoneón chords, in a manner reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s unnerving music for the shower scene in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), a crescendo of urgent sounds that complement the violent action. The murdered woman in the fantasy next appears as Laura, Mario’s ex-wife, entering his flat to recover a necklace. She finds Mario at home, and repels his forlorn sexual advances now that, as she explains, she is living with another man. As if to overcome grief through art, Mario leads the viewer to the next numbers, a mélange that registers his desire to learn from the past but also to look ahead. The ‘creole waltz’ is followed by a colourful photograph blow-up as a backcloth to the sound stage of Caminito, the street in the La Boca neighbourhood of Buenos Aires made famous in the tango sung by Gardel. Next we cut to a dance hall (where tangos are danced at what is called a milonga), where Carlos Nebbia (Juan Carlos Copes, one of the maestros of tango) is introduced to the patrons, and invited to parade his skills. He obliges by selecting a young milonguera (a female who attends a milonga) to dance the significantly titled ‘Recuerdo’ (I Remember) by Osvaldo Pugliese and E. Moreno. This is the prelude to an intricate temporal sequence that scrambles chronology to exemplify Freud’s comments on repression and amnesia.9 The sequence is as follows: the Maestro Nebbia (Copes) chooses a partner to dance in front of all the patrons at the dance hall; Elena dances with Larroca’s father; tango dancers led by Nebbia rehearse a number; Carlos Gardel is glimpsed in a clip from an old movie, singing ‘Arrabal amargo’ (Bitter Poor Neighbourhood); Laura and her new boyfriend dance together; Nebbia and Elena go through some steps; Mario and others discuss the design for the immigrant scene; finally, Mario visits the primary school where we see children learning to tango, and where flashbacks recall Mario’s own childhood at school, and memories of the Spanish Republican teacher living in exile in Argentina who inspired in him a love of poetry, and who always prefaced his

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classes with the cry, ‘¡Viva la República!’ (Long live the Republic!) Here lie the origins of Mario’s insistence on including scenes of violence and death in a screenplay that forces a nation (Argentina, but also Spain) to confront its cruel recent past. As a co-production made largely for commercial reasons to exploit markets in Spain and Argentina, Tango inevitably also has a bifocal thematic focus. While some Spanish/Latin American coproductions, as Isabel Santaolalla (2005) and others have argued, are motivated by various agendas, such as a desire to counteract the processes of cultural stereotype, Tango provides an opportunity for mutual exploration of compatible histories. And unlike, say, the Carlos Gardel films made at Paramount and discussed by Marvin D’Lugo (2008) primarily as examples of the star’s transnational significance, Tango, boasting no star of comparable international status as Gardel, draws its transnational meanings from the creative interaction between two nations of parallel circumstances. Argentina is, as it were, viewed through a Spanish lens, and vice versa. The sequence moves from the union of old and young – the recuperation and celebration of a traditional art form used here to bridge the span of history – to flashbacks of the nation’s history of immigration and its more recent troubled past, to a reaffirmation of the vitality of a culture, symbolised by its most iconic expression: the tango. The merging of young and old, of past and present, begins with Nebbia, the older maestro and his young partner, who dance a tango to the music of ‘Recuerdo’, its theme of memory relayed additionally through the union of young and old dancers. First, the older man is acknowledged by the Master of Ceremonies at the milonga dance hall, and given the limelight on the floor (‘Taking advantage of your presence, we request the gift of a tango’). He takes a bow, beckons to a young woman, as past calls to present. She accepts his invitation and, amid the applause of all the patrons, takes her place before him. They begin to dance to the music of ‘Recuerdo’, the camera catching them in medium shot, in the middle of the frame, backed by an orchestra of bandoneón, piano, violin and bass players. As Nebbia/Copes stretches his left leg in a backward movement, his partner does the same with her right to form an image of perfect triangular symmetry. They look directly into each other’s eyes, and after this initial pose, held for a few seconds, they slowly regain an upright position before going into

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their dance. Nebbia’s left leg and the girl’s right now move in unison towards the camera. Abandoning their static position, they advance backwards and forwards, sideways, pausing, never relaxing their mutual gaze, remaining locked in each other’s embrace as they resume their glide around the dance floor. How different from, say, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, who vary their holds with moments of separate virtuosity when dancing numbers like ‘Cheek to Cheek’ in Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935). Following the initial medium shots that allow the viewer to see the full bodies of the dancers, a close shot concentrates on the intensity of expression mapped on the craggy features of the older man and the smooth cheeks of his young partner. The camera then resumes its medium-shot distance, reverts to close-shot, before again adopting its medium-shot angle, but now from the side – not, as earlier, the front – of the ballroom space, showing us some of the milonga audience enthralled by the dancers’ skills. Now the film cuts to shots of their feet, revealing arabesque patterns that emphasise the erotic nature of their pas de deux. The camera maintains its close-shot focus on their legs for a considerable period, as the music quickens to a milonga tempo. As it does so we see the dancers’ feet and legs increasingly intertwined – though only ever touching very gently to indicate change of direction. The dance ends in a sequence of medium and close shots of the dancers’ full bodies and faces. Nebbia’s role in the narrative clearly represents the celebration of a traditional national art form. He has no personal psychological interest; nor does his young partner, whom we never see again. Their dance does not as, say, in Astaire/Rogers musicals, play out the ebb and flow of the special couple’s romance. Rather, Nebbia’s tango with his young partner provides commentary on the development of the protagonist’s – Mario’s – circumstances, his love affairs, his art, his inner struggles. Spectacle here – Nebbia’s dance with the girl – dramatises the film’s wider themes. For all its intricate beauty, the dance is surrounded by an aura of darkness. The dance hall is after all owned by Ángel Larroca, referred to by one of the patrons as ‘un tipo peligroso de verdad’ (a really dangerous character) and soon his young mistress, whom he introduces to Mario, will risk her own life by jilting him for Mario. Larroca functions as a reminder not only of present-day criminality but also of the brutal past’s survival in individuals still not reconciled to the country’s democratic present.

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The role of Ángel, though, is significantly given not to an Argentinian but to a distinguished Spanish stage and screen actor, Juan Luis Gallardo. Ángel, played by a Spaniard, is eventually undone by Mario, played by an Argentinian. The film defines Mario at first as an abandoned husband, but he eventually becomes someone who exchanges roles with the previously all-powerful Ángel, whose lover he steals. The reversal of fortunes of two characters who often mirror each other, and whose rivalry for the same woman is later dramatised through tango, is readable not only psychologically but also socio-historically. The inverse sentimental fortunes of these characters measure the revenge of the colonised on the coloniser. Elena’s betrayal of Ángel through her romance with Mario works on at least two levels, the psychological and the historical. Mario seems to embody Saura’s view that work provides a cure for unhappiness: ‘A person who is sentimentally in crisis, but who is saved by his work, as often happens’ (in Ponga, 1998: 95). His pursuit of Elena, heedless of the expected reaction of her padrino (godfather) Ángel, reveals a temperament not averse to risk. Additionally, though, in this story of an older man’s attraction to a younger woman, Saura explores all too human anxieties about the passage of time. At dinner, the prelude to their romance, Mario remarks on the brevity of life, and it is no consolation to hear a younger person attempt to heal anxiety with reminders of proud achievement. Through Mario, Saura formulates a common feeling that we only ever scratch life’s surface meanings before death calls time on our modest endeavours. Beyond psychology, though, the scene’s socio-historical significance is also multi-focused. This romantic meeting of young and old highlights the contrasting assumptions and expectations of the generation gap. Disillusioned with traditional standards of masculinity, Mario warns Elena not to follow men in their pursuit of medals, money and power. But as someone emerging from the chrysalis of evolving Latin American notions of gender, Elena responds with a remark that bypasses Mario’s point, insisting rather on a woman’s need to be heard. In the post-dictatorship society women’s voices demand male attention. In this new climate, too, reformulations of sexual orientation as well as of gender are permissible: in Schifrin’s ‘Tango lunaire’ number Elena and Laura dress as 1920s divas and dance together a tango that climaxes with a kiss on the lips.

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Elsewhere, male dancers, led by Julio Bocca, dance together not only in honour of tango’s origins in the all-male prácticas (academies) but also as post-Videla affirmation of condoned same-sex love. Mario’s ideological journey sees him exchanging machista possessiveness for feminised tolerance of his wife’s altered affections, his former attitudes now represented by Ángel, whose not wholly reconstructed beliefs anchor him in the past.10 Progress, though, towards cultural and political liberation is not painless. The years of brutal repression under Videla are vividly recalled. Interestingly, the décor for the big production number of the Videla tango is inspired by the darker work of Goya, like Saura an Aragonese (honoured in Goya en Burdeos [Goya in Bordeaux, 1999]), another touch that adds to the film’s transatlantic Spanish/ Argentinian theme. We are reminded that tangos were played in the 1970s torture chambers to muffle the cries of the regime’s victims. Elena wonders why past horrors should now be recalled, and Mario replies that amnesia destroys identity. Against the music of Schifrin’s ‘La represión’, carried by stringed instruments, wailing voices and martial drums, we see a cityscape of burnt-out cars, close shots of crying, anguished faces, including Elena’s, of soldiers hurling corpses into ditches, and documentary footage of the atrocities. People are herded, Elena raped, others lined up and shot, women dragged into torture chambers and violated, as trapped individuals attempt to escape the horror by climbing up walls. The number comes to an end, and the backers – including Ángel – who have been watching the rehearsal, object that such scenes do not belong in a musical. But musicals, perhaps the most ‘utopian’ of all film genres (Dyer, 1977), do not always ignore painful subjects. One thinks of Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972), for instance, or of West Side Story (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, 1961) – admittedly containing no scenes as chilling as Tango’s – and their inclusion of uncomfortable themes. Mario quotes Borges to justify the inclusion of this number: ‘The past is indestructible. Sooner or later things reappear. One of the things that reappears is the attempt to abolish the past.’ But if revisiting the Videla years traumatically unearths the memories of a brutal past, the recovery of more distant, happier episodes – such as the arrival of Italian immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, and of star tango turns like Carlos Gardel and Tita Merello – points to the creative sources and achievements of a vibrant nation. The contribution of Italian immigrants

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to Argentinian life and culture possesses none of the colonialist overtones that characterise relations between Mario and Ángel. The negative aspects of Argentina’s Italian cultural legacy are not political but social, symbolised by the Sicilian cult of machismo and revenge, of knife duels and possessiveness, dramatised in the climax to the number involving the immigrants where a jealous lover apparently stabs Elena to death. The crazed lover’s act of violence comes only at the end of the sequence, as a sort of necessary postscript to what goes before, the celebration of the immigrants’ arrival. The number begins with music from Verdi’s Nabucco, leads into a criollo waltz,11 followed by a milonga and ends, as all milongas must, with the cumparsita, danced by Laura and Nebbia. As the actors disperse, the camera used by Mario to shoot his film turns gently towards us, the real spectators. Inspired by Borges, and perhaps even by Calderón,12 whose plays are often acknowledged in his films, Saura makes no distinction between characters and spectators, all of whom, we are reminded, play their parts in el gran teatro del mundo.13 Notes 1 I am extremely grateful to the library staff of the Filmoteca Española in Madrid, especially Javier Herrera, who supplied me with press coverage of Tango, and to Marga Lobo, for making resources available that helped me in the writing of this chapter. I would also like to express my gratitude to Rocío Rubio, my brilliant maestra de tango, for memorable classes at her La Galería studio, with Estrella Jurado, in Zaragoza, Spain. 2 Female performers (mainly Andalusians) of traditional Spanish songs and dances. 3 For a recent reading of the film see Andrés Lema-Hincapié (2005: 151–65). 4 As David Turner puts it in A Passion for Tango, Argentinian tango has nothing to do with ‘ballroom tango, with its image of exotic dress, unnatural arm posture and bizarre, sharp head and neck movements’ (2004: xi). 5 The film attracted mixed reviews, positive as in Ramón Reboiras, ‘Tango; Carlos Saura al son del bandoneón’ (n.d.), and negative as in Angel Quintana, ‘Tango de diseño’ (1998: 14). 6 In an interview for Fotogramas Saura acknowledges Borges as a key influence throughout his career: ‘Borges, in whose work I steeped myself when I made El sur, a film about him in Argentina. Borges has

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Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema always influenced me, almost from the start of my career as a filmmaker. No one has said this, but I am saying it to you. There is always something Borgesian in my films. I love that labyrinthine play with time’ (Ponga, 1998: 96). Saura himself remarks: ‘In the film there are three essential kinds of tango music: the creole waltz, different from the central European version, the ‘milonga’, of probably Spanish origin, and from both of these the tango emerges’ (Ponga, 1998: 95). A more technical description of the two variants of tango may be found in Christine Denniston (2007: 199), where she comments on the four possible meanings of milonga — namely a folksy form of popular music, a dance hall where tangos take place, a form of tango danced in 4/8 time and, more commonly, ‘the youngest member of the Tango trilogy (tango, milonga, vals) invented in the 1930s’ (Denniston, 2007: 205), danced to a quicker tempo of 2/4 time — and the nature of the vals, a tango danced in waltz time. On the posture, steps, embrace and other technicalities of tango dancing, see Denniston (2007), and Paz and Hart (2008); on the politics of tango, see Savigliano (1995). See, for instance, Freud and Breuer’s ‘On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena: preliminary communication (1893)’ (Freud and Breuer, 1991: 53–69), Freud’s ‘The forgetting of impressions and intentions’ (Freud, 1982b: 184–214), Moses and Monotheism (1985a [1939]), ‘The uncanny’ (1985b [1919]) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1982a [1900]). On the origins of tango in the early twentieth century, and men learning to dance with men before daring to approach female partners, see Turner (2004) and Denniston (2007). Criollo is the Spanish for Creole or of European descent. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Spanish dramatist (1600–81). The great theatre of the world.

References Borges, Jorge Luis (1962), Labyrinths, Harmondsworth: Penguin. D’Lugo, Marvin (2008), ‘Early cinematic tangos; audiovisual culture and transnational film aesthetics’, in Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 5: 1 and 2, 9–23. Denniston, Christine (2007), The Meaning of Tango, London: Portico. Dyer, Richard (1977), ‘Entertainment and utopia’, in Movie, 24, 2–13. Freud, Sigmund (1982a) [1900], ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, in James Strachey (ed.), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

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Freud, Sigmund (1982b), ‘The forgetting of impressions and intentions’, in James Strachey (ed.), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 184–214. Freud, Sigmund (1985a) [1939], ‘Moses and monotheism’, in Albert Dickson (ed.), The Origins of Religion, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund (1985b) [1919], ‘The uncanny’, in Albert Dickson (ed.), Art and Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund and Joseph Breuer (1991) [1893], ‘On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena: preliminary communication’, in James and Alix Strachey (eds), Studies in Hysteria, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 53–69. Grainge, Paul (ed.) (2003), Memory and Popular Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lema-Hincapié, Andrés (2005), ‘Hybridity and the inescapable cliché’, in Chris Perriam and Ann Davies (eds), Carmen: from Silent Film to MTV, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Paz, Alberto and Valorie Hart (2008), Gotta Tango, Leeds: Human Kinetics. Ponga, Paula (1998), ‘El tango según Saura’, Fotogramas (September), 95–7. Quintana, Ángel (1998), ‘Tangos de diseño’, Dirigido por (October), 14. Reboiras, Ramón F. (n/d.), ‘Tango; Carlos Saura danza al son del bandoneón’ (no date or place of publication; held in Saura Collection, Filmoteca Española). Santaolalla, Isabel (2005), Los ‘Otros’; etnicidad y ‘raza’ en el cine español contemporáneo, Madrid: Ocho y Medio; Madrid: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. Savigliano, Marta E. (1995), Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press. Turner, David (2004), A Passion for Tango, Dingley: Dingley Press.

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Re-making Frida Kahlo through song in Frida Deborah Shaw

Frida Kahlo is probably the best known Latin American artist and a great deal has been written about her cult status, which began to emerge in the United States in the 1980s and has continued to the present day.1 There have also been a number of studies of the film Frida (2000), directed by Julie Taymor and starring Salma Hayek.2 However, the role of music in the film has not been the subject of systematic academic analysis, despite the fact that the soundtrack won the film its only Oscars at the Academy Awards ceremony of 2003, one for its original score and one for ‘Burn It Blue’ in the category of original song.3 The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that the film attempts to refashion both an ‘authentic’ and an accessible Frida Kahlo for international consumption, and it analyses the role of original compositions and pre-existing songs (with a focus on the latter) in this endeavour. It considers the way that forms of representation in Frida have important implications for the ongoing reconfiguration of US identity, with a particular focus on the sizeable Latino population of the United States.4 This chapter also explores the film’s use of well-known ‘Mexican’ singers Chavela Vargas and Lila Downs, and analyses their specific function within the narrative. In addition, it develops the idea of ‘altered listening’, derived from Michael Chion’s notion of ‘reduced listening’ (1994: 24–30) in order to shed light on the ways that the film uses traditional Mexican songs and inserts them into specific fictional and, in many cases, misleading representations of Kahlo. The chapter argues that songs play a key role in transforming a biographical Kahlo into Hayek’s Frida, a character construct which downplays her political militancy, enhances her sexual allure and parades, while simultaneously erasing, her lesbian identity.5 The film’s composer and musical director was Elliot Goldenthal,

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partner of its director, Julie Taymor, and the two worked closely together to ensure that the music played a central part in the creation of a Frida suitable for a commercial biopic at the start of the twenty-first century (Goldenthal, 2002). The soundtrack is made up of pre-existing songs, an original Mexican/Hispanic-sounding instrumental score, and new songs that Goldenthal and his collaborators composed for the film. Goldenthal has made much of the search for ‘authenticity’ in interviews. He has described how they ‘had a team of hunter-gatherers in Mexico ferreting out unusual music for Julie and I to listen to’ (Goldenthal, 2002). Nevertheless, the majority of pre-existing songs that feature in key scenes, such as ‘La bruja’ (The Witch, traditional), ‘La Llorona’ (The Weeping Woman, Luis Mars, n.d.), and ‘Paloma negra’ (Black Dove, Tomás Méndez, n.d.) are of Mexican origin, but have become transnational popular folk songs.6 Goldenthal highlights the fact that he worked with musicians from both Mexico City and New York City, and that half the soundtrack was recorded in the Mexican capital, at Churabusco Azteca studios (Goldenthal, 2002). Likewise, the traditional Mexican instruments selected to be played by the band put together for the film aim to create an ‘authentic Mexican’ sound, and include the quijada, a percussion instrument made with the jawbone of a donkey, the vijuela (a very small guitar) and the guitarrón (a large six-string Mexican guitar).The ‘Mexicanness’ of the film is defined as much by sound as by image, and while the emphasis is on cultivating an aura of authenticity, what Frida is really concerned with is creating a fictional transnational artist and country that can be sold through the channels of global Hollywood. The film’s success relies on the way that it manages to reconcile the paradox of being both a work of fiction and appearing to be rooted in reality. So, while the film ‘suffers from an overdose of reverence’, including the appearance on set of Diego Rivera’s grandchildren and dogs descended from Kahlo’s own pets (Smith, 2003: 41), many key elements of Kahlo’s life have been changed. Frida takes many liberties with its historical referent, unsurprising in a Hollywood biopic of a disabled, bisexual communist/Stalinist Mexican woman. These include the underplaying of Kahlo’s physical suffering, and a focus on Hayek’s sexualised body, rather than the artist’s disabled one; the romantic portrayal of her relationship with Rivera (Alfred Molina) that denies many of the realities of the infidelities committed by them both; and the

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dilution of her anti-Americanism and Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist political positioning (Shaw, 2010). One of the reasons for the introduction of so many changes in the transformation of the historical character into her fictional counterpart is that Frida is fundamentally a US commercial creation, with Salma Hayek one of the few Mexicans to appear in the film. It can even be argued that Hayek’s identity has shifted from Mexican to Latina through her current status as a US citizen, and her star status in commercial Hollywood films. As Deborah Paredez notes, Latin Americans become Latino/a when in the socio-political and cultural borders of the United States (2009: 23). Hayek had become a naturalised US citizen by the time of the film’s release (Molina Guzmán, 2006: 242–3), further consolidating this shift in national identity. Although the film’s cinematographer is the well-known Mexican Rodrigo Prieto, this is clearly a vision of Mexico and Frida as seen through a US prism. As Oriana Baddeley has noted with regard to representations of Kahlo within the US media, the artist is linked in the public imaginary with a foreigner’s eye view of the country: ‘She is seen to embody a wider set of assumptions about Mexico itself; exotic, passionate, yet constantly struggling against pain and deceit’ (Baddeley, 1991: 12). This vision of both character and country is illustrated through the film’s soundtrack. Goldenthal’s own compositions and choice of pre-existing songs help to support the interpretation given by Baddeley and to create the appropriate emotional response from the implied audience. In Frida the elements of the soundtrack composed by Goldenthal are musical cues that connote a pan-Hispanic identity, rather than an exclusively Mexican one, and provide a musical representation of the protagonist that underpins other forms produced through image and dialogue. Both these facets can be illustrated in the untitled signature theme reprised at key moments in the narrative and chosen as the music that accompanies the DVD menu page. Goldenthal (2002) describes it in the commentary on the DVD as ‘up-tempo and optimistic’ and states that it is typical of the music of central and South America. This lack of an attempt to create a specifically Mexican sound locates the musical element of the characterisation within a generic ‘Latin’ identity. The primary function of this repeated instrumental motif is to give a sound to the message of triumph over adversity. The piece is prominent when Frida defies all medical expectations and walks for

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her parents. What is most apparent from this scene is the way that the piece helps create this message, one that is also apparent when Frida climbs the high and many steps of the pyramid in Teotihuacán with Trotsky, accompanied by the same musical motif. The action itself is an example of poetic licence as her disabilities would have prevented her from such an undertaking, but yet again it is an example of a protagonist-hero overcoming extreme odds to achieve the near impossible, a generic trope of the biopic. The songs (mainly pre-existing) incorporated into the film also underscore the specific vision that the filmmakers have of Frida. The dialogue is almost exclusively in English, with the odd Spanish expletive or exclamation, a common device in Hollywood films that represent Latino or Latin American identities. Nevertheless, the characters in Frida occupy a curious bilingual world where Mexicans sing to each other in Spanish, yet talk to each other in English. As Dirk Delabastita and Rainier Grutman (2005: 17) note, ‘the actual quantity of foreignisms in a text is rather less important than the qualitative role they play with its overstructure, i.e. their potential as functional elements’. In Frida the traces of spoken Spanish, along with the language of the song lyrics seek to create a bilingual framework in which to build this Latina cinematic creation. All of the pre-existing songs incorporated into the body of the film are traditional folk songs, or well-known ballads (in the case of ‘Paloma negra’), and in this, too, they fit within a notion of both Mexican and multicultural US identity, as these are old transnational classics and rely on a nostalgic pre-modern musical vision that connotes an exotic, historical, passionate, suffering Mexico. The effect of the songs on nonSpanish speaking viewers, in particular, has parallels with Michel Chion’s notion of ‘reduced listening’ (Chion, 1994: 24–30), which privileges the sound at the expense of the meaning.7 In his words, reduced listening: focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning. Reduced listening takes the sound – verbal, played on an instrument, noises, or whatever – as itself the object to be observed instead of as a vehicle for something else. (Chion, 1994: 29)

This concept of reduced listening could be extended to encompass a notion of ‘altered listening’, which may illuminate the use of music in the soundtrack of Frida. The pre-existing songs incorporated

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into the film produce meaning, in addition to that produced by the sound, through their performance, context and the corresponding mise-en-scène. However, this meaning is frequently at odds with the lyrical content of the song in question, and assumes that either the lyrics are not being listened to or are not understood, as they are sung in Spanish without subtitles. Thus, it is not important that viewers understand the lyrics, indeed these often run counter to the desired message in the specific scenes. Rather, it is the sound of these songs that is important; they convey emotion and create a character profile, while also producing pleasure for the audience. In what follows, this framework will be used to explore the function of the performances of two very well-known traditional Mexican songs, ‘La Bruja’ and ‘Paloma negra’, and two original compositions, namely ‘Alcoba azul’ (Blue Bedroom), written by Goldenthal and Hernán Bravo, and ‘Burn it Blue’, written by Goldenthal and Taymor. Hayek/Frida’s authenticity is emphasised through the song that she herself performs, the well-known traditional folk song from Veracruz, ‘La Bruja’. This is a song whose sweet almost childlike melody runs counter to the somewhat gruesome lyrics, producing a powerful effect. It tells of a witch searching for victims, whether men, women or children, to eat. In a typical extract the interlocutor and witch exchange the following lines: Ay dígame, dígame, dígame, usted / Oh tell me, tell me please ¿Cuántas criaturitas se ha chupado usted? / How many children have you eaten today? Ninguna, ninguna, ninguna ¿no ve? / Not one, not one, not one, can’t you see? Que ando en pretensiones de chuparme a usted / As I’m planning to eat you today.8

However, in the film the sinister contrast between melody and lyrics is absent; there are no subtitles so the latter will be lost on non-Spanish speakers in the audience. The sense of the lyrics is not of interest here, despite the potential for intertextual meaning (references to children being killed could link to Kahlo’s miscarriages and inability to have children; references to the eaten husband could refer to Kahlo’s anger at Diego Rivera’s womanising). However, this potential is not realised and ‘La Bruja’ is used in the film to give voice to a defiant Frida, and to create the sense of a ‘real’ Mexico. She sings it, drunk on tequila, in a typical cantina, dressed in traditional, rural

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10 Frida (Salma Hayek) sings ‘La bruja’ in a Mexican cantina (2002), dir. Julie Taymor, prod. Handprint Entertainment, Lions Gate Films (as Lions Gate Films), Miramax Films, Ventanarosa Productions.

Mexican clothes, as was fashionable among the urban intelligentsia in post-Revolutionary Mexico (Herrera, 2003: 183). This choice of clothes was a political and nationalist statement of affinity with an indigenous Mexico for the historical Kahlo,9 yet, in the film, as with the lyrics, specific meaning is lost and both clothes and song come to symbolise exoticism and passion. This scene follows Frida’s discovery of the first of her husband’s many infidelities. Hayek’s vocals, over the instrumentation of harps and jawbones, detuned guitars and vijuelas (Goldenthal, 2002), create a raw, energetic, ‘authentic’ sound, and speak of the character’s sexual edge and wildness. She is seen flirting with male customers in the cantina, but essentially this is a performance for her husband, who watches her amused, and she wraps up the song with a passionate kiss for him. Her devotion to Diego is reinforced when she defends him from a drunkard in the cantina who hints at the political tensions surrounding Rivera. The drunkard berates the muralist saying, ‘This is a bar for workers not for government whores.’ Frida throws her tequila in his face, gleefully initiating a bar-room brawl, before reprising the song to accompany the fighting. The passion between the protagonists is the focus of this scene, with the political elements only acting as a catalyst for the drama. This serves to sexualise and de-politicise Frida, and to present an idealised bohemian Mexico that fits within contemporary imaginings.

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11 Frida (Salma Hayek) dances with Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd) (2002) dir. Julie Taymor, prod. Handprint Entertainment, Lions Gate Films (as Lions Gate Films), Miramax Films, Ventanarosa Productions.

This is further reinforced in another key musical moment: a tango to which Frida and the Italian photographer Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd) dance together. The tango song is entitled ‘Alcoba azul’ (The Blue Bedroom), with lyrics by Hernan Bravo and music by Goldenthal, and is performed by the well-known MexicanAmerican singer Lila Downs. What is striking about this song is that it is a deeply romantic and painful piece, yet the love it speaks to is that between Frida and Diego, despite the fact that its erotic charge comes from the two women dancing together. While the lyrics might be seen to foreshadow the troubled relationship between the married couple, this becomes another example of altered listening. Once again, there are no subtitles, and the tango, for non-Spanish speakers, is presented simply as a passionate love song. The dominance of Diego’s gaze to give meaning to the scene makes it clear that the romance is directed towards the heterosexual couple. There is, in fact, a curious disjunction between the melancholic lyrics and the playful sexuality exhibited by Tina and Frida for the benefit of the approving male gazes of Diego and fellow muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (Antonio Banderas), which validate the dance. Music in the film underpins the message of a new type of ‘modern’ heterosexuality that the fictional couple comes to embody, a heterosexuality that is confident enough in itself to allow Frida to have meaningless lesbian encounters.

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It is fitting that Lila Downs is chosen to become Frida’s personal singer in the film: she is, according to Goldenthal, based on Kahlo and Rivera’s friend, the folksinger Concha Michel (Goldenthal, 2002), and she appears on a number of occasions, although she is always nameless and has no speaking part.10 Downs has cultivated a following on the world music scene and among the Latino community for her performances of an indigenous Mexican identity, and she is thus consumed in the United States in a similar way to Kahlo herself. There are some biographical similarities between the two: both had foreign-born fathers and Mexican mothers; Kahlo’s father was a German-Hungarian Jewish émigré, and Downs is the daughter of a Scottish-American cinematographer/ painter and Mixtec-Indian mother. Both have embraced a form of indigenous identity, seen in their dress, and respectively in their art and singing; Downs as part of a multicultural US project to create awareness and understanding for indigenous Mexicans, and Kahlo for political, nationalist reasons. Downs was known, like Kahlo, for her Mexican huipils (colourful, embroidered blouses), and for her plaits, until she modernised her look. She has secured international attention, due to the exposure of Frida, and became the first Mexican-American to sing at the Academy Awards Ceremony in 2003, when she performed the Oscar-winning song ‘Burn it Blue’ with Brazilian singer-songwriter, Caetano Veloso.11 What is interesting is that the resemblance is not just one way; in the film Frida is made to resemble Downs. The latter gives voice to the protagonist’s emotional world by singing to Frida at key moments of the film. In addition to the performance of ‘Burn it Blue’, Downs features at a number of key moments, for instance, singing a mariachi version of ‘La Llorona’ at Frida’s final exhibition. The singing is usually diegetic in a way that has parallels with the traditional symbolic function of song in musicals, wherein characters burst into song to give shape to a key emotional moment in the narrative. Frida, as discussed earlier, is constructed as Latina in the film, through the casting of Hayek and the use of English as the dominant language, and the way Downs appears as her personal singer supports this depiction. The star capital of Downs helps to co-opt Kahlo for contemporary non-Mexican audiences: she is one of the best-known Latino folk performers in the USA and is bicultural in a way that Hayek’s Frida is, and Kahlo was not. She has lived in Oaxaca, California and Minnesota, and completed a degree

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at the University of Minnesota in voice and anthropology (‘Lila Downs: the Voice of Frida Kahlo’, 2005). Although much is made of her Mexican identity in the promotion of her performances, she publicly identifies herself as Latina (Cepeda, 2008). This Latina identity is most explicit in the final song of the film, ‘Burn it Blue’. The lyrics were written by the director, Julie Taymor, and the music by Goldenthal, and thus this song above all others gives an insight into their vision for their protagonist. It is sung by Caetano Veloso and Lila Downs, and provides an epitaph to Frida’s life. It is significant that the focus is on the love story, and the song casts her as a romantic heroine, not as a great artist, nor as a passionate political figure. This is clear from the following lyrics: Burn this house Burn it blue Heart running on empty So lost without you But the night sky blooms with fire And the burning bed floats higher And she’s free to fly Woman so weary Spread your unbroken wings Fly free as the swallow sings Come to the fireworks See the dark lady smile She burns. . .12

As Goldenthal observes, the lyrics continue ‘the thread of the movie and reflect(s) upon the immolation as well as the romance that was ever present between Frida and Diego’ (Goldenthal, 2002).This is, of course, a highly romanticised vision, and clashes with some of the less romantic realities of the final period of the Kahlo/Rivera relationship recounted in Hayden Herrera’s biography (Herrera, 2003), characterised by Rivera’s neglect and infidelity (Shaw, 2010: 307). The lyrics also claim Kahlo for a wider public. The use of the term ‘woman’ (‘Woman so weary’) casts her as a representative of womankind (despite her extraordinary nature and life experiences), while, at the same time, paradoxically, she is the passionate exotic Other, seen in the references to the ‘dark lady’, and to fire, fireworks and burning in both the lyrics and the visual images that accompany the song. While most of the lyrics are in English, there are a few lines in Spanish, yet they do not add anything new. They

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are essentially a translation of the English lyrics, and thus serve not to add meaning, but to add Hispanic flavour: ‘Y la noche que se incendia / Y la cama que se eleva / A volar’ translates as ‘And the night that bursts into flames / And the bed that floats / And flies.’ This is a ballad written by North Americans and Hispanicised through the vocals by Veloso and Downs and through instruments such as the Spanish guitar and the vijuela. The use of the global star, Caetano Veloso, adds Brazil to this Latin mix. The incorporation of Hispanic elements into a predominantly English-language framework speaks more of a desire for Latino integration than to Kahlo’s own desires. As Goldenthal notes, ‘this song is . . . a handshake of thanks to our neighbors in Southern America’ (Goldenthal, 2002). The other singer chosen to sing to Frida within the film, the iconic Chavela Vargas, also serves a specific function, as do the songs she performs for the protagonist, and her presence links to the curious parading and simultaneous erasure of Frida’s lesbian identity. Vargas, born Isabel Vargas Lizani in Costa Rica in 1919, had a hugely successful career in Mexico in the 1960s, and was famous for her interpretation of ranchera songs, and for her drinking, entrances to concerts on motorbikes, cigar smoking and flirting with female audience members (Yarbo-Bejarano, 1997: 34).13 Her alcoholism forced her into semi-retirement in the 1970s (Lo, 2005), until she came to international prominence, following her interpretation of Agustín Lara’s song ‘Piensa en mí’ (Think of Me) in Tacones Lejanos (High Heels, Pedro Almodóvar, 1991).14 Her appearance in Frida also helped in this late flowering of her career and she appeared, in 2003 at the age of 83, in concert at Carnegie Hall, introduced by Salma Hayek (Lo, 2005).15 Although Vargas only publicly came out as a lesbian in 2000 when she was 81 (Lo, 2005), she was known throughout her career for the ‘lesbianizing of music and lyrics’ and for her performance of sexual identity (Yarbo-Bejarano, 1997: 34), keeping the female gender of her addressees in her songs. In addition, it is also widely known that she had an affair with Kahlo.16 Her casting alone thus lends credibility to the film among the Latino/a and lesbian communities. The potential afforded by the presence and performance of Chavela Vargas in the film, is, however, undeveloped and is symptomatic of ‘the overdose of reverence’ previously discussed, whereby verisimilitude is sought, while biographical truth is rejected. Her main role within the diegesis is to give voice to Frida’s

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heterosexual suffering (see her rendition of ‘La Llorona’), despite the fact that she was Kahlo’s lesbian lover. Vargas’s first ‘appearance’ in the film is vocal, not physical, and takes the form of her non-diegetic pre-recorded version of ‘Paloma negra’, recorded forty years earlier (Goldenthal, 2002). The song is chosen to accompany Frida’s first Diego-induced heartache, following the discovery of her husband’s sexual encounter with her sister. The song is foregrounded in the scene through its volume, the absence of any dialogue, and the way that Frida’s actions are played out to it. The scene cuts between two images and events: Frida alone in a chair cutting off her hair in despair, and Frida seen at a decadent party in the same room with friends, drinking while lovers embrace. It ends with the image of her painting ‘Portrait with cropped hair’ (1940), with Hayek’s Frida replacing Kahlo in the portrait and coming momentarily to life in one of the artistic flourishes of the film. An analysis of the song will demonstrate another case of altered listening, linked here with lesbian erasure. Its power for lesbian listeners lies in the fact that, along with so many of Vargas’s songs, there is a heterosexual subversion in the passionate declaration of love from a female singer to another woman – given only the name of ‘paloma negra’ (black dove). The nature of Spanish, with its clearly differentiated gendered pronouns and adjectives, make this clear even when the addressee is not named.17 The lyrics of the song are marked by a strong patriarchal voice, with references to honour, exclusive love, suffering caused by a woman, and disappointment that ‘paloma negra’ should be out enjoying herself. This is subverted by Chavela’s reclaiming of this voice, although a butch/femme power dynamic is implicitly retained, as seen in the following lines of the song:18 Ya agarraste por tu cuenta las parrandas / You’ve already gone out on your own to party Paloma negra, paloma negra, ¿dónde andarás? / Black dove, black dove, where can you be? Ya no juegues con mi honra, parrandera / Don’t play with my honour, party girl Si tus caricias deben ser mías, de nadie más / Your caresses should be for me and no-one else Y aunque te amo con locura, ya no vuelvas / And although I love you madly, you’re not coming back

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Paloma negra, eres la reja de un penar / Black dove, you are the bars of my cell Quiero ser libre, vivir mi vida con quién yo quiera / I want to be free to live my life with whoever I want Dios dame fuerzas, que me estoy muriendo por irla a buscar / God give me strength for I am dying to go and look for her.

The meaning that is kept in the context of the film is quiet despair sung in an almost impossibly beautiful voice, followed by suffering, passion and raw anger, conveyed by the tone, not the words of the song. Chavela’s voice changes in emotional register from gentle to passionate as Frida angrily and roughly cuts her hair, with the sound of the scissors exaggerated to provide the percussion accompaniment for the song. Chavela’s passion is in synch with Frida’s, and their voices come together when the protagonist shouts over the singer ‘out, out, go’, as she insists that her friends leave her alone. In fact, once again, it is better for the lyrics not to be listened to or understood for the ‘right’ meanings to fit the scene. The emotional voice is Frida’s, conveyed by Vargas, and the addressee is Diego, and yet lyrics such as ‘although I love you madly, you’re not coming back’ and ‘my eyes are dying without looking into yours’, would not fit at all with Frida’s fury at what she sees as her husband’s unacceptable act of betrayal with her own sister. Conclusion Building on earlier work (Shaw, 2010), which explores the way Kahlo is transformed from biographical historical subject into cinematic creation, and centres on a comparative reading of Taymor and team’s Frida and Herrera’s Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (2003), this chapter has focused on the role of music, and particularly song, in the formation of this cinematic creation. Music plays a key role in generating meaning in Frida both through Goldenthal’s instrumental score and through the non-diegetic and diegetic use of pre-existing songs and their performances by Salma Hayek, Lila Downs and Chavela Vargas. The analysis of new songs ‘Alcoba azul’ and ‘Burn it Blue’ has provided an insight into the romanticised and exoticised image of Frida/Mexico sought by the filmmakers. Traditional Mexican songs are co-opted in the film to support a particular vision of Frida Kahlo; a vision with Frida as romantic heroine and post-feminist Latina icon at its centre,

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and one that eschews or sidelines Kahlo’s long-term relationships with women, her crippling disabilities, militant communism and Mexican nationalism.

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Notes 1 See, for example Baddeley (1991); Barnet-Sanchez (1997); Herrera (1990); Bergman-Carton (1993) and Tully (1994). 2 See, for example, Molina Guzmán (2006), Bartra and Mraz (2005), and Kerr (2001). 3 It also won a Golden Globe for ‘Best Original Score – Motion Picture’ at the Golden Globe Awards of 2003. Further details concerning the songs used in Frida can be found on ‘Soundtracks for Frida’. Online: www.imdb.com/title/tt0120679/soundtrack. 4 According to the results of the population survey Census 2000, there are 35 million Latinos in the United States (Clemetson, 2002). 5 In this chapter the term Kahlo is used to refer to the historical subject and Frida to refer to the fictional filmic creation. 6 Some popular Internet sources credit José Alfredo Jiménez with writing this song, while others attribute it to Tomás Méndez. However, the film’s credits name Méndez. See: www.imdb.com/title/tt0120679/ soundtrack. 7 The other two types of listening that Chion identifies are causal listening, namely ‘listening to a sound in order to gather information about its cause’ (1994: 24), and semantic listening, ‘which refers to a code or a language to interpret a message’, with less emphasis on the sounds and accents produced (28). This chapter is reproduced at www.dxarts. washington.edu/courses/460/TheThreeListeningModes_Chion.pdf. 8 This and all other translations from the original Spanish are by the author. 9 Herrera notes that ‘the regional costumes of Mexico were extolled, categorized and even worn by cosmopolitan Mexican women’ (2003: 183). 10 For more on Concha Michel, see Jocelyn Olcott (2009). 11 Downs herself has grown tired of the associations and has commented that ‘being always compared to Frida Kahlo has been difficult and even the braids are sometimes like a ball and chain’ (Cepeda, 2008). For an overview of Down’s career, see ‘Awards for world music ’07, Lila Downs’ (n.d.). For more information on Caetano Veloso see Chapter 15 of this volume. 12 The entire lyrics can be found at www.lyricstime.com/caetano-velosoburn-it-blue-lyrics.html. 13 Ranchera songs are the most famous musical form from Mexico. They are love songs originating from rural regions, and grew in popularity

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in the 1930s and 1940s with mass migration to the cities. For more information on ranchera music, see Broyles-González (2002). See Chapter 3 for analysis of Pedro Almodóvar’s use of this song. Her rendition of ‘Tú me acostumbraste’ (‘You got me used to it’, Frank Domínguez) is also used to powerful effect in the Mexican wedding scene in Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006). For a televised interview with Chavela Vargas, see www.youtube.com/ watch?v=XxALVj1I_Vg&feature=related. Here she discusses living with Kahlo and the love that existed between the two of them. There is a well-known traditional version of ‘Paloma negra’ by the male Mexican ranchera singer, Vicente Fernández. The lyrics are reproduced on a number of websites, including www. stlyrics.com/lyrics/frida/palomanegra.html.

References Alcántara, Isabel and Egnolff, Sandra (2001), Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Munich, London, and New York: Prestel Publishing. ‘Awards for world music ’07, Lila Downs’ (n.d.). Online: www.bbc.co. uk/radio3/worldmusic/a4wm2007/2007_lila_downs.html (accessed 10 January 2010). Baddeley, Oriana (1991), ‘Her dress hangs here: de-frocking the Kahlo cult’, Oxford Art Journal, 14:1, 10–17. Barnet-Sanchez, Holly (1997), ‘Frida Kahlo: her life and art revisited’, Latin American Research Review, 32:3, 243–57. Bartra, Eli and Mraz, John (2005), ‘Las dos Fridas: history and transcultural Identities’, Rethinking History, 9:4, 449–57. Bergman-Carton, Janice (1993), ‘Strike a pose: the framing of Madonna and Frida Kahlo’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 35:4, 440–52. Broyles-González, Yolanda (2002), ‘Ranchera Music(s) and the legendary Lydia Mendoza: performing social location and relations’, in Olga Cantú and Norma Nájera Ramírez (eds), Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 183–206. ‘Carnegie Hall Present Lila Downs’ (n.d.). Online: www.carnegiehall.org/ textSite/box_office/events/evt_11506.html (accessed 12 January 2010). Cepeda, Esther (2008), ‘Freedom from Frida: an interview with Singer Lila Downs’, 29 September. Online: www.huffingtonpost.com/esther-jcepeda/freedom-from-frida-an-int_b_129939.html (accessed 3 January 2010). Chion, Michel (1994), Audio-Vision: Sound on the Screen, New York: Columbia University Press. Clemetson, Lynette (2002), ‘Latino population growth is widespread, study says’, New York Times (31 July): A14.

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Delabastita, Dirk and Grutman, Rainier (2005), ‘Fictional representations of multilingualism and translation’, in Dirk Delabastita and Rainier Grutman (eds) Fictionalising Translation and Multilingualism. Special issue of Linguistica Antverpiensia, 4: 1–34. ‘Elliot Goldenthal: News and Updates’ (2003). Online: www.goldenthal. filmmusic.com (accessed 22 February 2010). Goldenthal, Elliot (2002), DVD Commentary, Frida, directed by Julie Taymor, Handprint Entertainment, Lions Gate Films, Miramax Films, Ventanarosa Productions. Goldenthal, Elliot (2002), ‘Album Notes’. Online: www.goldenthal.filmmusic.com/film/frida/index.html (accessed 3 January 2010). Herrera, Hayden (1990), ‘Why Frida Kahlo speaks to the 90’s’, New York Times (28 October). Online: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage. html?res=9C0CEFDD1F3AF93BA15753C1A966958260 (accessed 3 January 2010). Herrera, Hayden (2003), Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, New York: Bloomsbury. Kerr, Sarah (2001), ‘Viva Frida’, Vogue (December). Online: www.style. com/vogue/feature/112701/page2.html (accessed 3 January 2010). ‘Lila Downs: the Voice of Frida Kahlo’, March 2005. Online: www.pbs. org/weta/fridakahlo/about/downs.html (accessed 10 January 2010). Lo, Malinda (2005), ‘The life and music of Mexican legend Chavela Vargas’ (25 January). Online: www.afterellen.com/People/2005/1/ chavelavargas.html (accessed 10 January 2010). Molina Guzmán, Isabel (2006), ‘Mediating Frida: negotiating discourses of Latina/o authenticity in global media representations of ethnic identity’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23: 3, 232–51. Olcott, Jocelyn (2009), ‘ “Take off that streetwalker’s dress”: Concha Michel and the cultural politics of gender in postrevolutionary Mexico’, Journal of Women’s History, 21: 3, 36–59. Paredez, Deborah (2009), Selenidad: Selena, Latinos and the Performance of Memory, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Shaw, Deborah (2010), ‘Transforming the national body: Salma Hayek and Frida, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 27: 4, 299–313. ‘Soundtracks for Frida’. Online: www.imdb.com/title/tt0120679/sound track (accessed 11 January 2010). Smith, Paul Julian (2003), ‘Frida’, Sight & Sound, 13: 3, 41–2. Tully, Judd (1994), ‘The Kahlo cult’, Art News, 93: 4, 126–33. Yarbo-Bejarano, Yvonne (1997), ‘Crossing the border with Chabela Vargas: a chicana femme’s tribute’, in Daniel Balderston, Daniel and Donna Guy (eds), Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, New York: New York University Press, 33– 43.

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14

‘Silence! Fado is about to be sung’: fado and the comédia à portuguesa Anthony De Melo The phrase ‘Silence! Fado is about to be sung’,1 quoted in the title of this chapter, is the oft-repeated command that precedes the singing of fado in a so-called ‘fado house’.2 It is intended to alert the audience to the performance of fado so that they may devote their full attention to the song. Failure to acknowledge this will be met with hissing, shouts of ‘silence!’ and angry looks from aficionados. The message is clear – pay attention to the fado and nothing else. Such is the respect afforded fado tradition and convention, that this command and the audience’s silent deference are repeatedly represented in Portuguese cinema. Fado is typically thought of as a sad torch-song of loss and nostalgia originally sung by prostitutes, criminals, bohemians and sailors, and yet it paradoxically features prominently in the soundtracks of the comédia à portuguesa, literally ‘Portuguese-style comedy films’, a cinematic tradition that borrows heavily from the Portuguese revue theatre of songs, comedy sketches, and dances. This chapter examines the representation of fado in the comédia à portuguesa, where this song style became a generic element during the 1930s and 1940s. Viewed textually, fado is integrated into the narrative, albeit loosely, and is a key signifier of community and tradition, as well as being recognised for its musical ability to express the melancholia of saudade (a term which refers to a particularly Portuguese brand of nostalgia and longing). The chapter begins by offering a brief introduction to fado, with particular reference to the music’s evocation of saudade. Thereafter, the focus shifts to the influence of the teatro de revista, the Portuguese equivalent of music-hall or vaudeville entertainment, both on the comédia films and on fado. Finally, it analyses the position of fado

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as a signifier of community and as the ‘canção nacional’ (national song) within this cinematic tradition.

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Defining fado Fado emerged out of the poor neighbourhoods of Mouraria and Alfama in Lisbon in the early decades of the nineteenth century, but the debate surrounding the exact origins of fado has been contentious.3 Scholars claim that fado was, respectively, the result of African, Arab, or Brazilian influences, or various combinations of these, as well as being an ‘authentic’ Portuguese song form. Fado is sung by both male and female singers, known as fadistas, using a highly emotive singing style, one where not only the voice carries the emotional quality of the song, but the face and body are also signifiers of feeling. The great Amália Rodrigues (1920–99) exemplified this style, with her eyes closed, head tilted back, body swaying from side to side, wearing a black dress with a long, flowing skirt, and a black shawl draped over her shoulders. The voice in fado singing enjoys a rhythmic freedom and elaborate ornamentation to distinguish fado from other types of Portuguese folk song. Fadistas use extended voltinhas (elaborate and stylised vocal turns) and rubato (temporary disregarding of strict tempo) to emphasise phrases for dramatic and emotional impact. Accompanied by the guitarra portuguesa (Portuguese guitar) and the violão (classical acoustic guitar) a fado begins with an instrumental opening of four to sixteen bars, establishing tempo and melody.4 When the fadista begins singing the guitarra will act as the contra-canto (counter-song), offering a counter-melody to the singer, while the violão provides the steady rhythmic sound. Throughout the performance the audience sits silently, devoting all their attention to the fadista out of respect for the fado. The audience are as much a part of the fado as the singers and guitarists. This silence is a form of active listening and impacts on fado in a profound way. Fado has been said to represent the melancholia of saudade. Paul Vernon goes so far as to suggest that ‘Saudade is inextricably linked with the Fado. Indeed, it could be said that saudade is the very soul of the music’ (Vernon, 1998: 3). There is a general view that there is something unique and untranslatable about the word saudade, something which only the Portuguese understand. It is translated

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variously as melancholy, loss, yearning, nostalgia, sadness and homesickness. The view of fado as a sad and tragic song is equally powerful. For many, to separate fado from saudade is impossible. In his essay, ‘The Making of Saudade’, João Leal (2000) traces the history of saudade as an invented tradition promoted by individuals and groups for very specific purposes.5 Leal does not deny the profound impact of saudade, but he is sceptical about the idea that it is an inherited emotion. He views the invention of saudade at the beginning of the twentieth century as occurring simultaneously with the acceptance of fado by the cultural elite (2000: 277). If the excitement of the Republic led to assertions of national pride, then the promotion of both saudade and fado can be seen as a desire to culturally express that pride. Saudade and fado benefited from this association, as Leal argues: Being one of the main themes of fado, saudade also benefited from its process of transformation into a national song. At the same time that fado was becoming the particular and unique expression of Portuguese musical genius, saudade was slowly becoming – particularly in the urban centres – a widespread stereotype for describing the intricacies of the Portuguese soul. (2000: 277–78)

The philosophy of saudade, combined with the poetic lyrics and the distinctive musical features of fado (the timbre of the voice, the ornamentation of vocal styling and the Portuguese guitarra) conspired to express the euphoria of the day. Fado in the teatro de revista The Portuguese revista or music-hall revue is a theatrical show that includes comic sketches, songs, dances, and attractions such as magicians and jugglers.6 Comic-opera, operettas, and the comedia dell’arte, in various ways, have all influenced the revista (Rebello, 1984: 17). Luiz Francisco Rebello maintains that the defining features of the Portuguese revue, with its satirical skits of recent events, songs and caricatures of real people, were all evident from the first performance in 1851 (1984: 26). From 1912 on the revista would adopt a two-act structure with twenty or so songs and skits, with an overall theme loosely connecting these elements together.7 Incorporating fado into this artistic medium meant that musical performances would have to adapt to suit the revista format.8 As

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a result, fado songs were arranged for an orchestra and the traditional tendency for improvisation gave way to a four-minute time limit (Santos, 1978: 73). Fadistas would be hired by the theatre companies or the latter’s established singers would learn to sing fados, showing their versatility as performers by drawing on their comic talents when singing this style of song (Santos, 1978: 73). It is precisely this comic element that holds the key to understanding how fado was able to be incorporated into the revue theatre. While it is generally viewed as a melancholic song, fado also has a history of being sung for comic effect, and in the revista the traditions and conventions of fado were parodied. Furthermore, fado in the popular theatre became a very accommodating song form, incorporating elements from the styles of popular music that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, giving rise to hybrid styles such as the fado-fox, fado-slow, fado-rumba and fado-samba. Thus fado came to be sung in Spanish, French and English, and accompanied by the guitarra, the violão, or an orchestra (Rebello, 1985: 111). This blending of styles and influences illustrated that fado, while elevated to the position of national song and musical ‘soul’ of the Portuguese people, could also accommodate the light entertainment demands of the teatro de revista. From revista to comédia: fado on film The comédia à portuguesa dominated film production in Portugal in the 1930s and 1940s. It is indicative of the limited scope of the Portuguese film industry during these years that this dominant ‘genre’ only, in fact, comprised seven films. It was a successful cinematic tradition for the industry, however, achieving widespread popularity among Portuguese audiences, as well as appealing to the émigré Portuguese community in Brazil. Centred around life in the bairros (neighbourhoods) of Lisbon, the comédias feature a mix of lower- and upper-class characters who, by the end of the film, have come together in some form of happy union, often through marriage. Frequently, the plots turn on the inversion of social hierarchies so that lower-class characters pretend to be rich, while the upper classes downplay their privileged position. Traditional values of family, patriarchy and hierarchy are rigidly adhered to, along with a fascination for modern technology, such as the radio and the motor car. This blending

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of the traditional with the modern is one of the main features of the comédia and demonstrates that the values and ideals of village life, for example, can be easily and successfully transposed to the modern urban centre of Lisbon (Granja, 2000: 196). Harmony is the goal, for both individual characters and the community as a whole, and singing is often the expression of a harmonious community spirit. This has frequently resulted in the misleading classification of the comédia as a genre of films that heavily feature fado, but in reality not all the films belonging to this tradition include diegetic singing. O pai tirano (The Tyrannical Father, António Lopes Ribeiro, 1941) and O leão da Estrela (The Lion of Estrela, Arthur Duarte, 1947) do not feature characters who break into song, but these films still contain all the generic narrative elements associated with the comédia. Furthermore, A menina da rádio (The Girl on the Radio, Arthur Duarte, 1944) includes many songs but no examples of fado, and there is thus ample evidence to show that while songs, and performances of fado in particular, can be found in the soundtracks of the comédia, they are not a necessary feature of the genre. The teatro de revista and the cinema shared talent and expertise in the early years of sound film in Portugal. It has been argued that the contemporaneous popularity of the revista, the attraction of ready-made stars who made the transition from stage to screen, and the adoption of the formal elements of the revue theatre, are major factors that account for the success of the comédia à portuguesa (Pina, 1977: 112). Referring to the filming of A canção de Lisboa (Song of Lisbon, Cottinelli Telmo, 1933), Beatriz Costa (1907–96) commented: ‘I would work in the theatre then have to get up at six in the morning the next day to go and film’ (Pina, 1977: 40). This first example of the comédia tradition featured other stars of the revista such as Vasco Santana (1898–1958), António Silva (1886– 1971), and Teresa Gomes (1882–1962). As well as these actors, the film also included songs written by Raul Portela (1889–1942) and Raul Ferrão (1890–1953), veteran composers of the theatrical revue, and the dialogue was written by another teatro de revista mainstay, José Galhardo (1905–67). The careers of this group would continue to criss-cross the two media, and they worked in the popular theatre as frequently as they did in the cinema. The revista influence is particularly evident in the representation of fado in two examples of the comédia genre, O Costa do Castelo

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(Costa of the Castelo Neighbourhood, Arthur Duarte, 1943), and O grande Elias (Great Elias, Arthur Duarte, 1950), where fado tradition and convention are parodied for comic effect. In the former, António Silva plays Costa, a guitarrista who is training a young amateur fadista, Rosa Maria (Herminia Silva), who will go on to make her debut at a well-established fado house and achieve great success. Like all comédias, the main theme of this film is the differences between social classes in Portugal, and it ultimately glorifies the working class, while also presenting the rich in a positive light. During the lessons with Costa, Rosa Maria speaks in slang, which he constantly corrects, asking her: ‘How will you sing fado in public making such mistakes?’ He detests her street vernacular and insists that she speak in ‘proper’ Portuguese. Costa continues: ‘It’s not the voice, it’s the lyrics! Do you know what being a singer means?’ Rosa Maria goes on to suggest that becoming a fadista means no longer having to work in a factory. Fado by this point is an established profession and an opportunity for the lower classes to achieve financial stability. Costa also instructs Rosa Maria in the proper posture for singing fado: ‘Hands on your waist, head up, a smile.’ Rosa Maria exaggerates her smile and is reprimanded by Costa, who chides: ‘You’ll get a chair thrown at you’ and tells her to smile naturally (‘Put on the air God gave you.’). She sings, but using her lower-class street slang, and Costa’s cat is shown fleeing from the noise. The seriousness of the intense emotional quality of the song is undercut by the comic playfulness of the language, while the performance convention is exaggerated via a broad caricature in which a melancholy song is sung in an incongruously light-hearted way. In O grande Elias a wealthy aunt is visiting her nephew Carlos (Estevão Amarante), an inveterate gambler who has told her that he is a wealthy businessman with a large family whom she helps to support with monthly cheques. He enlists the help of his friend and co-conspirator, Elias (played by the ever-present António Silva), to deceive the aunt during her short stay, by pretending to be the family’s butler and arranging for their use of a mansion. Carlos convinces his estranged wife to help with the deception, along with their only daughter, Ana Maria (played by Milu) and her fiancé Miguel (Francisco Ribeiro, commonly known as Ribeirinho). Carlos has also told his aunt that he has twin sons, and so Miguel is coerced into pretending to be one of them, and she is told that

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the other twin has left home to pursue a life of drink and wrestling, bringing shame on the family. However, Aunt Adriana believes that she can save the black-sheep twin, Ernesto, and reunite him with his family. Elias decides to take Adriana to a bar where she will see that Ernesto/Miguel is beyond redemption and a fight will be staged as an excuse to usher her away before she can speak to him. It is in this bar that fado is heard. As the scene begins, a fadista sits at a table with a group of men, playing a guitarra. When Elias and Aunt Adriana are spotted getting out of a taxi, the fadista is directed to the table where Ernesto/ Miguel is sitting. He and the fadista visually parody the famous fado painting by José Malhoa depicting the prostitute, Adelaide de Facada and her lover, the fadista Amâncio, but with a reversal of gender roles. Ernesto/Miguel is shown in cutaways drinking large gulps of liquor, his eyes bulging and his face contorting in a ridiculous fashion as he is obviously not accustomed to hard drinking. This comic association of fado with drunkenness, along with the mock representation of the Malhoa painting, utilises the teatro de revista’s convention of broad caricature to parody fado’s origins in the taverns of Lisbon. The song itself, however, is not mocked. The comedy, which draws on visual representations, is kept separate from the fado performance, and the music and singing remain faithful to the traditional style. The fado here is not a mournful, melancholic lament, but a proud and upbeat song, glorifying the figure of the hard-working sailor and fadista. Throughout her performance there is not a sound from those in the bar, and the tradition of maintaining silence while fado is sung is respected. The scene evokes a sanitised version of the early years of fado’s origins and comically exploits the iconographic representation of a fadista prostitute and the music’s associations with a violent machismo, yet does so while respecting the song itself. Fado in the comédia à portuguesa: a song of community and nation The examination of the influence of the teatro de revista on the comédias has so far focused on the convention of comic exaggeration as a counterpoint to the melancholia of fado. In these instances, fado is just one of many entertaining elements that make up a comedy film. However, fado also operates as a musical

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expression of community and as a de facto national song, its performances on screen imbued with saudade. The use of diegetic fado as an expression of belonging to both a local and national community can be seen in the very first example of the comédia, A canção de Lisboa, which established the template for the genre. The narrative is straightforward: a young university student, Vasco (played by Vasco Santana), is nearing the end of his studies in medicine. He is living off the money that his wealthy aunts send him, but squanders it on a bohemian lifestyle and is evicted from his apartment. His aunts decide to visit him in Lisbon and he sets about deceiving them, acting as if he were already a practicing doctor. The aunts discover the truth and cut off his funds, so a friend, Carlos (Manoel de Oliveira), finds him a job singing fado. The film also centres on the innocent romance between Vasco and a young seamstress, Alice (Beatriz Costa). Of the various song styles present in the film, it is fado that rescues Vasco from despair and re-establishes the community as the ideal foundation of society. The film ends with the marriage of Vasco and Alice, and his graduation as a doctor. During the early years of the dictatorship, the Estado Novo (New State), as part of its policy of promoting fado as the national song, restricted where it could be performed. These restrictions coincided with the establishment of state-sanctioned fado houses which were ‘all similar in style . . . with a resultant homogenising effect on all manifestations of the fado’ (Brito, 1994: 32). In a clear allusion to such venues, in A canção de Lisboa, Carlos takes Vasco to the local fado house, the Retiro do Alexandrino, in an attempt to secure him a contract to sing fado there. The prominent display of the Portuguese coat of arms makes the audience aware that the Retiro is an example of a homogenised, official fado house, and is visible in almost every shot of Vasco: when he sits at a table it features on the wall behind him; when he stumbles to the bar he stands by a coat of arms; and when he drunkenly rails against fado, it is visible in the background. This blatant symbol of the state is such a prominent feature in the Retiro that it is even found hanging from a tree, aligning the fado house with the Portuguese nation itself. In another shot, when Vasco is carried off on the shoulders of his fans, a billboard on the wall of the Retiro advertises with patriotic pride ‘Portugalia’ beer, produced in Portugal’s oldest brewery. Here the fado house becomes a site of national symbols and iconography as well as the performance space for the national song.

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Vasco, at this point, is essentially no longer a member of any community, and he disrespects the traditions of fado from the beginning of the scene. When the fadista is introduced he loudly shouts out his drink order to the deaf waiter, resulting in a rebuke from the audience, and then he stumbles about the Retiro drunkenly during her performance. When he is asked if he will sing fado, he verbally attacks the song style itself, shouting ‘death to all fadistas!’ His outbursts against fado are the final act of a man completely cut off from his community, and the audience’s reaction is violent. The fado aficionados will not tolerate an outsider, especially one who is disdainful of their beloved fado. With his ejection from the venue, Vasco is now at his lowest point: ‘orphaned, abandoned, kicked out, sad and alone’, he claims. Only when he has hit rock bottom – as he walks down the stairs from the terrace to exit the establishment, dragging his feet, his chin resting on his chest and his shirt dishevelled – can he express his melancholy, or saudade. He then sings fado, in the shadow of the fado house, with such emotional authenticity that he draws the diegetic audience to him and is accepted back into the community. Similarly, in O pátio das cantigas (Courtyard of Songs, Fernando Ribeiro, 1942) fado is attacked but shown to be Portugal’s national song nonetheless. Centred on a Lisbon courtyard, the film celebrates the music and folkloric traditions of the nation, as the neighbours sing and dance together in their communal pátio. Romances flourish and animosities are resolved to paint a picture of an idealised close-knit community. As Lisa Shaw writes, the film ‘upholds the myth of Portugal’s brandos costumes or peaceful way of life, as the characters for the most part treat each other with respect and politeness, and family ties are close’ (2003: 157). The greater city of Lisbon is disregarded; the action takes place almost exclusively in the courtyard, which acts as a de facto city square. During the festival of Santo António (Lisbon’s patron saint) the courtyard, decorated with streamers and filled with people, appears as a crowded, bustling, somewhat claustrophobic space with no hint that there is a larger city beyond its walls. The film opens in the courtyard as one of the neighbours is attempting to bring music to the residents by hooking up a loud speaker from his amateur radio console. His success brings folkloric brass band music to the awaiting neighbours, who are then inspired to dance. However, this appreciation of traditional forms

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of music is soon interrupted by Evaristo (António Silva), who is a fan of opera. The two types of music are pitted against one another; the folkloric as the music of the community, and opera as the music of the snobbish, pretentious elite. Evaristo plays his gramophone through his open window (the radio having broken down) to the disappointed neighbours. He admonishes them: ‘Fado singers! You only enjoy that useless guitar music. Ignorant fools! You can’t appreciate classical music or opera. And opera is the music of the workers.’9 Despite the fact that fado was not being played, it is singled out for attention in Evaristo’s attack, and makes him even more of an outsider, and a critic of Portuguese tradition and folklore. Evaristo also parodies the ubiquitous command that precedes fado performances, as shown in many of the comédias (‘Silence! Fado is about to be sung’) by declaring to the gathered neighbours: ‘Silence! Opera is about to be sung.’ This attack on fado seems to come from nowhere, but Evaristo must surely understand fado’s importance to his neighbours. While they appreciate other kinds of music and song forms, it is fado that they perform. The radio broadcasts brass band instrumental music, which the neighbours enjoy dancing to, but when it comes to performing music, fado is their chosen genre. This attack on fado again emphasises that the song style has its detractors, but they are evidently individuals drawn in opposition to the community. We later find out how important fado is when the fadista answers Evaristo’s attack by singing the following lines: ‘for all those people / who do not believe / that this Portuguese song/is beautiful’. Later that night, fado brings the neighbours together, drawing them out of their homes to share in the music. Maria Paula, playing a wouldbe fadista named Amália,10 sings to the accompaniment of Carlos Bonito (António Vilar) on the guitar and João Magrinho (Barroso Lopes) on the guitarra. To emphasise the tight-knit nature of the community that the neighbours have created, they each perform from their respective balconies. The scene evokes the days when fado was sung on the streets, with the fadista singing to the stars in the sky, her voice carrying across the courtyard to the windows where her neighbours lean out to appreciate the music. Another moment when fado is heard in this film occurs after Amália’s grandfather, Senhor Reitor, having been beaten up and robbed, is shown convalescing in his bed. The instrumental opening of a fado is heard and a cut reveals that the guitarists are situated

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across the courtyard, playing in the room of the radio enthusiast, who is broadcasting their performance over his amateur radio. The guitarists are unaware that their music is bringing comfort to the old man in his bed. At the same time, Amália is drawn to the music and is inspired to sing. Fado connects the neighbours across the courtyard, providing comfort, solace and entertainment. In this striking moment it is fado that has the mesmeric power to bring about an emotional connection. Unlike the other instances where music brings the neighbours together, this time they are not performing for each other, but rather are lost in their own thoughts, isolated from one another, unaware that they are sharing the moment. Amália, in the earlier scene, was filmed looking out over the courtyard singing fado, but this time she is framed in the doorway on to the balcony, but with her back to the courtyard and singing to the camera positioned inside her apartment. Her concern for her grandfather, the old man’s physical pain and humiliation, the effect that the robbery has had on the courtyard’s inhabitants, and the emotional playing of the two guitarists, are intensified through fado in this shared moment of melancholy. The performers are playing and singing for themselves, but the fado is not for them alone. It belongs to the community and brings comfort to them all. It is through fado that they have an outlet for their emotions at this difficult time. Conclusion In the comédia à portuguesa fado is rendered compatible with the comedy format via its associations with the light-hearted entertainment traditions of the teatro de revista. In particular, O Costa do Castelo and O grande Elias reconcile the comédia’s demands for parody and exaggeration with simultaneous respect for and celebration of the conventions of fado. The song’s inherent association with saudade and melancholia enables it to assert community values and to act as a musical representation of the nation on screen, as reflected in the films A canção de Lisboa and O pátio das cantigas. Assimilating the formal elements of the revista, the comédias present a series of comic sketches, dances, songs and broad comic caricatures, along with a healthy dose of wordplay, all incorporated into a narrative that deals with innocent romance, family life and the inversion of social hierarchies. Fado, having

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experienced decades of accommodation and adaptation, had by the 1930s adjusted to fit within the varied performance format of both the theatrical revue and the comedy film, taking on a lighter satirical tone while continuing to nurture its melancholic dimension. The 1940s would witness a shift in fado’s relationship with the Estado Novo and its own historical traditions. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Salazar regime turned to the ever-popular fado as a sanctioned expression of the mood for greater freedom. This coincided with the rise of Amália Rodrigues, who presented Portuguese cinema with a star fadista. With such dramatic films as Capas negras (Black Capes, Armando Miranda, 1947) and Fado: história d’uma cantadeira (Fado: Story of a Singer, Perdigão Queiroga, 1947), fado became the central narrative focus instead of just one of a series of song styles within a film. This state-endorsed promotion of fado on screen, complete with the song style’s traditional transgressive associations, constituted yet another phase in fado’s history of contradictory representations and accommodations, however, without the comic safety net of the revista or comédia traditions. Notes 1 Unless otherwise stated all translations are the author’s own. In relation to the research on which this chapter is based, the author would like to acknowledge the support of the University of London’s Central Research Fund, and to thank Richard Dyer for his helpful comments. 2 A ‘fado house’ (casa de fado) is a restaurant, bar or club where fado is performed. These venues have changed throughout the long history of what is often referred to as Portugal’s national song, to incorporate various associative iconographies (these may include paintings depicting bulls and bullfighters or idyllic garden settings with dancing peasants, and the walls may also be adorned with pictures of famous fado singers and guitarists). 3 See Carvalho (1982 [1903]); Gallop (1933); Osório (1974); Costa and Guerreiro (1984); Pimentel (1989); Vernon (1998); and Nery (2004). 4 The guitarra portuguesa is a twelve-stringed guitar that belongs to the cittern family of instruments (with an oval body, flat back and a fretted neck). The guitarrista plays with unhas (so-called ‘fingernails’) that are worn on the thumb and the index finger so the musician can pluck the strings quickly. The violão is a standard six-string acoustic guitar. 5 Poet Teixeira Pascoaes (1877–1952) became the chief theoretician of

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the saudosismo movement. Inspired by the Republican revolution of 1910, he promoted saudade as a spiritual and national emotion – one that would have a profound impact on the country. João Leal argues that Pascoaes and the saudosismo movement influenced the dictatorial regime of António Salazar (1889–1970, prime minister from 1932 to 1968). Beginning in 1851, the teatro de revista was initially an annual variety show, but adopted a thematic structure very early on in its evolution with the themed show, Fossilismo e Progresso (Fossilism and Progress) in 1856. The revista would adapt to incorporate new musical trends and performing acts as they became popular, and continues to be performed to this day at the Teatro da Trindade theatre in Lisbon. The precise date of this shift in format is not known. However, Rebello dates the two-act structure as first appearing between 1912 and 1927 in the shows produced by Ernesto Rodrigues, Félix Bermudes and João Bastos, the so-called ‘Parceria’ (Partnership) production team (Rebello, 1984: 26). Fado made its first appearance in the revista in 1869 in a show titled Ditoso Fado (Happy Fado) at the Trindade theatre in Lisbon. In Portuguese the words for ‘opera’ (ópera) and ‘workers’ (operários) allow for a verbal pun here, another typical feature of the scripts of the comédia. Initially, this part was to be played by Amália Rodrigues, who at this early stage in her career was fado’s rising star. It was an attempt to capitalise on her popularity, but the decision was made not to cast her as it was thought that she was not photogenic (Baptista, 2009: 52). Amália would make her screen debut in 1947 in the film Capas Negras (Black Capes, Armando Miranda) and would go on to appear in many more films.

References Baptista, Tiago (2009), Ver Amália: os filmes de Amália Rodrigues, Lisbon: Tinta-da-China. Brito, Joaquim Pais de (1994), ‘Fado: voices and shadows’, in Joaquim Pais de Brito (ed.), Fado: Voices and Shadows, Lisbon: L94/Electa, 15–36. Carvalho, Pinto de (1982 [1903]), História do fado, Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote. Costa, António Firmino Da and Guerreiro, Maria Das Dores (1984), O trágico e o contraste: o fado no bairro de Alfama, Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote. Gallop, Rodney (1933), ‘The Fado (the Portuguese song of fate)’, The Musical Quarterly, 19:2, 199–213.

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Granja, Paulo Jorge (2000), ‘A comédia à portuguesa, ou a máquina de sonhos a preto e branco do Estado Novo’, in Luís Reis Torgal (ed.), O Cinema sob o olhar de Salazar, Coimbra: Círculo de Leitores, 194–233. Leal, João (2000), ‘The making of saudade: national identity and ethnic psychology in Portugal’, in Ton Dekker, John Helsloot and Carla Wijers (eds), Roots and Rituals: The Construction of Ethnic Identities, Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 267–87. Nery, Rui Vieira (2004), Para uma história do fado, Lisbon: Público. Osório, António (1974), A mitologia fadista, Lisbon: Livros Horizonte. Pimentel, Alberto (1989), A triste canção do sul: subsídios para a história do fado, Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote. Pina, Luís de (1977), A Aventura do cinema português, Lisbon: Editorial Vega. Rebello, Luiz Francisco (1984), História do teatro de revista em Portugal Vol. 1, Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote. Rebello, Luiz Francisco (1985), História do teatro de revista em Portugal Vol. 2, Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote. Santos, Vítor Pavão dos (1978), A Revista à portuguesa, Lisbon: O Jornal. Shaw, Lisa (2003), ‘Portuguese musical comedies from the 1940s and 1950s and the transatlantic connection’, International Journal of Iberian Studies, 15:3, 153–66. Vernon, Paul (1998), A History of the Portuguese Fado, Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Sounds from Brazil: brasilidade and the rise of the music documentary Tatiana Signorelli Heise

Most research that addresses the relationship between film and music adopts a view of music as a ‘resource’, that is, an element that is used in the film for particular cinematic purposes. Leaving aside musicals, much less has been written about films in which music is a topic in itself (Dickinson, 2003: 7). Romney and Wootton’s Celluloid Jukebox (1995) and Dickinson’s Movie Music are among the few examples of works that discuss what it means to tell the story of a musician or to use popular music as the topic of a documentary. This chapter contributes to this underexplored field by focusing on the music and musicians that constitute the subject matter of four recent Brazilian films. Although music has always played a prominent role in Brazilian popular culture, filmmakers’ interest in music is a relatively recent phenomenon. With the exception of a handful of 1930s chanchadas (musical comedies) featuring famous singers playing themselves,1 and a few isolated cases thereafter, it was only from 2000 onwards that filmmakers systematically turned their attention to music and musicians as subject matter.2 Since then, Brazilian musical styles have been examined in a number of documentaries, ranging from films about samba (O mistério do samba [The Mystery of Samba, Lula Buarque de Hollanda and Carolina Jabor, 2008]), bossa nova (Coisa mais linda: Bossa Brasil [Stories of Love: The Birth of Bossa Nova, Paulo Thiago, 2005]), and MPB (Uma noite em 67 [A Night in 67, Ricardo Calil and Renato Terra, 2010]),3 to representations of more contemporary and globalised forms such as rap (Fala tu [Living Rap in Rio, Guilherme Coelho, 2003]; L.A.P.A. [Emílio Domingos and Caví Borges, 2008]), funk carioca (a local variant of Miami bass) (Sou feia mas tô na moda [I’m Ugly but Trendy, Denise Garcia, 2005]) and rock (Titãs, a vida até parece uma festa

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[Titãs, Life’s Like a Party, Oscar Rodrigues Alves and Branco Mello, 2008]). The documentary biopic has been even more popular, with over forty titles released since 2000. These include accounts of such diverse musicians as samba composer, vocalist and guitar player Paulinho da Viola, considered the legitimate heir of traditional samba; Tim Maia, who became known in Brazil as the father of Brazilian soul; Arnaldo Batista from Os Mutantes, the first rock band in Brazil to achieve international acclaim, and arguably the most artistically significant; Humberto Teixeira, whose partnership with Luiz Gonzaga in the 1940s produced the North-Eastern song and dance style baião;4 Tom Zé, the most inventive and anarchic exponent of the Tropicália movement;5 and three films about Maria Bethânia, who, like her brother Caetano Veloso, achieved a cult status in Brazil with a varied and prolific musical career spanning over forty years. Bethânia started as a singer of protest songs in the 1960s before reaching stardom with her interpretation of well-known romantic ballads in the 1980s; she then surprised her fans by venturing into a more experimental type of music, which combines, among other elements, the sound of Afro-Brazilian prayers with birdsong recordings and poetry readings. Maria Bethânia: Pedrinha de Aruanda (Maria Bethânia: Little Stone from Aruanda, Andrucha Waddington, 2007) and Música é perfume (Music is Perfume, Georges Gachot, 2005) explore different aspects of her life and career, with particular focus on her vibrant live performances and her relationship with her famous brother. Outros (Doces) Bárbaros (Other [Sweet] Barbarians, Andrucha Waddington, 2002) documents her reunion with fellow MPB artists Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil and Veloso for a series of concerts across Brazil. Alongside these documentaries, there have also been a number of fiction films that have popular music as their focus, including two of the greatest box-office successes: Dois filhos de Francisco (Two Sons of Francisco, Breno Silveira, 2005) and Cazuza, o tempo não pára (Cazuza, Time Doesn’t Stop, Walter Carvalho and Sandra Werneck, 2004). The first is a biopic of the most popular country music duo in Brazil, and the second dramatises the rise and fall of the eponymous 1980s’ rock star and enfant terrible. In terms of number of films, however, fiction is far outweighed by the documentary format. It is therefore not surprising that the biggest documentary hit since the beginning of the twenty-first century is

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also about music: Vinicius (Miguel Faria Jr, 2005), a biopic of the famous poet, playwright and songwriter Vinicius de Moraes. To explore this rise of the music documentary in Brazil, this chapter looks more closely at four biopics which have been significant either in terms of box office or critical reception (or both) and which tell the stories of major figures in Brazilian songwriting: Cartola, música para os olhos (Cartola, The Samba Legend, Lírio Ferreira and Hilton Lacerda, 2007); A casa do Tom: mundo, monde, mondo (The House of Tom, Ana Jobim, 2009); Vinicius, and Coração vagabundo (Wandering Heart, Fernando Grostein Andrade, 2009). The analysis focuses on how the musician’s life story is cinematically rendered and what kinds of strategies the films adopt in order to represent music, particularly song. This chapter also examines the balance that each film strikes between representations of the musician’s personal life, on the one hand, and discussions about his music and career on the other. Finally, and given that music has always been strongly associated with claims about Brazilian national identity, it seeks to understand to what extent the musician is represented as having a special relationship to brasilidade or ‘Brazilianness’, a term that encompasses the qualities that are thought to define the nation and distinguish Brazilians from other people. A key reason for the popularity of documentaries about music legends is the audience’s wish to get ‘up close and personal’ with their idols, as observed by Lee-Wright (2010: 257) and Winston (2006: 79). The process of revealing the artist as he or she supposedly ‘really is’ is discussed by Romney in terms of the ‘backstage’ concept, which he explains as follows: It is a space of privacy, a world behind the curtain in which the real being, the ineffable precious essence of the performer’s self, supposedly lies shielded from sight . . . The audience is not normally permitted behind the sacred veil, but it is a convention of the music documentary to include scenes which take us backstage and offer us tantalising glimpses of the reality behind the show. (Romney, 1995: 83)

Most music documentaries strike a balance between ‘backstage’ scenes, musical performances and discussions about music. This balance varies considerably from one film to another, as we see in the four titles discussed here. They form a continuum ranging from

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a film almost entirely obsessed with its protagonist’s domestic life (A casa do Tom) to one that teases our desire for private revelations but systematically denies us this satisfaction (Coração vagabundo). In between these two extremes are Vinicius, which offers as much information about the songwriter’s personal life as is necessary to understand his music, and Cartola, which sets itself apart from the conventional biopic by obscuring its central character through a series of digressions into virtually unrelated topics. Family portrait: Tom Jobim In A casa do Tom the desire to reveal aspects of the artist’s personal life prevails over any other concerns. The title itself suggests an invitation into Jobim’s most private space, his house, and this is precisely what the film does, taking us back and forth between the three homes which the songwriter shared with his family between 1979 and 1994 in Rio de Janeiro, Poço Fundo (in the countryside of the Brazilian South East), and New York, respectively. Each of these settings is revealed through a series of photographs and footage that the director gathered during the seventeen years she was married to Tom Jobim. By means of a voiceover she gives us a history of each home and describes what their life was like. At one point she concludes: ‘Tom was pretty much the same everywhere we lived. His life would revolve around the same aspects: piano, home and children. He had his own peculiar routine.’ These three elements – Jobim’s piano practice, his interactions with his children and his daily routine – are the core of the film. A casa do Tom is less interested in Jobim’s public image as a composer, arranger, singer, pianist and guitarist than in the surface details of his role as a husband and father. Many of the photographs that feature in the film were taken by Ana Jobim herself in the context of their daily life, and most of the footage was captured in a similar fashion using a digital camera and no lighting or sound equipment. These techniques give the audience the impression that we are leafing through her family photograph albums or browsing her collection of home videos – which indeed we are. However, this excessive focus on the private and personal replaces any significant information about Jobim’s public life and identity as a songwriter. All the questions that are usually explored in music biopics – what kind of musical education the artist

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received, how his career started and developed, how he dealt with fame, and so forth – are ignored in this film. The one aspect of Jobim’s public life that the film does explore, albeit superficially, is his decision to live in the United States and how this was negatively reflected in the Brazilian media. There is something of a preoccupation in the film with the claim that Jobim’s living abroad did not impinge on his status as an ‘authentic’ Brazilian. A number of sequences serve to reaffirm his attachment to his native country by revealing his fascination with Brazil’s Atlantic forest and his fondness for typical aspects of Brazilian daily life, such as coffee, rice and popular folktales. In addition, the film emphasises Rio de Janeiro, a city strongly associated with Brazilian national identity, as a place of particular importance in Jobim’s life and a locus of belonging. Shots of famous Rio landmarks, such as the statue of Christ the Redeemer, Ipanema beach, the Botanical Gardens and the Rodrigo Freitas Lagoon are juxtaposed with tales about Jobim’s life, while the same technique is not used in the New York sequences, even though Jobim lived there for three decades. Rio was the place where he found the inspiration to write his music and where he had the most fruitful exchanges with his musical partners, we are told; New York was a ‘retreat’ where he ‘did his homework’. Hence, despite portraying Jobim as a world citizen, the film nevertheless highlights his brasilidade and presents his music as essentially ‘made in Brazil’. This statement is reinforced midway through the film as intertitles handwritten and signed by Jobim inform us: ‘All of my work is inspired by the Atlantic forest.’ A ‘true’ Brazilian: Vinicius de Moraes The attempt to represent the musician as ‘truly’ Brazilian is even more prominent in Vinicius, which charts the life and career of Jobim’s most prominent musical collaborator. The film alternates between a conventional biopic style, in which an off-screen voice narrates the subject’s life story over archival images, and a stage show in which a number of well-known Brazilian artists perform de Moraes’s songs and read his poems. These are intercut with commentary by his daughters, friends and fellow musicians, including Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque and Toquinho, who also perform versions of de Moraes’s songs for the camera. In contrast to A casa do Tom, music has a central role in this film,

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even to the extent of largely excluding discussion of de Moraes’s lengthy career as an international diplomat. The voice-overs, archival material, interviews and performances are all used to help us understand why de Moraes wrote the kinds of songs that he did and why he chose to abandon poetry in favour of writing songs. These revelations unfold as the film explores a series of interrelated themes, principally de Moraes’s status as a ‘true’ Brazilian and his tumultuous love life. The film advances the claim that de Moraes was not ‘really’ himself, or indeed Brazilian, until he embraced Brazilian popular music and its associated bohemian lifestyle. His initial formation as an erudite poet, heavily influenced by European Romanticism, is represented as a phase in which he proved his extraordinary talent but nevertheless failed to realise his true potential, as argued by poet and art critic Ferreira Gullar in an interview in the film: Vinicius started out writing French poetry inspired by French Catholicism . . . But that wasn’t him. It just wasn’t him. Gradually he converted himself into Vinicius de Moraes, that is, he became Brazilian. And he went further than the others, because many others took this same route, and became Brazilians but not as much as him. (Miguel Faria Jr, 2005)

A positive appraisal of the poet’s transformation from ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘erudite’ to ‘popular’ and ‘Brazilian’ is reinforced in the voice-over narration, which recounts that, as a consequence of de Moraes frequenting the brothels of Lapa (Rio de Janeiro’s red-light district), dancing in cabarets and befriending samba musicians, his writing ‘came down from the heights and got closer to life’. The film thus suggests that the artist’s new interest in everyday life and ordinary people in Rio, particularly the mixed race and the underclass, enlivened his poetry and subsequent song writing. Despite the film’s dismissal of de Moraes’s initial poetic Romanticism as being ‘foreign’, it nevertheless represents him as the quintessential romantic character: highly sensitive, impulsive, individualistic and addicted to love. The fact that he married nine times and drank himself to death is treated in a positive light, as evidence of his emotional vulnerability. It is significant that, rather than explore the obvious influence that de Moraes’s early Romanticism had upon his subsequent song writing, the film dismisses his initial trajectory as some kind of

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deviation from the ‘real’ person that he was. This view echoes a nationalistic discourse that dates back to the 1920s, when Brazilian Modernist artists rejected the dominant influence of European art and the ideal of branqueamento (whitening) in favour of Afro-Brazilian cultural forms and racial miscegenation, prized as evidence of Brazil’s uniqueness and superiority.6 This particular understanding of Brazilian national identity became hegemonic for the rest of the twentieth century, and it reappears in Vinicius as the film positively appraises the artist’s move away from white, Catholic, Europeanised culture towards the racially mixed world of samba and Lapa as a process of ‘Brazilianisation’. Racial democracy, a crucial tenet in the ideology of Brazilian national identity, is also touched upon in the film as a sign of the artist’s brasilidade. Twice we are told that de Moraes claimed himself to be the ‘blackest white man in Brazil’, a suggestion of his strong identification with Afro-Brazilian culture. This identification is further reinforced in discussions of his play Orfeu da Conceição, written for an all-black cast, and his Afro-samba music of the late 1960s, which emphasised Brazil’s African legacy more than any other style of popular music had done until then.7 The samba legend: Cartola Both A casa do Tom and Vinicius seek to shed light on particular aspects of their respective subject’s life while also affirming his brasilidade. In Cartola, the assertion of Brazilian national identity is so forceful that it takes precedence over the musician’s biography. Rather than helping us to understand what kind of person Cartola (Angenor de Oliveira) was, and how he came to be one of the most cherished samba composers of the twentieth century, the film uses his story as a point of departure to explore diverse social and cultural developments in Brazilian music, cinema, and society in general. In this respect, Cartola reverses the strategy of A casa do Tom. The latter demystifies the artist’s stardom and all its associated clichés by portraying him as a humble everyman; the former strengthens the myth around the musician by revisiting familiar historical facts and refusing to provide much insight into his life as an ordinary person. The myth building starts in the opening sequence, with archival footage of Cartola’s funeral in 1980 that shows a mass of followers

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and admirers, some of whom hold roses in reference to the artist’s most famous samba, ‘As rosas não falam’ (The Roses Don’t Speak). A voice on the soundtrack reads the first lines from Machado de Assis’s novel Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, 1881). Beginning the film with Cartola’s funeral is a direct reference to this landmark in Brazilian literature, in which the dead protagonist narrates his own story from beyond the grave. According to Lacerda, the connection made between Cartola and Machado de Assis signifies a ‘handing over of the torch’ between two individuals who helped to define Brazilian culture (in Vianna, 2007: 7). By means of this and other unexpected associations, the film positions Cartola in the pantheon of Brazilian popular culture and represents him as a kind of omnipresent figure whose life runs parallel to crucial events in the country’s history. Instead of the usual combination of interviews, archival footage and musical numbers, the film unfolds like a long music video where Cartola’s songs are superimposed over sounds and images derived from different sources: fiction films, television programmes, radio recordings, newsreels and dramatisations. Glimpses of the composer’s biography are intercut with a history of samba and tempered with clips representing, among others, the 1930s chanchadas, Orson Welles’s shooting of the unfinished film It’s All True (1942) in Rio, Marcel Camus’ film adaptation of Orfeu da Conceição (renamed Orfeu negro [Black Orpheus, 1959]), the construction of the new capital city Brasília, the 1970 World Cup, and a gallery of iconic cultural figures, ranging from singer Carmen Miranda to football legend Pelé and filmmaker Glauber Rocha. The thread that connects all these references are Cartola’s compositions, which are relentlessly played on the soundtrack. Some of his songs are thematically linked to the narrative, such as ‘Chega de demanda’ (No More Demands), Cartola’s first samba, played over the image of two samba dancers clad in the traditional pink and green colours of Estação Primeira da Mangueira, the ‘samba school’ (neighbourhood carnival association) which he founded in 1928. In other cases the link between song and image is less obvious, or even ironic, as in the use of the melancholic and melodious samba ‘Acontece’ (It Happens) over footage of the military police and tanks intimidating the population of Rio during the post-1964 dictatorship. In addition to these recordings, there are a few performances by the composer himself, and these are the closest we get to an

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understanding of who he was. The archive footage of him playing ‘O mundo é um moinho’ (The World Grinds You Down) for his father is of particular interest. The sequence is introduced right after we learn that, quite late in his life, Cartola was forced to move in with his father, Sebastião de Oliveira, owing to bankruptcy. Earlier in the film we are told that Cartola’s father was a tyrant who abandoned him when he was very young, so there is an implication that having to share a house at this stage in his life must have been a considerable challenge. A two-shot reveals them sitting side by side. Sebastião looks amused as Cartola introduces him and tells the camera about their relationship when he was a child: ‘I didn’t like to study, so he gave me lessons at home . . . But I couldn’t pay attention, because he’d give me work to do and while I was studying he’d play the guitar. I didn’t know if I should learn to read or to play the guitar.’ At his father’s request, Cartola then plays ‘O mundo é um moinho’, a samba-canção (a softer and slower ballad-style samba) whose lyrics are a bitter prediction of failure and disillusionment. The song’s theme echoes that low moment in Cartola’s life, when he was forced to abandon music-making and survive in underpaid jobs. Adopting a familiar narrative structure of rise and fall followed by redemption, the film’s final sequences then trace Cartola’s ‘rediscovery’ by an influential white, middle-class journalist, who helped him out of extreme poverty, and to achieve success. In this context, it is significant that the film insists on celebrating brasilidade and its symbols (samba, carnival, football) while leaving Cartola’s racial identity unexamined. His blackness is entirely taken for granted, as if it had no impact on his musical career. Yet anyone who is familiar with the history of samba knows that it is marked by racially based contradictions. Samba is celebrated in Brazil as a practice that brings people of all classes and races together.8 This view sits incongruously with the fact that many of the Afro-descendent artists who created samba in the 1920s and 1930s remained poor and in obscurity for most of their lives, while their compositions became vehicles for the instant stardom of white singers such as Francisco Alves, Mário Reis and Carmen Miranda (McCann, 2004: 12). Cartola’s story is a classic example; he was 65 when he finally managed to record his first album. Instead of explaining this late-blooming success in terms of a wider social context in which race plays an important role, the film subtly associates it with the artist’s lack of discipline, and treats it as part of

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the ‘legend’. In this way, Cartola reinforces the dominant view of samba as a democratising practice and of Brazilians as being more tolerant of racial difference than other people.

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A foreign sound: Caetano Veloso A different outlook on brasilidade, race and even on the value of Brazilian music is constructed in Coração vagabundo, a mixture of biopic and concert movie that charts Caetano Veloso’s 2003 tour of Brazil, North America and Japan. Veloso is known in Brazil for continuously defying his audience’s expectations by exploring new musical paths, and this aspect of his work is well captured in this film. It opens with a flashback to Veloso’s historic 1968 performance in São Paulo in which he shocked the young Left-nationalist audience by introducing electric guitars and rock influences into his music.9 In response to the booing, Caetano shouts: ‘You understand nothing! Absolutely nothing!’ We then jump forward thirty-five years to another performance in São Paulo in which Caetano performs numbers from his first all-English language album, A Foreign Sound. The juxtaposition of the two periods reminds Brazilian spectators of the huge cultural and political differences that separate them: the dictatorship came to an end over two decades ago and São Paulo is now one of the most cosmopolitan and globalised cities in Latin America. Yet when Veloso talks to the filmmakers backstage after performing songs from A Foreign Sound, he draws attention to the negative reaction of the public to his singing North American standards and pop songs; a reaction that shows that, when it comes to nationalist sentiments about Brazilian music and musicians, not much has changed. In contrast to the other films discussed in this chapter, in which the artist’s brasilidade is continuously emphasised, Coração vagabundo portrays Veloso as a ‘world’ musician with an established audience spread across the globe and a particular interest in exchanges with non-Brazilian artists and cultures. His identity as an icon of Brazilian popular music is not contested, nor is his attachment to his home country. Indeed, at one point in the film Veloso stresses his loyalty to Brazil by saying that he would not like to live anywhere else. Yet, unlike other films considered here, Coração vagabundo does not represent the musician primarily in terms of his brasilidade. The use of testimonies by international artists such

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as David Byrne, Pedro Almodóvar and Michelangelo Antonioni, all of whom have had some musical association with Veloso in the past, also serves to strengthen his portrayal as a global musician. While the film does invite us to think of Veloso’s music in a new transnational context, it nevertheless also invites reflections on national identity by means of travelogue sequences in which some of his standard Portuguese-language hits, such as ‘Leãozinho’ (Little Lion) and ‘Terra’ (Land), play over images of foreign places and people. The only point in the film where Veloso’s emotional life is examined focuses on his performance of the unofficial anthem of the Brazilian North East ‘Asa branca’ (White Wings), a powerful evocation of brasilidade. In this sequence, the only one which touches on the singer’s personal life, we encounter the suggestion that, no matter how far he is from his country or how global his music may have become, his connection with Brazilian culture and identity is indelible. This idea is reinforced in other sequences in which hand-held cameras track Veloso walking in the streets of Tokyo, Osaka and New York as he discusses music-related themes from the perspective of a Brazilian. Instead of the blatant celebration of brasilidade commonly expressed by artists in music documentaries, Veloso advances a rather more critical view of what it means to be Brazilian and mixed race: ‘You feel the weight of humiliation of what it means to be from a third-world country, to be racially suspect and to speak a language whose literature is unknown.’ In questioning the national pride associated with Brazilian popular music, Veloso goes as far as disputing the commonly accepted view that Brazilians have of their music as being ‘the best in the world’. The sequence refers to a story published by an arts magazine in which Veloso was attacked for claiming that the best music in the world is North American, with Cuban music in second place. He reasserts his opinion in the film by arguing that, although he accepts that Brazilian musicians may have a unique type of creativity, their significance in terms of contribution to the global music scene is minimal when compared with what North America has produced to date. Conclusion From the introspective home movie style of A casa do Tom to the aesthetically flamboyant Cartola, the techniques for representing

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songs and songwriters in recent Brazilian documentaries are as diverse as the topics they address. Among the four films discussed in this chapter, Vinicius is the most informative with regard to the process of song writing, and also the most successful in relating its subject’s life experiences and personality to his art. By different means, both A casa do Tom and Cartola diverge from music as subject matter, the first through an excessive focus on the artist’s personal life and the second by taking us on a frenetic journey through Brazil’s cultural history. In Coração vagabundo, songs are discussed mostly in terms of their reception in the context of cultural globalisation. Despite their differences, however, these four films have one significant element in common: an overriding concern with brasilidade, whether in a critical form, as in Coração vagabundo, or in a straightforward celebratory manner, as in the other three cases (and as, indeed, in the majority of Brazilian films about music). Why should this concern be so pervasive? As McCann has argued (2004: 3–5), when artists, bureaucrats, politicians and ordinary Brazilians began a systematic inquiry into the meaning of brasilidade in the 1920s, they turned to the field of music. A re-evaluation of the African cultural influence in Brazil was the single most important element in the construction of a national identity, and nowhere was this influence more evident than in popular music. Hence, to a greater degree than cinema, food, sport or any other cultural practice, music emerged as the decisive forum for debate over the national character of Brazil. This continued to be the case for much of the twentieth century, with bossa nova briefly replacing samba as the musical expression of the nation, and then giving way to MPB and renewed samba forms from the mid-1960s onwards. Yet, despite their distinctive ‘Brazilianness’, all these musical genres and song styles derive, to varying degrees, from the influence of African, North American and Portuguese music. Since the early 1980s, this hybridisation process has gained new dimensions as globalised genres such as rock, funk, soul, rap, heavy metal and electronica have found their way into Brazil. As observed by Dunn and Perrone (2002: 24), rather than pointing to a new era of homogenised and uprooted global music, these genres are constantly reinterpreted and reinvented in local terms. Their appropriation by Brazilian artists has made them no less national than bossa nova, samba or MPB, as observed by the authors in relation to rock: ‘Brazil’s consumption of homebred rock

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had, and continues to have, peculiar nationalist implications . . . Composed, performed, and recorded in Brazil, new rock created its own idioms, idols, and paradigms, thus complicating the notion of cultural alienation via music.’ The idea that the internationalisation of music poses no threat to the ‘Brazilianness’ of national song writing has been famously defended by Caetano Veloso, for whom ‘foreign influence carried on the tides of globalisation may be a puzzle for Brazilian popular musicians and their audiences, but given the vitality and market potential of MPB, in Brazil and abroad, it is not a problem’ (Sovik, 2002: 104). The films examined in this chapter well illustrate this point. Through the persistent associations that they draw between musical expression and brasilidade, they suggest that national identity continues to play a distinctive and significant role in the ways in which Brazilians represent, understand and appreciate their music. Notes 1 See Chapter 17 for a detailed description of the chanchada. 2 For analysis of the chanchadas Voz do carnaval (Voice of Carnival, Adhemar Gonzaga and Humberto Mauro, 1933), Alô, alô, Brasil (Hello, Hello Brazil, Wallace Downey, João de Barros and Alberto Ribeiro, 1935) and Alô, alô, carnaval (Hello, Hello Carnival, Adhemar Gonzaga, 1936) in the context of samba music, see Shaw (1999: 54). For a more detailed discussion of the genre, see Dennison and Shaw (2007: 70–7). 3 MPB is an acronym for Brazilian popular music, and specifically refers to urban popular music since the 1960s that combines different musical elements and whose artists do not fall into individual categories such as samba, jazz or rock. For a discussion of MPB, see McGowan and Pessanha (2009: 79–111). 4 Originating in the North-Eastern state of Pernambuco in the 1940s, baião is a song and dance style marked by syncopated melody and the use of accordion, bass, drum and triangle instrumentation. 5 Tropicália or Tropicalismo, as it is also known, was a cultural movement which emerged in the late 1960s and encompassed poetry, art, music, theatre and film. In music the movement was led by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil; it is marked by unorthodox song structures and an anarchic mixture of rock and Brazilian musical styles, and of erudite and kitsch elements. For a historical account of the movement, including its wider cultural and political implications, see Dunn (2001).

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6 For an overview of this process see Davis (1999: 56–69), McCann (2004: 2–3) and Borges (1995: 59–78). 7 McGowan and Pessanha (2009: 67) provide a brief discussion of de Moraes’s ‘Afro-sambas’. 8 See Chasteen (1999: xiv) and Dunn and Perrone (2002: 26). 9 Veloso offers an account of his historic 1968 performance in his autobiography Tropical Truth (2003: 189–93).

References Borges, Dain (1995), ‘The recognition of Afro-Brazilian symbols and ideas, 1890–1940’, Luso-Brazilian Review, 32: 2, 59–78. Chasteen, John Charles (1998), ‘Translator’s preface’ in Hermano Vianna, The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, xiii–xv. Davis, Darién J. (1999), Avoiding the Dark: Race and the Forging of National Culture in Modern Brazil, Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. Dennison, Stephanie and Shaw, Lisa (2007), Brazilian National Cinema, London and New York: Routledge. Dickinson, Kay (2003), ‘General introduction’, in Kay Dickinson (ed.), Movie Music: The Film Reader, London: Routledge, 1–11. Dunn, Christopher (2001), Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dunn, Christopher and Perrone, Charles (2002), “‘Chiclete com Banana”: internationalisation in Brazilian popular music’, in Christopher Dunn and Charles Perrone (eds), Brazilian Popular Music and Globalisation, London: Routledge, 1–38. Lee-Wright, Peter (2010), The Documentary Handbook, London and New York: Routledge. McCann, Bryan (2004), Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making  of Modern Brazil, Durham and London: Duke University Press. McGowan, Chris and Pessanha, Ricardo (2009), The Brazilian Sound, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Romney, Jonathan (1995), ‘Access all areas: the real space of the rock documentary’, in Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton (eds), Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s, London: BFI, 82–92. Romney, Jonathan and Wootton, Adrian (1995), Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s, London: BFI.

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Shaw, Lisa (1999), The Social History of the Brazilian Samba, Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. Sovik, Liv (2002), ‘Globalising Caetano Veloso: globalisation as seen through a Brazilian pop prism’, in Christopher Dunn and Charles Perrone (eds), Brazilian Popular Music and Globalisation, London: Routledge, 96–105. Veloso, Caetano (2003), Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil, London: Bloomsbury. Vianna, Luiz Fernando (2007), ‘Obra dialoga com o mundo do compositor’, Folha de São Paulo (6 April). Online: www.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/ ilustrad/fq0604200707.htm (accessed 30 September 2010). Winston, Brian (2006), ‘North American documentary in the 1960s’, in Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond (eds), Contemporary American Cinema, New York: McGraw-Hill, 73–89.

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Soundtrack to roguery: music and malandragem in the city Lorraine Leu

Samba, malandragem and the cinema One of the most popular samba compositions of the Rio de Janeiro carnival in 1942 was ‘Praça Onze’ (Eleventh Square). The song took its title from the name of a square in the Cidade Nova (literally, New City) area just north of the centre, a place which was closely associated with the development of samba and popular carnival celebrations in the early twentieth century. The song was a lament for this area of the city, which was marked out for destruction in order to make way for a new avenue. The construction of the Avenida Presidente Vargas (President Vargas Avenue) was to be a gigantic monument to the country’s populist dictator and to the power of the state to impose itself in urban space. During the three years of its construction, 525 buildings were demolished, displacing local residents and small businesses to more distant suburbs. The Praça Onze neighbourhood had served as a refuge for the victims of another brutal urbanisation project carried out between 1903 and 1906. These infamous reforms, spearheaded by the city’s mayor, Francisco Pereira Passos, were concentrated on the areas where Afro-descendents and immigrants lived: the port and the most densely populated parts of the city centre. Whole communities were reduced to rubble in an attempt to put an end to the street as a public space for the popular classes. Similarly, the intention of the later urbanisation project, in the 1940s, was to reclaim and rationalise public space for Vargas’s dictatorial Estado Novo (New State, 1937–45). It sought to replace the informal spaces of parallel citizenship constructed by subaltern groups, with easier to regulate civic spaces (Williams, 2006). The Vargas reforms pushed the popular classes even further away from the city centre, and

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like those of Pereira Passos before them, seemed intent on effecting what cultural geographers refer to as topocide: the deliberate annihilation of place (Porteous, 1988: 75). Despite the attempts by the Pereira Passos administration to eliminate the presence of Afro-descendents in the streets, squares like Praça Onze had become a focus of resistance to the disciplining of the city. It served as a meeting point for street toughs and capoeira fighters.1 Those displaced to Praça Onze and other suburbs by the demolition appeared with regularity in newspaper police chronicles, and were frequently represented as a threat to public order (Velloso, 1988: 37). This square was also a space of negotiation between community leaders from the North-Eastern state of Bahia and city officials. Members of the early carnival associations lived there, and solicited police permits to parade from their neighbourhood to the newly reformed city centre, reoccupying it briefly every year in a kind of permissible transgression of the spatial divide. Praça Onze became, therefore, a symbol of the contestational power of popular social and cultural practices. The lyrics of the tribute samba symbolically unite the suburb with favelas (shanty towns) across the city in this tradition of resistance. They also suggest the longevity of cultural memory and a future conquest of spaces in the city as sites of popular cultural production: They’re going to put an end to Praça Onze There’ll be no more samba school,2 no more The frame drum weeps, the whole hillside weeps Favela, Salgueiro, Mangueira, Estação Primeira Put your tambourines away, away Because the samba school won’t parade today Goodbye, my Praça Onze, goodbye We already know that you’ll soon disappear Take our fond memories as you depart But know that you’ll always be in our hearts And one day a new Square will be ours And there we’ll sing of what we lost.3

This samba features prominently in a sequence from Orson Welles’s unfinished Good Neighbour film,4 It’s All True (1941–42). The nostalgia expressed by the song functions as a counterpoint to the official message that the Estado Novo’s propaganda department ensured was included in the film: that the destruction of the square was necessary to make way for the modernisation of the city

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(Benamou, 2007: 110). Leading the diegetic performance of the song in a carnival scene in Welles’s film is the writer of its lyrics, Grande Otelo, who plays a favela-dwelling malandro. Malandros were a product of a post-abolition society whose preference for European immigrant labour sidelined Afro-descendents from the job market, compelling many to live off illegal activities, or their wits. This culture of roguery encompassed a gamut of anti-social behaviours, such as womanising, illegal gambling, street fighting and petty crime. The malandro’s dissolute lifestyle was completely unacceptable to the officially promoted work ethic of Vargas’s New State, which used a combination of censorship and co-option to sanitise the image of the malandro that had dominated a whole genre of samba compositions from the late 1920s until around the end of the 1930s.5 The apparently reformed malandro became a national symbol and evidence of a society made up of disciplined workers who were part of an orderly whole. The symbolic value of the malandro’s regeneration can be seen as part of a wider project of appropriating Afro-descendent cultural and social practices for the nation. The reformation of anti-social behaviour in a marginalised social group was also tied in with the ideology of racial and social harmony that became established under Vargas. By implication, Afro-descendents were not fit to be citizens until they renounced a certain lifestyle – one that was antithetical to a modernising nation. One of the chief ways of controlling the malandro and incorporating him into the national fold was via the regulation of public space. In addition to urbanisation processes aimed at socio-spatial stratification, malandragem (the lifestyle or ethos of the malandro) was also controlled through day-to-day policing activities. In 1934, four years after Vargas came to power, policing in the city was extensively restructured. Decree number 24,531 of 2 July 1934 detailed every aspect of how to ensure total control of urban space in the thirty police districts of Rio. This included surveillance of streets and the patrolling of beaches during the working week to round up the unemployed, as well as careful control of popular festivals like carnival. The intense persecution of vadios, or ‘vagabonds’ and ‘idlers’ who spent a great deal of their time in the streets, was justified by New State authorities because vadios were considered economically passive and therefore potentially dangerous to the social order. During the 1930s police routinely detained vadios until they were exiled from

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the city to the then remote central state of Goiás – the state’s brutal solution to dealing with the under- and unemployed in the new urban order.6 This context goes some way towards explaining the memorialising of malandragem in Brazilian cinema during the Estado Novo, which combined nostalgia for traditional lifestyles with visions of a modernising society, and frequently expressed this tension in spatial terms. Image and sound worked together in the 1940s and 1950s to enact these tensions. Samba was the obvious choice as the soundtrack to cinematic representations of the malandro, given that a sub-genre of samba since the 1920s was devoted to celebrating his wit, courage and independence of spirit. Additionally, early samba was very closely associated with the neighbourhoods from which its composers came, which were often seen by urban planners as spaces that were antithetical to their urbanisation projects. When Brazilian cinematic production surged again in the 1930s, after the slump that followed the initial boom of the silent era, it was with a genre of musical comedy that appealed most to those sidelined from the benefits of urban modernisation. The chanchada’s popular humour did not find favour with the critics, but the genre dominated the box office throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The films were often used as a vehicle for launching samba songs, and the ethos of malandragem evident in samba compositions was pervasive in both the soundtracks and the narratives of the chanchada.7 Like samba during the Estado Novo, chanchadas appeared to conform to the regime’s message of social inclusion and opportunity for all. The process of contestation and subversion of the regime’s ideology that was still evident in samba, however, had its counterpart in the chanchada, where things were frequently not as they seemed. The films were full of carnivalesque criminal capers based on mistaken identities, social inversions and disguise. These were used as a means of criticising the status quo and the social hierarchies and inequities that oppressed its popular audience. As João Luiz Vieira observes: ‘It is as if the critiques undertaken by the chanchadas were permitted only within the carnivalesque universe’ (1995: 262). The malandro was a fundamental part of that universe, whose conversion to hard-working citizen was superficial – like a carnival disguise that facilitated some form of sanctioned transgression of New State mores. Almost as much as carnival,

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therefore, malandragem is a pervasive cultural code in the chanchadas that informs the unstable status quo of the films. With his street smarts, wit, sense of honour, talent for the samba, or sheer luck, the malandro achieves social mobility (O samba da vida [Samba of Life]); celebrity (Vai que é mole [Go on, It’s Easy]); and wealth (Esse milhão é meu [This Million’s Mine]).8 The chanchadas also negotiated the issue of socio-spatial stratification; their popular heroes rubbed shoulders with the elites in luxury hotels and casinos in an apparent democratising of urban space. As Rosângela de Oliveira Dias comments, ‘By popularising these spaces through film, the chanchadas facilitated a kind of symbolic occupation of them. Through the big screen the popular classes gained access to those places, and not just so they could provide services to those who usually frequented them’ (1993: 76–7). However, access to usually prohibited social spaces was often made possible by chance occurrence or pretence, and it was clear that the films’ popular characters did not really belong there. They were elements of society left out of the capitalist order, often migrants from the North East of the country, or descendents of African slaves who had not assimilated the individualist norms of urban-industrial development, and retained their traditional, rural values of honour and neighbourliness (Catani and Souza, 1983: 77).9 The chanchadas expressed the disorientation of such individuals in urban space, but also imagined how the cunning of the malandro could facilitate access to and freedom of movement in the city that was denied in reality (Dennison and Shaw, 2004: 93–4). These films imaged the modernising city for their audience, writing the anti-authority figure of the malandro into its cognitive map. One of the most successful chanchadas at the box office in the 1940s, Berlim na batucada (Berlin Samba-Style, 1944), explores the  tension between nostalgia for the city that was disappearing under the wrecking ball and the desire to be part of the new order. The title refers to the bombing of Berlin by the Allied Forces, but the film focused more on Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour policy, parodying Orson Welles’s 1942 visit to Brazil for the filming of It’s All True. While Welles was in Rio, Brazilian secret police discouraged him from filming in favelas, and sections of the media lamented Welles’s interest in ‘scenes of hills, no-good half-breeds [and the] filthy huts of the favelas’ (Rippy, 2009: 120). The watchful eye of Vargas’s propaganda department is invoked in this

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chanchada in the character of the tour guide charged with chaperoning the American visitor (known as Mister). However, attempts by the regime and the conservative media to distance the parodic version of Welles from areas of the city inhabited by the popular classes are symbolically thwarted in Berlim na batucada. The tour guide’s drunken excesses prevent him from exercising his duties, and he is obliged to ask a friend, a malandro known as Mexerico (the name means ‘gossip’) to take his place. Instead of accompanying the American, an impresario looking for Brazilian talent to take to Hollywood (perhaps a parody of Lee Shubert, who ‘discovered’ Carmen Miranda in 1939 at the Urca Casino), to the luxurious Copacabana Palace hotel, Mexerico checks him into a humble suburban guesthouse, ironically called the ‘Palace’. The visitor is then taken to the favelas of Mangueira and Providência to hear samba, by inference sites of production of more ‘authentic’ ‘Brazilian’ culture than the stylised version promoted by the New State and on offer at the city’s beachfront casinos. The film sets up a contrast between two types of malandro, the canny trickster Mexerico, who sees the American as his meal ticket, and the Mangueira malandro Chico (played by the famous crooner Francisco Alves), who has all the traditional honour and courage of malandragem and is concerned with safeguarding the cultural traditions of the morro (literally, ‘hill’, but by extension the hillside shanty town). Despite his profound ties to the favela, Chico ends up deciding to go to Hollywood, so as not to lose his sweetheart, who has been chosen to star in the impresario’s musical. He therefore realises the malandro’s dream of suddenly improving his lot, in this case through his talent for the samba. As Suzana Ferreira observes, Chico, the traditional malandro no longer has a place in Vargas’s Brazil. The film dispatches him to the simulacrum city of Hollywood, the site par excellence of quick success (2003: 116). There he may fulfil the malandro’s dream of social ascension, but with it comes the complete and certain demise of his local identity and authority as a popular cultural producer. As well as the suggestion that genuine samba is firstly a local, more than a national phenomenon, the film acknowledges a new international site of production in Hollywood. Three of the sambas performed in the film lament the demolition of Praça Onze to allow for the building of the new President Vargas Avenue, disguising their critique with jaunty melodies. Despite its criticism of the degradation of

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traditional malandragem and samba, the film ends with a celebration of the samba schools (neighbourhood carnival associations) on a studio set designed to look like a morro. The suggestion that collectively produced samba from the favelas will endure as a form of popular expression and resistance is a strong theme in the film’s musical performances. Malandragem, music and urban imaginaries in A grande cidade Through its narrative, and its visual and musical treatment of samba, Berlim na batucada rejected the symbolic economy of space generated by the state and the culture industry. Sharon Zukin describes a city’s symbolic economy as ‘its visible ability to produce both symbols and space’ (1995: 2). This is fuelled by the growth of cultural consumption and the industries that cater to it. Like Berlim na batucada, Carlos Diegues’s 1966 film, A grande cidade (The Big City), also questions who has ‘the cultural power to create an image, to frame a vision of the city’ (Zukin, 1995: 2–3); and who has the right to imagine its soundscape. However, as part of the Cinema Novo movement’s critique of market-oriented cinema, Diegues rejected the chanchadas as a ‘form of cultural prostitution’ that was ‘defiled by bad taste and by the most sordid commercialism’ (1995: 65). His youthful invective reflects frustration with the foreign domination of the market. Cinema Novo had emerged around 1960 in response to what its directors saw as the cultural imperialism evident in Brazilian filmmaking and distribution, and the movement was consolidated during the flourishing of the cultural and political Left that accompanied the government of João Goulart (1961–64). The Cinema Novo filmmakers made low-budget, anti-industry films that focused on the exploitation and oppression of the urban and rural masses. As Johnson and Stam observe, these early Cinema Novo films demonstrated a political optimism in developmentalism, and a faith in the power of cinema to begin solving these problems merely by revealing them. However, films like A grande cidade, made after 1964, the year of the military coup that ended democratic populism, functioned as ‘analyses of failure of populism, of developmentalism, and of leftist intellectuals’ (1965: 34 and 35, emphasis in the original). The increased interest of Cinema Novo films in urban settings, which

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became evident at this time, responded to a need to disenchant the supposed sites of the country’s progress. Diegues’s film sets about doing this from its very first frame, opening with the iconic panorama of Guanabara Bay and the Sugar Loaf Mountain, which has traditionally imaged Rio in the national and international imaginary. This invocation of the city’s dominant scopic regime is accompanied by an intertitle quoting a seventeenth-century Jesuit priest that traces the Edenic mythology of the city back to the colonial period, and an audio commentary on a football match that references one of the cultural phenomena for which Rio is best known. Ironically, given Diegues’s excoriation of the chanchada, just like Mexerico in Berlim na batucada, the malandro Calunga is our guide to the city as it is experienced by its subaltern population. He opens the tour with several vistas of the ‘earthly paradise’ that is Rio de Janeiro. The sequence’s visual style invokes something of the factual authority of a travelogue film, and Calunga’s recherché discourse on the city suggests the consensus on Rio’s mythical status in the official imaginary as a place of extraordinary natural beauty. This totalising perspective from above is then suddenly contrasted with the city at street level. Calunga confronts passers-by, shot in close-up and medium close-up, with a series of questions about the tedium of their daily routine that highlights the rational, modern city. Calunga himself, however, rejects both the mythological and the rational city. As an archetypal malandro, he prefers to spend his time on leisure pursuits, and the scene cuts to him running on to the beach shouting ‘to hell with everything else!’ The phrase recalls Roberto Carlos’s rock-and-roll hit of 1965, ‘Quero que vá tudo pro inferno’ (Everything Can Go to Hell). The sentiment expressed in the song, originally that of a jilted lover, became a coded expression of denunciation against the military regime throughout the country. Indeed, the manner in which Calunga questions pedestrians is aggressive and intrusive, and a document from which he reads aloud as he walks through the streets, containing minute details of the way the average citizen spends his or her day, recalls a police document based on interrogation and surveillance.10 The film’s eponymous title song, a samba by Zé Kéti,11 which we hear after the credits have rolled, also invokes and then disenchants the mythological and discursive city. The song recalls the sambaexaltação, a sub-genre that emerged during Vargas’s Estado Novo

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and whose lyrics eulogised a beautiful, harmonious and prosperous nation. The lyrics of ‘A grande cidade’ hint at powerful national myths of cordiality and racial democracy in ‘this city of love’, and refer to ‘People dreaming on the sea shore / Happy people singing’. In Rio, these myths were fundamental to the naturalising of its landscape as a space of peaceful coexistence between inhabitants of the hillside favelas and those in the affluent seafront neighbourhoods that they overlook. However, this utopian vision and the particular poetics of place it evokes are undermined by the song’s lyrics, which mention suffering and death, and by the action that most of the song accompanies. It heralds the arrival of the female protagonist, Luzia, disoriented and lost in the big city. She joins the underclass of North-Eastern migrants labouring in the city’s construction sites and cleaning the homes of the wealthy. On the surface, the song appears to echo the faith in the orphic power of song to prevail over oppression that was evident in early protest song (‘[The masses] . . . turn life into a carnival / By singing they drive away their woes’).12 However, it becomes a motif for the limitations of samba and carnival as forms of popular resistance in the context of state appropriation and censorship, and the power of the culture industry. The song is performed diegetically, and as it ends we see Zé Kéti singing it for Calunga outside a corner bar and asking what the malandro thinks of his latest composition. Calunga acts as a cultural broker for the composer with the record company, and their conversation centres solely on the song’s potential commercial value. Later, we hear the song being played on the radio without being credited, and with both Calunga and its composer powerless to prevent its theft.13 The radio is an ambivalent visual and aural motif in the film. For Inácio, the North-Eastern construction worker who longs to return to the sertão (rural backlands) of his homeland, listening to rock music by Roberto Carlos on his radio is a means of connecting to the city from which he feels so alienated. When he eventually sells the radio it is to facilitate his return home. The self-reflexive foregrounding of popular culture is echoed in a later carnival scene in the city centre. The roving camera films the crowds in the streets in documentary style, to the accompaniment of diegetic samba percussion. A commentary, which appears to be an omniscient voice-over, suggests that carnival is a form of release and escapism; that once a year people ‘do what they don’t usually

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do, dress as something else, take a holiday from themselves’. The narration is then revealed to be diegetic dialogue, that of Calunga philosophising in his local bar. Although Calunga is presented as having some of the typical characteristics of the malandro, he has a dual role in the film both as a popular insider and as a kind of critical outsider. In a later samba school scene Calunga is shown dancing among the participants, but he points out to Luzia earlier that he does not live in Mangueira (‘thank God’), but simply has friends who live there. He is from, or belongs to, all or any of the public spaces of the city, he says. This freedom is not typical for the malandro; as mentioned previously the loveable rogues of the chanchadas did access all areas of the city, but it was frequently by accident, and the humble heroes of these films often committed gaffes that revealed their ‘out-of-placeness’. Calunga, however, seems at ease both in the favela and in the well-off neighbourhood of Ipanema. His refusal to be tied to place is also unusual given the importance of local or neighbourhood identities in traditional malandragem. Robert Stam observes that Calunga is reminiscent of Exu (the trickster deity associated with the figure of the malandro in Umbanda religious practice), one of whose attributes is the ‘opening of paths’.14 Indeed, Calunga transcends the barriers of physical, as well as social space in the film’s prologue. As if by magic, he jumps into the frame, appearing in discontinuous spaces around the city (Stam, 1997: 234). Calunga’s stylised, magical malandragem does not dwell extensively on the quotidian hardships of the Afro-descendent urban poor. Instead, the film presents malandragem as a trope for a transgressive creativity that is also an act of solidarity with the people. In the streets, parks and street-corner bars, Calunga produces a different symbolic economy that eschews cultural consumption as catered to by the culture industry and the state. Malandragem becomes a way of facilitating alternative experiences of space through which those in the city’s underclass use fantasy and memory to make a claim to it. In the film’s prologue Calunga addresses the camera directly, asking why we spectators have come to the cinema. Answering his own question, he runs through the street proclaiming the function of cinema for its public as the source of magic, dream and memory. The scene is in marked contrast to the previous sequence of rapidly cut close-ups of Calunga interrogating the spectator about the monotony of his or her daily routine. Extra-diegetic music by Hekel

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Tavares, which reappears at the end of the film, and is reminiscent of a Hollywood happy ending, accompanies a hand-held mobile camera that tracks Calunga as he runs freely down an atmospheric, rain-soaked street. The use of sentimental orchestration and images that evoke mainstream US cinema and narrative closure imply a self-reflexive critique of escapist cinema, given Cinema Novo’s rejection of the Hollywood aesthetic in favour of taking the camera ‘out into the street’.15 A ‘cinema of the streets’ is invoked several times in the film, such as in a scene during carnival when Calunga stops to sweet-talk a girl who is standing on the pavement in a skimpy costume. Time and space in the city are hijacked by this quotidian encounter. The sequence is speeded up to a rhythm typical of silent cinema comedies and the soundtrack is Ernesto Nazareth’s 1910 choro,16 ‘Odeon’, a homage to the cinema theatres where the composer played to entertain patrons as they waited in the lounge. This self-referencing suggests a role for film in conveying the dynamics of city life for its most humble inhabitants, but also how cinema can make the ordinary become extraordinary. The role of malandragem in the film is also to create sites in which the everyday is transformed by individual performativity in public places. The film repeatedly de-familiarises landscapes and landmarks of the city by combining music with choreographed, stylised body movements and poetic declarations. These turn urban spaces into stages on which marginal characters can enact their own relationships with the city. Calunga befriends Luzia, the newly arrived migrant from the North-Eastern backlands, and takes her to the Passeio Público, Rio’s first public park, built in the late eighteenth century in the city centre. The Passeio Público was  the first urbanised area of the city, designed to exhibit the power of the Portuguese Crown to the local populace, but actually built by the forced labour of those on the bottom rung of colonial society – vadios and convicts from the Ilha das Cobras prison. The park quickly became a focal point for promenading in the city by diverse social groups, including a space for gay cruising, and Calunga makes his own claim to it as he waves Luzia through its imposing iron gates. The scene begins with a close-up of the gates, featuring the insignia of metropolitan power – the coat of arms of the King and Queen of Portugal, Dona Maria I and Dom Pedro III. Harpsichord music from the classical era accompanies the shot,

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but the evocation of eighteenth-century colonial power is disrupted by Calunga’s parody of the monarch, as he bows with a flourish to welcome Luzia to ‘his’ city (‘This is all yours, I bestow it upon you!’), and strolls in the gardens as he acknowledges his ‘subjects’ (‘It’s more democratic that way . . . it keeps them happy’). After the music fades, at the foot of a fountain in which street kids splash, Calunga declaims that the place that he calls home in the city is wherever drums are playing. His speech is overlaid with the sound of a street vendor who crosses the frame in the foreground, singing a pregão, or jingle, to advertise his wares. José Ramos Tinhorão dates the appearance of these jingles to the early nineteenth century, with the oldest known example being the cry of the black ice-cream seller (1976: 50). Until the Pereira Passos urban reforms a century later, the informal spaces created by those who gathered round the street vendor’s stall or tray facilitated important networks of sociability for subaltern groups (Velloso, 1988: 200). The appearance of this diegetic sound serves to contrast the grandeur of the conceived space with the uses to which the park has been put by the popular classes. Calunga’s performances contest the cityscape as a form of naturalisation and regulation. Throughout the film they evoke the intended spaces of urban planners, then disrupt them by creating what Lefebvre called ‘representational spaces’, in which inhabitants use their imaginations to change and appropriate dominated space (2001). Writing in another context (that of feminist critique), Gillian Rose describes space as ‘the articulation of collisions between discourse, fantasy and corporeality’ (1999: 247). Rose proposes that these are three critical elements in the conceptualisation of space because of their role in the relation between self and other. This ‘relationality’ is what the film seems to propose as a mode of social interaction and agency in the light of the dismantling of collective mobilising and action by the dictatorship after 1964. Rose describes such ‘relationalities’ as being constituted through performance, rather than being a given between two pre-existing ‘actants’. The instability that this implies, of both space and social relations, is something potentially transgressive, and difficult to police in the film in the context of an authoritarian society. This is what Calunga’s malandragem comes to signify – a kind of ‘deviant’ way of being in the city, which is not bounded by the latter’s ideologically charged symbols.

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Calunga’s performative malandragem operates in a similarly subversive way on spaces of memory in the city. In the scene in the Passeio Público, Luzia contemplates a bust of the abolitionist poet Castro Alves (1847–71) to the accompaniment of a flute, again playing music reminiscent of the classical era. As she asks Calunga who is commemorated there and he replies, ‘No idea’, the music stops. Calunga struggles to read the inscription because of the height of the statue. The monument is not designed for interaction, but to dominate the space around it. Castro Alves’s anti-slavery message should be meaningful to Calunga as an Afro-descendant. However, the official memorial merely replicates hierarchical sociospatial power relations. After confirming that the luminary depicted in the statue is dead, Calunga improvises an alternative memorial. Using the statue’s pedestal as a prop, he dramatically declaims an example of popular cordel literature about the North-Eastern religious hero Padre Cícero.17 The cordel and the itinerant singers and oral poets who performed it were important sites for the transmission of memory in a society in which illiteracy predominated. Calunga’s act of memorialising from below speaks to Luzia as the work of the dead poet cannot; she remembers the story of Padre Cícero as told to her by her father. Calunga himself, therefore, is presented as a more meaningful repository of living memory. Significantly, the character shares his name with a quilombo, or maroon slave community, and an Afro-Brazilian lexical legacy that offers important clues to Brazil’s African past.18 The memory and traditions brought by rural North-Easterners frequently disrupt space and time in the modern city. When Luzia first visits the plush apartment in Ipanema where she ends up working as a maid, the music playing in the living room as she talks to the lady of the house is the latest American hit song, ‘Walk on By’. The foreign song is used together with the lavish furnishings to create a space of middle-class material comfort entirely alien to Luzia – afraid to push the elevator button to exit the building, she asks the lady of the house to do it for her. After she leaves the apartment she stops in the street, mesmerised by an elderly NorthEastern woman singing and dancing to a children’s song in front of a shop window. The song comes from a folk tale about a wicked stepmother, which is widely known in Brazil and is believed to have been passed on through black wet nurses (Mário de Andrade, 1987: 208). According to folklorist Luís de Câmara Cascudo, it is part

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of a group of popular stories in which a criminal act is eventually uncovered and denounced (2002: 328–30). After Luzia’s visit to the apartment, the song seems to suggest a denunciation of the complicity of the middle classes in the military regime in order to preserve their status. As the old woman gazes at the shop window, the inanimate faces of the shop mannequins gaze back impassively. The surreal nature of the moment confers a mystical, revelatory quality on the old woman’s apparent insanity that disturbs an otherwise everyday landscape in a modernising capitalist city. The intrusion of the pre-capitalist into the modern is articulated most clearly in another form of criminality outlined in the film through the character of Jasão, Luzia’s erstwhile lover and the reason she has come to Rio de Janeiro. Jasão lives in the favela and earns his living as a hitman. His representation as a criminal subject differs radically from Calunga’s, as suggested in the first scene in which he appears. When Luzia goes to Mangueira’s samba school looking for Jasão, the music of the rehearsal and the hand-held, documentary-style filming of the participants are interrupted when she catches sight of him. Jasão is sharply dressed as an iconic malandro, but sound works with image to establish his isolation from the favela community. The diegetic sound of samba is replaced with a stark two-measure solo percussion line that increases in volume, as well as texture, with the addition of foot tapping and a castanetclicking sound that seems to evoke the North-Eastern baião song form. This accompanies a slow zoom in on Jasão standing alone and apart from the proceedings, lit in a film noir style that is in structural alliance with the drama of the soundtrack. The stark contrast created by the sharp shadow on the wall behind him makes him appear sinister and threatening, as opposed to the playful and charming Calunga. Jasão represents a different mode of criminality, wherein the tradition of the rural NorthEastern hired gun is pressed into the service of urban political violence. He does not practise the social banditry of malandragem, nor that of cangaço, North-Eastern backlands banditry. Hired to assassinate a senator, he is reminiscent of Glauber Rocha’s paid killer Antônio das Mortes, who is dispatched by Catholic Church leaders to kill the false prophet Sebastião in Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964). Like Antônio das Mortes, Jasão is merely an instrument of the elite and appears powerless in the face of his destiny. His consciousness of this weakness makes

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him a tragic figure who expresses his anger and frustration in impassioned monologues that invoke the lyricism of cordel literature. They reveal that he chooses violence, however unproductive, because it is preferable to apathy (‘People have no choice, they are dying everywhere . . . and I despise the people because they believe they are guiltless’). After Jasão is eventually reunited with Luzia, he emerges from the shadows and is filmed on top of Corcovado Mountain by day, with a tracking, high-angle shot showing off the panoramic city below. The change of location as he prepares for the execution suggests an assault on the elite’s occupation and imaginary of the city. The dissonant chords that accompany the hit suggest that his act of violence is a form of disputing the consensual city. He has promised Luzia that he will carry out only one more contract before trying their luck together in the city outside the criminal world (‘This is a big city, there’s space for all of us here’). However, Jasão’s fate is as inescapable in the big city as it was in the rural North East. At the end of the film, as he returns from hiding to begin a new life with Luzia, the lovers are gunned down by police at the ferry dock. Calunga witnesses their death and runs from the scene through downtown Rio to the sound of the title samba ‘A Grande Cidade’. The samba in praise of the city and the nation becomes the incongruous elegy for Jasão and Luzia, and other migrants who help fuel the regime’s economic developmentalism. It accompanies Calunga as he runs in slow motion past street people who have no social existence in the city, and past policed carnival parades. The film’s ending suggests that Jasão’s violent criminality leads nowhere. Instead it proposes Calunga’s malandragem, which opens up creative, critical spaces in the city, as a mode of strategic non-conformism in an authoritarian society. In the final scene, Calunga proclaims to the camera that Jasão was defeated in spite of his bravery and recourse to violence, and that he, Calunga, will resist instead with laughter, tears and memory – that is, the stuff of cinema. His monologue is delivered in the public space of another park, the Aterro do Flamengo, which was still being constructed at the time of filming. Calunga turns its brand new open-air amphitheatre into his personal performing space, dancing and melodramatically acting out the shootings to the rhythms of Hekel Tavares’s ‘Concerto para piano e orquestra em formas brasileiras’ (Brazilian-style concerto for piano and orchestra, 1938).

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Tavares, appropriately, composed for popular review theatres in the city, and at the end of the film the space of urban planners is once again transformed into a stage for the cultural agency of ordinary people. At a time when spaces of political mobilisation in the city were compromised or eliminated, Calunga’s subalternising of space through performativity provides some opportunity for dissent. The panorama city of the first frames has become a lived landscape where control is contested every day, and where it is possible for the dominated to repeatedly undermine the geography of power. Notes 1 Capoeira fighting was the most common collective form of resistance and self-affirmation for slaves and poor free men in the second half of the nineteenth century. The First Republic’s (1889–30) penal code of 1890 upgraded the practice of capoeira from a public order offence into a serious crime for which grave punishments were meted out (Misse, 1999). Despite this, many street toughs were hired by politicians at election time to intimidate potential voters for their rivals. 2 Samba school (escola de samba) is the term used to refer to the neighbourhood carnival associations that parade in the Rio carnival, and which date back to the late 1920s. 3 All translations from the Portuguese are by the author. 4 The term reflects the policy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt towards Latin America and was taken from Roosevelt’s first inaugural address on 4 March 1933. This policy aimed to improve cultural ties between North and South America in order to foster mutual understanding and allegiances, particularly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Hollywood films featuring Latin American performers, settings and rhythms were a key element of this cultural production, and were exhibited widely throughout the Americas. 5 For a detailed exposition of malandragem in samba lyrics before and during the Estado Novo, see Cláudia Matos (1982) and Lisa Shaw (1999). 6 See Cancelli (1993) for more details on policing during the Vargas era. 7 For a detailed discussion of the chanchada genre see Shaw, this volume, Chapter 17, and Dennison and Shaw (2004). 8 This last film actually rewards a dedicated government functionary (who manages not to miss a single day’s work for a whole week) with a cash prize that then facilitates a malandro lifestyle. The idea that social and economic mobility was only possible for popular subjects by virtue

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of happy accident (rather than a week’s hard work) is epitomised in the samba, ‘Acertei no milhar’ (I Hit the Jackpot, 1940), in which the subject voice dreams of a winning lottery ticket that will enable him to leave the drudgery of work, live in an elegant hotel and educate his children at boarding school. For an analysis of this samba see Matos (1982). Dennison and Shaw point out that chanchadas focused on class-based inequalities, largely overlooking the issue of racial inequality (2004: 108). Indeed, the casual racism expressed in the chanchadas belied the ideology of racial democracy that was being profoundly implanted in Brazilian social thought at the time. The Afro-descendent actor Grande Otelo managed to become a major screen presence in the chanchadas. However, the social recognition that he gained in the films was based on hegemonic ideas of blackness. Always the sidekick (and paid less than his white comic partner Oscarito), he was often infantilised and the source of repeated comments and gags about his colour and ugliness. Despite what the films portray as these obvious setbacks, in the carnivalesque universe of the chanchadas he frequently managed to triumph socially. In Vai que é mole (1960), for example, he plays a pickpocket called Brancura (Whitey) whose attractive mulata fiancée is coveted by the Portuguese police chief, recalling the seigneurial rights of the Portuguese male in colonial society. However, despite his fiancée’s repeated references to his physical shortcomings (‘preto, velho, pequeno’ [black, old, short]), and his malandro’s reluctance to settle down, Brancura gets to keep the girl. I am grateful to Dorian Lee Jackson for this observation. Zé Kéti was a samba composer associated with the vociferous moment of cultural protest that followed the 1964 coup. This theme appeared in protest song during the Leftist Goulart government and continued in the period immediately after the coup of 1964, before the military crackdown on freedom of cultural expression in 1968. The exploitation of samba composers is also the theme of Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Rio, Zona Norte (Rio, North Zone, 1957), which also opens with a panoramic shot of Rio. See Chapter 18 in this volume for more details of this film. Homage was also paid to dos Santos’s film in the form of the 1959 chanchada, Quem roubou meu samba? (Who stole my samba?) Umbanda is a syncretic religion formed mainly from a fusion of African spirituality, Catholicism and the Spiritism of Allan Kardec. Maria Cecília Coelho sees the film as a critical response to Marcel Camus’s romanticised, dehistoricised Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus, 1959), with Luzia descending into the hell that is the big city. (See Chapter 18 for

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more details on this film). However, orphic lyricism is transferred to the character of Calunga, whom Coelho considers as closer to the figure of Hermes (2008: 490). As well as being the patron of thieves, orators and poets and the bringer of dreams, Hermes is the god of travellers and border crossings. Diegues advocated the filming of marginalised social groups in their local environments in his 1962 article published in the journal of the National Students’ Union in which he attacked the chanchadas (reprinted in Johnson and Stam, 1995: 64–67). Choro is a layered musical form based on rhythmic and melodic counterpoint playing against the main melody, traditionally played with an instrumental ensemble of flute, cavaquinho (akin to a ukulele), guitar and tambourine. Literatura de cordel (‘literature on a string’) refers to verses published in pamphlet form in the North East of Brazil since the late nineteenth century. One of the recurring themes of the cordel is the life of Padre Cícero (1844–1934), a priest believed to have possessed miraculous healing powers. See Byrd and Moraes (2007) for a study of the speech community of Calunga in Minas Gerais.

References Andrade, Mário de (1987), As melodias do boi e outras peças, São Paulo: Duas Cidades/ Brasília: Instituto Nacional do Livro. Benamou, Catherine (2007), It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey, Berkeley: University of California Press. Byrd, Steven and Daniela Bassani Moraes (2007), ‘Calunga and Calungadores: an Afro-Brazilian speech community of Minas Gerais’, Afro-Hispanic Review, 26: 2, 27–45. Cancelli, Elizabeth (1993), O mundo da violência: a polícia da era Vargas, Brasília: Editora Universidade de Brasília. Cascudo, Luís de Câmara (2002), Contos tradicionais do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro. Catani, Afrânio and Souza, José de Melo (1983), A chanchada no cinema brasileiro, São Paulo: Brasiliense. Coelho, Maria Cecília (2008), ‘Revendo A Grande Cidade de Cacá Diegues: o orfismo às avessas na periferia’, in Esther Hamburger, Leandro Mendonça, Gustavo Souza, and Tunico Amancio (eds), Estudos de cinema Socine IX, São Paulo: Annablume, 45–52. Dennison, Stephanie and Shaw, Lisa (2004), Popular Cinema in Brazil, 1930–2001, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dias, Rosângela de Oliveira (1993), O mundo como chanchada: cinema

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e imaginário das classes populares na década de 50, Rio de Janeiro: Relume-Dumará. Diegues, Carlos (1995), ‘Cinema Novo’, in Randal Johnson and Robert Stam (eds), Brazilian Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, 65–7. Ferreira, Suzana (2003), Cinema carioca nos anos 30 e 40: os filmes musicais nas telas da cidade, São Paulo: Annablume. Johnson, Randal and Stam, Robert (eds) (1995), Brazilian Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press. Lefebvre, Henri (2001), The Production of Space (translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith), Oxford: Blackwell. Matos, Cláudia (1982), Acertei no milhar: samba e malandragem no tempo de Getúlio, São Paulo: Paz e Terra. Misse, Michel (1999), ‘Malandros, marginais e vagabundos e a acumulação social da violência no Rio de Janeiro’, unpublished PhD thesis, Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro. Porteous, J. Douglas (1988), ‘Topocide: the annihilation of place’, in John Eyles and David M. Smith (eds), Qualitative Methods in Human Geography, Cambridge: Polity Press, 75–93. Rippy, Marguerite (2009), Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Rose, Gillian (1999), ‘Performing space’, in Doreen Massey, John Allen and Philip Sarre (eds), Human Geography Today, Cambridge: Polity Press, 247–59. Shaw, Lisa (1999), The Social History of the Brazilian Samba, Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. Stam, Robert (1997), Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tinhorão, José Ramos (1976), Música popular: os sons que vêm da rua, São Paulo: Edições Tinhorão. Velloso, Mônica (1988), As tradições populares na belle époque carioca, Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE. Vieira, João Luiz (1995), ‘From High Noon to Jaws: carnival and parody in Brazilian cinema’, in Randal Johnson and Robert Stam (eds), Brazilian Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, 256–69. Williams, Daryle (2006), ‘Civicscape and memoryscape: the first Vargas Regime and Rio de Janeiro’, in Jens Hentschke (ed.), Vargas and Brazil: New Perspectives, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 55–82. Zukin, Sharon (1995), The Culture of Cities, Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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The Brazilian chanchada’s musical moments and the performance of identity Lisa Shaw This chapter considers the performance of songs in the musical comedy films known as chanchadas, which dominated film production in Brazil from the late 1930s to the beginning of the 1960s, and initially at least took their inspiration from the Hollywood musical. The majority of these low-budget films were produced by the Atlântida studios, based in Rio de Janeiro, and each contained, on average, between ten and fifteen musical sequences, for which the narrative simply paused and a straightforward excuse was found for someone to break into song. This excuse was usually provided by the ‘backstage’ settings of the films, such as nightclubs, casinos, radio stations, cruise ships, recording studios or cabaret clubs. Since it first emerged in the mid-1930s, and until the end of the 1940s, the chanchada tradition was a vehicle for carnival songs, chiefly sambas and marches (marchas or marchinhas), with the film studios predicting the hits of the forthcoming carnival for inclusion in the soundtrack, and the release of the films coinciding with the annual carnival celebrations. From the beginning of the 1950s, however, these carnival songs were performed alongside an increasingly heterogeneous mix of imported and regional rhythms, such as the mambo, the rumba and the North-Eastern baião, reflecting changing audience tastes moulded by the radio. This chapter considers how the identities of the Brazilian nation and its imagined ‘Other(s)’ are articulated in these musical interludes within the chanchada, not just through the choice of song styles but equally via the myriad extra-musical aspects of what have been termed ‘brief eruptions of aural and visual spectacle’ (Tincknell and Conrich, 2006: 6), all of which are equally important in constituting music’s meaning. This chapter analyses, in particular, the

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soundtrack of an emblematic example of this cinematic tradition, Aviso aos navegantes (The Nutty Stowaway / All Aboard, Watson Macedo, 1950), to illustrate the growing aural eclecticism of the chanchada, and to suggest that its relationship with Hollywood is not simply founded on naive mimesis. Samba and (Afro-)Brazilian identity on screen As has been well documented, Afro-Brazilians are conspicuous by their absence in the chanchadas, typically featuring as either backing musicians or dancers, only present on screen to ‘set off’ the beauty of the white stars, as Robert Stam has argued (1997: 103). In this respect the chanchada can be compared directly with the Hollywood musical. As Ella Shohat writes with respect to the latter: ‘The presence of marginalized groups is largely felt through music and dance or entertainers, while the “realistic” narrative development becomes largely the space of white action [. . .] The presumed nonrealistic status of the musical numbers provides a narrative license for displaying “exoticism” ’ (1991: 235). The disavowal of Afro-Brazilian identity in the casting of the chanchadas is endorsed by their soundtracks, which similarly ‘whiten’ Brazilian demographic and musical realities. As Stam writes, ‘given their Brazilian origins, their Rio de Janeiro setting, and their samba subject, the musicals shockingly underrepresent the black presence. [. . . It is] as if Brazilian producers, not unlike their Hollywood counterparts, wanted to have black culture without dealing with the people who produced it’ (1997: 102). In the same way that jazz was treated in Hollywood, the chanchadas denied the blackness of samba, suppressing what Michael Rogin has called the ‘surplus symbolic value of blacks’ (1992: 417). The sambas that feature in chanchada soundtracks are predominantly performed by white lead singers, and characterised by orchestral arrangements and accompaniments, as popularised in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s by Brazilian radio stations and record companies, thus distancing the genre from its origins as the percussion-based creation of Afro-Brazilians. The composer and bandleader, Radamés Gnatalli, the lynchpin of the musical team at Rádio Nacional, the station that dominated Brazil’s airwaves in this era, created orchestral arrangements for popular rhythms such as samba, ensuring that this stylised samba would become enshrined

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as Brazil’s ‘national’ music. According to Bryan McCann, Gnatalli was particularly influenced by jazz and US big bands, and ‘seamlessly blended these influences with Brazilian rhythms, producing a swinging, orchestral samba that defined the sound of Brazilian popular music in the late 1930s and 1940s’ (2004: 141). His influence on the way samba was performed on the radio and on disc was naturally extended to its performance in chanchada soundtracks. Gnatalli was employed by several independent film producers to adapt the hit songs of the moment for inclusion in their films, and for the vast majority of Atlântida’s chanchadas the composer Lyrio Panicalli was responsible for similar arrangements and orchestrations of samba. When Afro-Brazilian musicians appear in the chanchada, they are depicted as ‘primitive Others’, who seem to have little or nothing to do with modern Brazil, and perform the socially stigmatised, percussion-based samba-de-morro (literally, samba from the hillside slum), as if giving a folkloric show for the benefit of the elite and/or foreign diegetic audiences. In the chanchada O camelô da Rua Larga (The Street Vendor of Larga Street, Euripides Ramos and Hélio Barroso, 1958), for example, a white female lead singer, dressed in a baiana costume,1 takes to the stage in a nightclub and is surrounded by a host of mixed-race baianas and black musicians dressed as malandros.2 She sings ‘é samba’ (It’s Samba) to a percussion accompaniment. Against a stage-set of cubist-style enlargements of African tribal masks and in contrast to the white baiana’s poised, restrained vocal delivery, the outlandish performance of the Afro-Brazilian male and female dancers, who appear to be possessed by spirits by the end of the number (in a tacit nod to samba’s historical links with the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé), is drawn in stark contrast to the staid, sophisticated white diegetic audience (tellingly the performers and the audience are never framed in the same shot). The caricatured black malandros grin inanely to entertain the white elite spectators, who are sitting at cabaret tables in evening dress. The number ends with a rather grotesque close-up of a black performer’s face, as he grimaces in demonic fashion. These black performers are equally as ‘exoticised’ as the flamenco dancer, the US cowgirl and the belly dancer who appear in the same cabaret sequence. In the same vein, in a musical number in the film Esse milhão é meu (This Million’s Mine, Carlos Manga, 1959), black percussionists

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appear at the side of the stage wearing a stylised version of African tribal dress. Their mock tribal drumming provides an odd introduction for the subsequent chachachá, accompanied by orchestrated strings and piano, in what amounts to a very fragmented musical number in which the percussion and the melody sit uneasily alongside each other. Via this mismatch of aural and visual elements, modern, white Brazil, personified by the pale-skinned Sônia Mamede, paradoxically wearing dark ‘brownface’ make-up and a variation on the ethnically loaded baiana costume, who takes centre stage as she dances to the chachachá, distances itself from the nation’s African roots, drawing a clear demarcation between the two. Afro-Brazilians are internally ‘orientalised’ in the musical numbers of these Brazilian films, and thus sufficiently distanced from the white diegetic audience, and the real-life, extra-diegetic audience, who ironically would have been composed of many people of mixed race. Such musical performances that permeate the chanchada tradition deny the nation’s Afro-Brazilian heritage and yet borrow from it at one and the same time. Capoeira, the dance/martial art created by African slaves on Brazil’s colonial plantations, for example, appears only in the form of a stylised dance performed at a highsociety party in the film Samba em Brasília (Samba in Brasilia, Watson Macedo, 1961). These brief flirtations with Afro-Brazilian culture echo the Hollywood musical’s evocations of Latinas, Orientals or Africans within musical numbers, which Shohat terms as ‘outlets for ephemeral play with ethnic identities’ (1991: 224). Uncomfortable with its African heritage, Brazil depicts itself on screen through the whitening prism of Hollywood’s pan-‘Latin American’ musicals, as discussed in more detail below. Samba soundtracks, the baiana and Hollywood mediations In her first film, the Atlântida production E o mundo se diverte (And the World Has Fun, Watson Macedo, 1948) Eliana Macedo, the white-skinned leading lady of countless chanchadas, sings the well-known samba, ‘No tabuleiro da baiana’ (On the Baiana’s Tray), accompanied by the equally pale-faced male backing band, the Quitandinha Serenaders, in what constitutes an archetypal performance of samba within the chanchada tradition. The performances of samba on screen by white stars were stripped of

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Afro-Brazilian ethnic markers, save the non-threatening visual cue of the stylised baiana and malandro costumes. As Stam writes, ‘film after film gave the impression that samba was a White cultural product’ (1995: 287). In this musical number Eliana, as she was simply known, performs a samba by Ari Barroso, who personified the new generation of white, middle-class samba composers who emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Barroso’s samba ‘Aquarela do Brasil’ (Watercolour of Brazil, entitled simply ‘Brazil’ in the USA) was used in the soundtrack of Walt Disney’s animated Good Neighbour Policy production, Saludos Amigos (Wilfred Jackson et al., 1942), and other of his compositions featured in the partially animated feature, The Three Caballeros (Norman Ferguson et al., 1944). ‘Aquarela do Brasil’ (again re-titled simply ‘Brazil’) also formed part of the soundtrack of the Republic Studios’ production, Brazil (Joseph Santley, 1944),3 and of Road to Rio (Norman Z. McLeod, 1947). Barroso’s compositions were popular with US audiences, as the following excerpt from a review of the film Brazil reveals: ‘The picture is prodigally endowed with Ari Barroso numbers among them the one bearing the title of the film. Those who relish South American music will revel in Brazil’ (Film Daily, 1944).4 When performed back in Brazil in chanchadas of the 1950s, Barroso’s wellknown, anthemic sambas, so familiar to Brazilian cinema-goers thanks in large part to their incorporation into the soundtracks of these US films, could not fail to recall Hollywood’s representations of Brazil (usually depicted as an indistinguishable part of a generic ‘Latin America’) in the Good Neighbour Policy years.5 The performances of his songs in these Brazilian films are thus mediated by their passage through Hollywood.6 In the Good Neighbour musicals, Hollywood reduced Latin America to a variety of pseudo-‘Latin’ rhythms and exuberant, white-skinned, caricatured performers in apocryphal ‘national dress’. The most memorable embodiment of this metonymic representation was undoubtedly Carmen Miranda, who came to stand for the ‘exotic’ city of Rio de Janeiro, from whence she hailed, but by extension, Brazil and Latin America as a whole. As FreireMedeiros argues, ‘through its musicals, Hollywood has been largely responsible for “inventing” a specific image of Rio de Janeiro for world consumption’ (2002: 52). She notes that Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland, 1933) was the first and last US musical about

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Rio de Janeiro to incorporate black performers in the cast, and that Rio is presented as an allegorical shorthand for all the cities of Latin America in countless Good Neighbour Policy musicals, Brazil’s then capital being itself reduced to a customary performance of ‘pseudo-samba’ (2002: 54, 60). This reductionism and essentialising, characteristic of the musical numbers in these Hollywood films in particular, directly impacted on how Brazilians depicted themselves on screen, not least in the figure of the baiana. The stylised baiana costume, with its characteristic turban, frills and exposed midriff, was of course made famous by Carmen Miranda in Hollywood. Miranda adopted the baiana as her alter-ego in Brazil in the late 1930s in order to give credibility to her performances of sambas with AfroBrazilian themes. In Hollywood in the early 1940s, in the context of the Good Neighbour Policy, Miranda’s baiana was stripped of her ethnic connotations, and became the perfect embodiment of the non-threatening, ‘tropicalised’ Latin female ‘Other’, her southern European complexion sufficiently sanitising the AfroBrazilian origins of her costumes.7 Miranda’s homogenisation of Latin American identity in Hollywood received a mixed reception in Brazil, but her version of the baiana persona began to dictate how Brazilians depicted themselves, not least for international audiences. At the World’s Fair in New York in 1939, for example, the white-skinned hat-check girls at the restaurant in the Brazilian pavilion wore baiana costumes, as did white female Brazilian singers performing at the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco the following year. To return to Eliana’s performance of Ari Barroso’s popular samba ‘No tabuleiro da baiana’ in the Brazilian film E o mundo se diverte, here Atlântida’s biggest female star adopts the costume and persona of the baiana, a figure with which she would become synonymous in the musical numbers of the chanchadas. Paradoxically, Eliana’s whiter-than-white face became the acceptable face of Afro-Brazilian culture in these films. In a further twist to the intertextual relationship between the chanchada and Hollywood’s Good Neighbour musicals, this performance by Eliana is remarkably similar to Aurora Miranda’s rendition of another of Ari Barroso’s sambas, ‘Os quindins de Yayá’ (Missy’s Coconut Cakes) in Disney’s The Three Caballeros. Eliana’s celluloid baianas and their performance of samba, and by extension of ethnicity, often

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accompanied by white male musicians adopting the persona of the malandro in their dress to add a touch of ‘authenticity’ to their rhythms, are clearly inflected by the passage through Hollywood of Brazil’s unofficial ‘national’ costume (that of the baiana) and ‘national’ music (samba), with which Aurora Miranda’s famous sister, Carmen, was inextricably associated. Musical eclecticism: the case of Aviso aos navegantes (1950) In the 1950s Brazilian radio regularly featured recordings of a variety of Latin American rhythms, such as rumba, mambo and the beguine, in addition, as the decade wore on, to jazz, blues and other styles of North American music, European popular orchestral music by the likes of Mantovani, and recordings by foreign singers such as Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour (Tinhorão, 1999: 331–2). This bewildering variety of musical styles and the evolution in radio audience tastes that it naturally gave rise to, were increasingly catered for in the soundtracks of the chanchadas in the 1950s in an effort to innovate the tradition and to ensure its continued commercial success.8 As early as 1950, the chanchada Aviso aos navegantes, set on a cruise ship returning from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro in time for carnival, furnishes an excellent illustration of the eclecticism of the tradition’s typical soundtrack. Most of the musical numbers are performed on a cabaret stage on board ship for the elite diegetic audience. The film begins with Eliana performing a baião, to an orchestral accompaniment, wearing a baiana costume and accompanied by male dancers dressed as cangaceiros.9 As Bryan McCann has written, in the late 1940s the baião, a new rhythm from Brazil’s North East, was beginning to encroach on samba’s popularity thanks to its promotion via the radio and the growing numbers of North-Eastern migrants arriving in Rio de Janeiro (2004: 96–128). Of the range of rhythms hailing from this rural region, the baião was deemed the easiest to assimilate in the centre-south of Brazil, its traditional instrumentation being modified to give rise to the trio of accordion, triangle and zabumba drum (Saroldi and Moreira, 2005: 40).10 This new musical trend was picked up on in the chanchadas very quickly, with its chief exponent, Luiz Gonzaga appearing in the 1948 film E o mundo se diverte, alongside the female accordionist Adelaide Chiozzo and the country music duo

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Alvarenga and Ranchinho. Eliana’s rendition of this North-Eastern music in Aviso aos navegantes prompts a member of the diegetic audience to appreciatively exclaim ‘Grande baião!’ (Great baião!), leaving the real-life audience in no doubt about what musical genre they have just heard. This number is immediately followed by the performance on stage of a carnival marchinha, entitled ‘Marcha do Neném’ (The Baby’s March), by the comic star Oscarito dressed as a baby and attended by glamorous, scantily clad ‘babysitters’. After a brief narrative interlude, establishing shots of Buenos Aires directly precede and follow two musical performances in what purports to be a cabaret club in the Argentine city. The first is by Ruy Rey, who sings in Spanish, accompanied by his dance band,11 followed by the appearance on stage of the Cuban singer Cuquita Carballo, who sings and dances to another Latin rhythm, a Cuban guaracha by Otílio Portal entitled ‘A Romper el Coco’ (Crack Open the Coconut).12 These performances resonate with Hollywood’s clichéd pan-‘Latin American’ motifs, with sets decorated with coconut palms, and grinning black musicians relegated to providing the percussion accompaniment, playing bongo and conga drums in frilly-sleeved shirts, in a perhaps surprising evocation of a generic ‘Tropics’ in the temperate Argentine capital, the self-styled Paris of the Americas. Carballo, in a revealing sequinned bikini, epitomises the Hollywood archetype of the lascivious Latin American woman, dancing energetically as the camera’s lens suggestively closes in on her shaking buttocks, framed by extreme close-ups of black hands beating on drums in the foreground. A similar performance by another stereotypically hot-blooded, tropicalised temptress features in the chanchada Carnaval Atlântida (Atlântida Carnival, José Carlos Burle and Carlos Manga, 1952), in which the Cuban star of many Mexican musical films, Maria Antonieta Pons, known in the USA as ‘the Cuban Hurricane’, plays a highly sexualised Cuban, tellingly named Lolita, who teaches the strait-laced professor of Greek mythology, Xenofontes (played by the puny clown Oscarito) to dance the mambo. Both these performances, like the Hollywood and Mexican versions that they echo, index the mixed-race Cuban mulata, a key trope in cabaret and nightclub performance on the Caribbean island in the late 1940s and 1950s, who embodied sexual ‘exoticism’ and hedonism for an elite white and foreign male tourist gaze. Via the

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12 Oscarito as rumbeira in Aviso aos navegantes (1950), dir. Watson Macedo, prod. Atlântida Cinematográfica.

inclusion of Pons and Carballo in these chanchadas, and their tropicalised and racialised performances of ‘Latin’ rhythms, Brazil displaces its own mixed-race heritage and the anxieties surrounding its representation on screen onto the body of the ‘imported’ mulata, relegating the nation’s own Afro-Brazilian beauties to the safety of the sidelines. In a subsequent musical interlude in Aviso aos navegantes, the male comic star Oscarito performs a hilarious parody of this same seductive mulata archetype, impersonating the Cuban rumbeira played by Carballo in a cabaret show, as one of his many ways of evading detection as a stowaway on board ship (see Figure 12). The improvised lyrics of his rumba (‘Candelária’ by Ruy Rey) expose the artifice of any stage show, not least those of Hollywood’s ‘Latin American’ musicals. In the opening line he admits, in very rudimentary Spanish, as members of Ruy Rey’s dance band look on bemused, ‘nunca estuve en Cuba’ (I’ve never been to Cuba) and ‘soy de Madureira’ (I’m from Madureira), a reference to a down-market district of Rio’s Zona Norte or working-class northern suburbs. He also brings in prosaic references to the city of Niterói, situated across the Bay of Guanabara from Rio de Janeiro, and which naturally suffers by comparison with its much more glamorous neighbour.

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Seen alongside Carballo’s musical performances in the same film, this tongue-in-cheek, cross-dressed parody of the Cuban rumbeira sequences that featured in many Mexican cabaretera musicals of this era and were emulated in Hollywood’s ‘Good Neighbour’ musicals, exposes the inherent performativity of identities, whether related to gender, ethnicity or nation. There is, of course, a well-documented tradition of parody within the Brazilian chanchada, in which Hollywood movies are often the target of the joke.13 As Shohat argues in relation to Hollywood, ‘parody, by exposing the mechanisms of mimesis and the processes of intertextuality, becomes an apt locus for rendering explicit the ethnic “mimesis” of much of American cinema’ (1991: 239). By exaggerating and distorting the Hollywood ‘Latin temptress’ cliché, Oscarito’s cross-dressed parody thus exposes the often farcical nature of Hollywood’s stereotyping of a generic ‘Latin American’ exoticism.14 Such parodic musical performances also undermine the essentialising treatment that musical styles are subjected to in order to be deemed ‘national’ rhythms within internationalised mediascapes.15 It is worthy of note in this context that on Brazilian radio in the 1950s Spanish American songs were played alongside Brazilian versions of the same songs, some of which were comic parodies.16 The chanchada thus takes its lead from Hollywood’s depiction of ‘Latin’ identity in its musical numbers, but equally undermines such representations via parody. Conclusions Within the chanchada tradition the exoticised space of the nightclub stage, with its diegetic audience of foreign tourists and white, elite Brazilians, provides the perfect environment in which to reproduce tropicalised, metonymic Hollywood motifs of an apocryphal ‘Latin American’ identity via renditions of samba by pale-skinned baianas that have been moulded by an inter-hemispheric celluloid journey. These sanitised versions of two of the fundamental symbols of Afro-Brazilian subjectivity (namely samba songs and the baiana costume), go hand in hand with the marginalisation of Afro-Brazilians on screen, which on the rare occasions they do appear, are depicted as internally orientalised elements, as ‘exotic’ as the Cuban stars Maria Antonieta Pons or Cuquita Carballo. The musical interludes in the chanchada constitute a sanctioned

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space where the ‘domestic Other’ can be temporarily performed. Ultimately, however, these musical representations serve to permit both diegetic and extra-diegetic audiences to imagine a ‘whitened Brazil’. This bears striking similarities to the images of ‘themselves’ with which they are intimately familiar, thanks to the domination of Brazilian cinema screens by Hollywood movies, not least the ‘Good Neighbour’ musicals. These fleeting musical moments in which black culture surfaces in the chanchada can be read as auto-ethnographic ‘texts’, in which Brazilian cinema takes its lead from Hollywood as ‘ethnographer, creator and translator of “otherness” ’ (López, 1993: 68), but turns the camera on itself, or more specifically on its own, internal ‘Other’. These musical moments reveal a covert fascination with the exoticism of the Afro-Brazilian ‘Other’, although the latter’s problematic identity is safely defused by projecting it onto the body of an imported Caribbean mulata or a stereotypical African ‘native’, calling on recognisable Hollywood sounds and images. Brazil’s cultural and ethnic anxieties are thus attenuated. As Shohat argues, ‘filmic images and sounds come inevitably “saturated” with ethnic and racial resonances’ (1991: 219). She shows that the Hollywood musical, even when devoid of ethnic or racial themes or characters, can reveal what she terms as ‘inferential ethnic presences’ (1991: 223). A closer examination of the soundtrack of the paradigmatic chanchada Aviso aos navegantes reveals a series of such ‘ethnic presences’. Black Brazil is denied any contemporary societal role or agency in these films, but is rather relegated to the realm of spectacle and passivity, and removed from representations of national self-definition. In many ways, the chanchada’s treatment of Afro-Brazilians directly mirrors their representation in the lyrics of the sub-genre of samba known as samba-exaltação, which, in its overtly patriotic and romanticised lyrics, celebrated ‘Afro-Brazilian culture as the source of national identity, albeit in a way that consigned Afro-Brazilians themselves to a folkloric, idealized, and static past’ (McCann, 2004: 78). Notes 1 The baiana outfit was traditionally worn by black female street vendors in the North-Eastern city of Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia and main port of entry for African slaves during the colonial

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period. It drew on diverse African dress styles present in the city, as well as elements of Portuguese colonial dress (Ligiero Coelho, 1998: 90). By the first decades of the twentieth century, the costume was worn by so-called baianas who sold food on the streets of Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, but also by women who led the rituals of the AfroBrazilian religion, candomblé, or performed in Rio’s ‘samba schools’, the neighbourhood carnival groups, as a tribute to the Bahian women who brought samba from the North East to Rio and, subsequently, the rest of the nation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Like the baiana, the malandro, often represented by a straw hat, striped jersey and/or two-tone shoes in musical films, was inextricably bound up with Afro-Brazilian identity but appropriated under the Vargas regime (1930–45) to become a national symbol, a light-hearted representative of Brazil’s mythical cordiality. This is exemplified in the Walt Disney creation, Joe Carioca, a malandro parrot who introduces the US ‘tourist’, Donald Duck, to the delights of Rio in Saludos Amigos (Wilfred Jackson et al., 1942), and embodies Brazil in this film and in Disney’s partially animated The Three Caballeros (Norman Ferguson et al., 1944). This film incorporated another samba by Barroso, entitled ‘Rio de Janeiro’, which later featured in the soundtrack of the chanchada Aviso aos navegantes (1950), discussed in more detail later in this chapter. Barroso finally accepted an invitation to visit the USA in 1944, and spent two months in Hollywood, after which he travelled to New York to perform his music from Saludos Amigos on two radio programmes for NBC, in partnership with Brazil’s Rádio Tupi station (Olinto, 2003: 92–3). Such was Barroso’s success in North America that he was invited by Walt Disney himself to become the musical director of the entire operation of Walt Disney Productions, an invitation which he declined (Olinto, 2003: 94). As Murphy writes, ‘ “Aquarela do Brasil” is one of a handful of songs that are recognizable by their introductory accompaniment figure alone (“New York, New York” is another), a three-note figure that is played twice, once on the beat and once with syncopation’ (2006: 16–17). The chanchada tradition was no stranger to inter-filmic citation and dialogues with North American cinema in particular, evidencing the familiarity with the Hollywood product of both the Brazilian filmmakers and their audiences. In Guerra ao samba (War on Samba, Carlos Manga, 1956), for example, Renata Fronzi performs a seductive dance copying the scandalous one performed by Jane Russell in The French Line (Lloyd Bacon, 1953). The performance of an impromptu samba by a showgirl in the aisle of a steam train for the benefit of her

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fellow passengers in the chanchada Pistoleiro bossa nova (Bossa Nova Gunman, Victor Lima, 1959) is a clear wink to Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, which premiered in 1959. Miranda was born in Portugal, to Portuguese parents, but moved to Brazil as a young child. As Molina Guzmán and Valdivia write: ‘Tropicalism erases specificity and homogenizes all that is identified as Latin and Latina/o. Under the trope of tropicalism, attributes such as bright colours, rhythmic music, and brown or olive skin comprise some of the most enduring stereotypes about Latina/os, a stereotype best embodied by the excesses of Carmen Miranda and the hypersexualization of Ricky Martin’ (2004: 211). The authors cite extravagant jewellery, bright seductive clothing, curvaceous hips and a focus on the area below the navel, as among the key aspects of the trope of tropicalism or tropicalisation in its feminised form within US popular culture. The vogue for ‘Latin’ music in film soundtracks of this era was not restricted to Brazil. Tim Bergfelder analyses the German revue films of the 1950s, the eclectic ‘schlager’ films, such as Cuba cabana (Fritz Peter Buch, 1952), illustrating how the tradition only survived into that decade by embracing ‘cosmopolitan’ musical styles, albeit often sung in German. Like the chanchadas, ‘West German musical genres of the 1950s were neither a culturally “pure” or nativist alternative to American paradigms, nor a simple imitation or copy without indigenous roots and references, they contained elements of both’ (2000: 87–88). Cangaceiro is a term used to refer to bandits who became local heroes among the poor of the arid hinterland or sertão of Brazil’s North East, and earned mythical status. As Saroldi and Moreira write, Rádio Nacional’s promotion of the baião gave rise to ‘a kind of musical fever that then spread from the north to the south of the country’ (2005: 41). In spite of his Hispanic-sounding stage name, Rey was born Domingos Zeminian in São Paulo in 1915. After success as a crooner on Rádio Nacional, in 1948 he had the inspired idea of forming his own band to specialise in Spanish American rhythms, capitalising on the vogue among Brazilian radio listeners and record buyers. The careers of Ruy Rey and his band took off, and their performances of a generic ‘latinidad’ (‘Latinness’), often sung in Spanish, featured in several of Atlântida’s chanchadas. Here he sings a song entitled ‘Mercê’ (Grace), which he co-wrote. Born in Cuba in 1922, Carballo appeared in four of Atlântida’s chanchadas as the archetypal rumbeira or rumba dancer/singer. As she sings here about cracking open coconuts, black percussionists do exactly that on top of their drum skins.

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13 The critically acclaimed Hollywood Western High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952, released in Brazil as Matar ou morrer [Kill or Die]) was systematically mocked in the Atlântida film Matar ou correr (Kill or Run Away, Carlos Manga, 1954), in which Oscarito plays a most cowardly sheriff, comically debunking the heroism of Gary Cooper in the Hollywood original. As Shohat and Stam explain, the chanchada’s ‘parodic strategies are premised on North American hegemony; they assume that the audience has already been inundated by North American cultural products’ (2007, 305). 14 Shohat and Stam identify a very similar strategy in the Egyptian film Iskandariya Leh? (Alexandria Why . . .?, Youssef Chahine, 1979), in which the protagonist directs Egyptian musical scenes that ‘affect a kitschy, “under-developed” mimicry of Hollywood production values’. Shohat and Stam write, ‘As Egyptian performers emulate the formulae of the Hollywood-Latino musical, they also point to Hollywood’s role in disseminating imagery of the Third World’ (2007: 283). 15 As Connell and Gibson argue, working-class musical genres in Latin America (that were themselves hybrid forms), like the samba in Brazil and the rumba in Cuba, were transformed into national emblems, ‘while in internationalised mediascapes Latin dance sounds have been regularly homogenised and sexualised, as tropical soundtracks [. . .] These appropriations of clichés, while never absolute, present simplified versions of nationhood and ethnicity that “stick” in global mediascapes, “postcard” images that are as much related to national tourism campaigns as they are to sustained local cultures. Achieving notional homogeneity, and a “national music”, demands crude essentialism’ (2002: 126). 16 My thanks to João Luiz Vieira for this information. The Columbia, RCA Victor, and particularly Odeon record labels released Brazilian covers, known as ‘versões’ or versions, of international pop songs in this era, including Argentine tangos, and Cuban and Mexican boleros, with lyrics translated into Portuguese. Tellingly, most were tunes that Brazilian audiences first encountered in Hollywood musicals (McCann, 2004: 142).

References Bergfelder, Tim (2000), ‘Between nostalgia and amnesia: musical genres in 1950s German cinema’, in Bill Marshall and Robynn Stilwell (eds), Musicals: Hollywood and Beyond, Bristol: Intellect, 80–8. Connell, John and Gibson, Chris (2002), Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity, and Place, London: Routledge. Film Daily, 27 October 1944.

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Freire-Medeiros, Bianca (2002), ‘Hollywood musicals and the invention of Rio de Janeiro, 1933–1953’, Cinema Journal, 41: 4, 52–67. Ligiero Coelho, José (1998), ‘Carmen Miranda: An Afro-Brazilian Paradox’, unpublished PhD thesis, New York University. López, Ana M. (1993), ‘Are all Latins from Manhattan? Hollywood, ethnography and cultural colonialism’, in John King, Ana M. López and Manuel Alvarado (eds), Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, London: BFI, 67–80. McCann, Bryan (2004), Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil, Durham NC and London: Duke University Press. Molina Guzmán, Isabel and Valdivia, Angharad N. (2004), ‘Brain, brow, and booty: Latin iconicity in U.S. popular culture’, The Communication Review, 7: 2, 205–21. Murphy, John P. (2006), Music in Brazil: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Olinto, Antônio (2003), Ary Barroso: história de uma paixão, Rio de Janeiro: Mondrian. Rogin, Michael (1992), ‘Blackface, white noise: the Jewish jazz singer finds his voice’, Critical Inquiry, 18: 3, 417–53. Saroldi, Luiz Carlos and Moreira, Sonia V. (2005), Rádio Nacional: O Brasil em sintonia, Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. Shohat, Ella (1991), ‘Ethnicities-in-relation: toward a multicultural reading of American cinema’, in Lester D. Friedman (ed.), Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 215–50. Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert (2007), Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, London and New York: Routledge. Stam, Robert (1995), ‘Samba, candomblé, quilombo: black performance and Brazilian cinema’, in Michael T. Martin (ed.), Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 281–301. Stam, Robert (1997), Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture, Durham NC and London: Duke University Press. Tincknell, Estella and Conrich, Ian (2006), ‘Introduction’, in Ian Conrich and Estella Tincknell (eds), Film’s Musical Moments, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1–13. Tinhorão, José Ramos (1999), História social da música popular brasileira, São Paulo: Editora 34.

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Orpheus in Babylon: music, myth and realism in the films of Rio de Janeiro David Treece Not surprisingly, the music of Rio de Janeiro’s streets and hillsides has played more than a mere supporting role in cinematic representations of the city across the last half-century. The figure of the popular musician is one we might expect to inhabit the scenarios and landscapes of contemporary Brazilian film, with its strong tradition of musical comedy1 and its shift in the second half of the twentieth century towards a socially engaged perspective on everyday working-class life and popular culture. But more than that – most explicitly in the two screen versions of the Classical Orpheus myth, one a Franco-Brazilian production (Black Orpheus, Marcel Camus, 1959), the other a Brazilian project (Orfeu, Carlos Diegues, 1998) – the musician has even been invested with a special, symbolic role of restorative agency, embodying the hopes, dreams and flaws of a city and country traumatically divided along the fault lines of class, culture, state and citizenry. It is not hard to understand the appeal of the Orpheus narrative, with its drama of the transformative power of music, to the poet and lyricist Vinicius de Moraes who, as Charles Perrone (1988) tells us, began considering its dramatic potential as an allegory for the lives of Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas as early as the 1940s. The evolution of this idea and its trajectory as a practical artistic project, from Moraes’s 1956 stage musical Orfeu da Conceição via Camus’s Black Orpheus to Carlos Diegues’s 1998 remake Orfeu, have been recounted in detail and their representation of the themes of race relations, ‘favela life’ and national identity have been examined thoroughly, so these arguments do not need to be rehearsed here (Perrone, 1988, 2001; Santos, 2003; Grasse, 2004).

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Rather, this chapter takes the seminal narrative of Orpheus as a starting point for interpreting the specific role of music, both symbolic and material, in screen representations of Rio de Janeiro since the 1950s, and especially in the performance of ideas of redemption and perdition for a city in crisis. In doing so it also takes a critical look at one assumption about the shifts in cinematic and musical idiom across this period and their relationship to the realist aesthetic: the idea that the ‘harder’ soundtracks of the most recent films (centring on hip-hop, soul and a local Brazilian offspring of Miami bass, funk carioca, with its bass-heavy electronic beats [Herschmann, 1997]) correspond to a necessarily more realistic and therefore truthful representation of the city, as opposed to the apparently sentimentalised depictions associated with the musical scores of Black Orpheus and Rio, Zona Norte (Rio, North Zone, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1957), for example. Taught to play the lyre by his father Apollo, according to Classical mythology, the Thracian Orpheus was that supremely gifted minstrel whose skill, together with the sweetness of his voice, were such that he could charm wild animals, cause trees to uproot themselves and follow in his steps, and even save Jason and the Argonauts from shipwreck by outsinging the Sirens. Orpheus falls in love with a wood-nymph named Eurydice and enjoys a brief, blissful life with her until one day, pursued through the forest by the minor deity Aristaeus, she steps on a poisonous snake, is bitten and dies. Armed with his musical powers and protected by the gods, the grief-stricken Orpheus descends into the Underworld, where he succeeds in charming the monstrous three-headed dog Cerberus and persuades Hades, the King of the Dead, to allow him to return with his wife to the world of the living. But tragically, Orpheus breaks the one condition imposed by Hades – unable to trust that Eurydice is following him as promised, or impatient to share his joyful anticipation with her, before they emerge into the light he turns to see her, and she is lost to him forever. Swearing that he will never love another, Orpheus mourns Eurydice with his music, so intensely and steadfastly that the jealous Maenads, the wild women of Thrace, tear him limb from limb, and throw his head into a river. But his head goes on singing all the way to the sea, and is thereafter saved by the Muses to remain among the living, enchanting everyone forever with its melodies. If the spirit of Orpheus was believed to guide the hands of all

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musicians who sing of lost love, we could say that Brazil’s contemporary cinematic imaginary has been animated by a comparable faith in the spirit of music-making as a force for social regeneration and reconciliation. As a disinterested creative impulse, and in its communicative potential, as the expression of an inclusive popular identity, music has symbolised the idea of a redemptive, transformative future for the conflict-ridden social world of urban Brazil, in which the power of human creativity and imagination can overcome the spectre of violence and death. According to musicologist José Miguel Wisnik (1995), for example, the ‘poetic-musical wisdom’ of popular song, above all since the 1950s, in its especially rich dialogue between the erudite culture of the lyrical text and popular traditions of music-making, has injected a new vitality into the country’s literary-intellectual culture, a creative energy derived from the ‘innocence of joy’ that inhabits the more elemental forms of popular artistic expression, epitomised by the culture of carnival. In this way, music projects an alternative, utopian path for Brazil’s destiny as opposed to the social disharmony and alienation which would appear to be its historical legacy. However, does this idea of music as an interface or terrain of dialogue between antagonistic cultures and social forces – the erudite and the popular, the morro and the cidade (the hillside township and the city below) – represent anything more than a merely dreamtof aspiration of reconciliation for an irremediably divided society? As early as the mid-1930s, the modernist poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade had posed the question, tentatively and ambiguously, in his poem ‘Morro da Babilônia’ (Babilônia Hill), which evokes a favela in the Leme neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro’s south side, occupying a steep ridge separating Copacabana beach from the district of Botafogo: At night, down from the hillside come voices creating terror (urban terror, fifty per-cent from the movies, and the rest that came from Luanda or got lost in the common tongue). When there was a revolution, the soldiers scattered up the hill, the barracks caught fire, they didn’t come back. Some of them got shot and died. The hillside became more magical.

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But the voices from the hillside aren’t exactly mournful. There’s even a well tuned ukulele that overcomes the noises of the rock and undergrowth and makes its way down to us, modest and playful, like a kindness from the hillside.2

The Morro da Babilônia is emblematic of the issues discussed below, as it has been a setting for both real-life and cinematic dramas of encounter and confrontation between different elements of the city. Having its origins as an army observation post in the late nineteenth century, its occupation began in earnest as Drummond was writing, following the construction of the apartment blocks and the tunnels and tramway system linking Copacabana to the older city centre. Extensive sections of Camus’s 1959 Black Orpheus were shot in the Morro da Babilônia, and the film’s main character, the amateur musician Orfeu, works during the day as a tram driver between the city’s centre and this outlying neighbourhood. In more recent years Babilônia, which shares the hill with another favela, Chapéu Mangueira, has been controlled by drug traffickers linked to the Terceiro Comando (Third Command) organisation. Eduardo Coutinho’s 1999 documentary Babilônia 2000 followed twelve hours in the lives of the two communities as they prepared for the Millenium New Year celebrations. José Padilha’s 2007 film Tropa de elite (Elite Squad) depicts the actions of the BOPE (Special Police Operation Battalion) in the favela in 1997, to eliminate the risks to security posed by the drug dealers in advance of the Pope’s visit to the city. Over half a century before this, then, at a key moment in the early history of the Morro da Babilônia during the populist era of Getúlio Vargas’s presidency (1930–45), Drummond had glimpsed the possibility of a different kind of relationship between the two worlds ‘up there’ and ‘down here’, between the largely AfroBrazilian and working-class communities of the hillside and the new bourgeoisie of the city’s south side, a relationship that might be mediated not by an already long accumulated burden of fear and violence, but by the language of music. It is as if the previously alien, incomprehensible voice of the favelado (favela inhabitant) were given a modulated intonation, a musical ‘tuning’ making of it something poetic, ludic and susceptible, if not to comprehension, then at least to recognition. ‘Like a kindness . . .’ – with this

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subtle qualification, Drummond manages to avoid sentimentalising the relationship, aware of where he stands in the social and cultural divide, and of the power and limitations of the perceptions, mythologies and imaginaries in which he is implicated. Other depictions of the morro and its musical symbols from the same period were not so self-reflective. Kid Pepe’s samba ‘Se gostares de batuque’ (If You Like The Batuque), as recorded by Carmen Miranda in 1935, for example, is an unashamedly paternalistic, middle-class fantasy of the contented poor, which invites its listeners to visit an old-style African circle-dance or batuque up on the hillside. It thus patronisingly folklorises the ‘rootsy’, slave antecedent of the samba, appropriating it as an element of Brazil’s national-popular heritage: Hey, if you like a batuque . . . There’s batuque that’s made-in-Brazil. Go up the hill and join the samba and there you’ll see what spry, nimble folk are dancing samba in the ring. Because all that stuff’s real Brazilian. And they lead their lives singing, Forgetting all the rest, that’s how they get along. Go up the hill and join the drumming party and you’ll see real humble folk, so happy while they don’t have a thing.3

After the 1930s and 1940s, when official rhetoric claimed to incorporate popular interests and identities into the mainstream of national life, the next instance of musical dialogue between the morro and the cidade was to have rather different ideological resonances. In his account of the evolution of violence in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Cidade partida (Divided City), Zuenir Ventura (1994) points to the mid-1950s, following the suicide of Getúlio Vargas after his return to office by democratic vote in 1950, as a turning point. It was in that atmosphere of generalised political and ideological conflict, and against a backdrop of intense capitalist growth and consumerism (the ‘Golden Years’ of Juscelino Kubitschek’s presidency), that the symbiotic relationship between violent criminality and repressive policing entered a new phase; one symbolised by the rise of notorious gangsters, such as Cara de Cavalo and Mineirinho, and their police counterparts Mílton Le Cocq de Oliveira, Amauri Kruel and the Esquadrões da Morte

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(Death Squads). At the same time, the developmentalist surge of the Kubitschek administration – out of which emerged the new waves in music and cinema, bossa nova and Cinema Novo, respectively – led to a sharpening polarisation between the social actors who were claiming the fruits of this prosperity. By the early 1960s, as the contradictions of urban life were becoming both deeper and more complex, the language of politics turned away from getulismo, the old-style populist nationalism associated with Getúlio Vargas, to a new, Left populism, based on a strategy of revolutionary partnership or alliance between the povo (masses) and a politicised section of the artistic-intellectual bourgeoisie. Radicalised by the growing mobilisation of both rural and urban labour, by the anti-imperialist and revolutionary movements sweeping the Latin American continent and beyond, and by the new president João Goulart’s announcement of a programme of grass-roots reforms (‘Reformas de Base’) in September 1961, part of the bossa nova generation of artists and intellectuals committed itself to a partnership with working-class musicians with a view to reinterpreting the notion of ‘popular culture’ as an instrument of revolutionary denunciation and action.4 The group’s most prominent representatives were Carlos Lyra (co-writer, with Vinicius de Moraes, of the 1964 stage musical Pobre menina rica [Poor Little Rich Girl]), Sérgio Ricardo (singersongwriter and filmmaker, responsible for the soundtracks to Glauber Rocha’s Deus e o diabo na terra do sol [Black God, White Devil, 1964] and Terra em transe [Land in Anguish, 1967]) and vocalist Nara Leão, among others. Focusing their activities around the CPCs or Popular Culture Centres, under the leadership of the National Students’ Union, they sought to unify musically the experiences and aspirations of Brazil’s oppressed classes and the vanguardist politics of the new Left, by incorporating the compositional and performative innovations of bossa nova within a more militant language of social critique, in collaborations with roots sambistas (samba composers) such as Cartola, Nelson Cavaquinho and Zé Kéti. In Pobre menina rica the lyrical, orphic impulse quite literally brings together the two protagonists – the poor little rich girl and the beggar-poet – in a romantic, if ultimately ephemeral encounter on Copacabana beach, mediated by poetry and song. In other cases the friction between romanticism and naturalism, rhetoric and critique, was integral to the aesthetic structure of the

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new, politically engaged art. Black Orpheus and Rio, Zona Norte stood at the threshold of this moment of conscious representational rupture, still daring to imagine a city of multiple temporalities where the mythic and the real, the ritual and the everyday, might collide and even converge. As early as 1957, some years before the Popular Culture Centre initiatives, Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s film Rio, Zona Norte was already exploring the theme of the class divide from the point of view of its working-class protagonists, although it was initially criticised for its unwieldy mix of expressionism and social realism and for failing to match the impact of Santos’s more consistently neo-Realist debut Rio, 40 graus (Rio, 40 Degrees, 1955) (Melo, n.d.). The film’s particular thematic focus is the phenomenon of parceria – the songwriting partnerships which, on the one hand, opened the way for the professionalisation of the careers of many poorer, typically black sambistas from the 1930s onwards but, on the other hand, exposed them to exploitation and the outright theft of their creative material by unscrupulous, ambitious agents and singers. In Pereira dos Santos’s dramatisation of the relationship, the victim Espírito da Luz Soares (literally ‘Spirit of Light Soares’, played by the legend of musical comedy or chanchada, Grande Otelo) is found dying beside the tracks of Rio’s suburban railway, and as his life slips away we re-live his dream of artistic success and its cruel destruction. The soundtrack opens with Alexandre and Radamés Gnatalli’s incidental score evoking, in a somewhat traditional Hollywood approach (Guerrini Jr, 2009: 26–8, 146–7), two contrasting moods – the modernist bustle of the urban landscape and a piano-led romantic interlude suggestive of the tragedy to come. But this soon gives way to the polyrhythmic drumming of a batucada or samba percussion ensemble, which connects two contrasting ideas and tempi: the relentless clatter of the commuter train transporting its working-class passengers between the centre and the northern suburbs (where the largely Afro-Brazilian population was forced to resettle at the turn of the twentieth century) and the ecstatic energy of a pre-carnival samba rehearsal, in its most popular version – the improvised samba de terreiro or ‘dirt-floor samba’. Although ominously interrupted by a violent gang attack, the scene of the escola de samba (literally ‘samba school’, the term used to refer to Rio’s neighbourhood carnival associations) is

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remarkable as the first of several in which Espírito is seen and heard performing compositions from his (in reality Zé Kéti’s and Vargas Júnior’s) samba repertoire in their entirety, without any orchestral backing, and in the real-time context of the narrative, rather than simply as extra-diegetic musical interludes. It is as if time and space are given up for the sambista and his samba to intervene directly in the drama with a sense of autonomy as agents of creative potential, to voice Espírito’s dream of self-realisation (to re-marry, be reunited with his baby and wayward son, and make a new home). But it is equally implied that the songs – such as Zé Kéti’s ‘Mágoa de sambista’ (The sambista’s pain): ‘Samba meu, que é do Brasil também’ (‘Samba of mine, and Brazil’s as well’) – performed by Espírito in their unadorned, raw, ‘authentic’ state, represent the real soul of popular musicality; by contrast, he laments, once stolen from him by the cynical agent Maurício, his song loses the spirit of its roots in the old-guard traditions of the call-and-response, tambourine-driven samba de partido alto (‘broken high’ samba). Espírito’s illusory, unattainable dream of consummate stardom is symbolised by a cameo performance from the real-life figure of well-known singer Ângela Maria, who hears and offers to record one of his compositions. Espírito takes up the promise of another would-be intermediary and collaborator – the middle-class professional musician Moacir – to have the song transcribed. But on visiting him in his plush south-side apartment, where he is entertaining his fashionable bourgeois friends, he discovers the superficiality and opportunism of Moacir’s interest in him. The hope of social and individual redemption through the conciliatory agency of the parceria is shattered, and Espírito loses everything. As we are encouraged to speculate, his death will no doubt be followed by a further cynical betrayal, as Moacir vows to gather together Espírito’s surviving compositions for ‘posterity’, although more probably for his own personal profit. The orphic conception of musical artistry – ambivalently bearing both the promise of redemption and of fallibility – therefore underlies Rio, Zona Norte’s hybrid combination of expressionism and naturalism, and its dreamlike quality.5 Camus’s Black Orpheus was released only two years later, in 1959, and while its international success – including an Oscar and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival – was matched by considerable critical notoriety

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inside Brazil (Perrone, 1988; Santos, 2003), it bears some striking structural similarities to Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s predecessor. Neither film actually lays claim to a documentary realist approach to everyday life in Rio’s poor neighbourhoods, and the recourse in Black Orpheus to colour photography, the city’s dramatic landscapes and its set-piece carnival and macumba (popular Afro-Brazilian spirit worship) scenes are unquestionably exploited to spectacular effect. Yet while this has attracted accusations that Black Orpheus effectively manufactures an exoticised, tourist vision of a tropical fantasy, Vinicius de Moraes’s original stageplay is no less vulnerable to criticism for its consumerist, exoticising gaze upon the internal ‘Other’. For Perrone, the play ‘celebrates beauty in the favela but in a mystifying fashion that conceals sociohistorical contexts’ (1988: 5). Perhaps this is to miss the point, however. Regardless of the implicit perspective (foreign or local) from which the two films’ respective settings in the favela and the suburb are viewed, both achieve a comparably vivid and intense evocation of those locations, without whose powerful sense of aura the mythical narratives that unfold in them would not be credible. Rather than offering a sociological map of the contemporary urban world, the Rio de Janeiro of both films is a city of dreams, a stage upon which the forces of creativity, love, violence and death are set in motion within the lives of ordinary people in pursuit of the extraordinary. It makes little sense, therefore, to regard Black Orpheus, or Rio, Zona Norte, as failures of social realism; if anything, on the contrary, they should probably be seen as anti-realist in conception, if one of the priorities of the realist aesthetic is to bring us close to the palpable, material experience of the quotidian, as rendered sensorially intense in the immediate ‘now’ of the present. As Beatriz Jaguaribe argues, ‘A key element of the prevalence of the realist register is also related to the perception of realism as being closely tied to the construction of modernity. Whereas religious beliefs, inner realms of fantasy and collective carnivalesque practices may actually feature in realist productions, the controlling reality principle is given by the rationalist realist code’ (2004: 330). In that sense, Black Orpheus also shares with Rio, Zona Norte a tension between the mythic time of love and song and the quotidian tempo of modernity; the relentless, destructive flux of urban existence is magically suspended by the power of dream, ritual, music or

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dance, as its protagonists struggle against the constraints of the real. This is surely where the narrative dynamic and appeal of Black Orpheus lie, in suggesting how the cultural world of the Brazilian morro, of twentieth-century Afro-Brazilian favelados, is an orphic site of convergence yet also of tension between the realms of dream and of the everyday, the poetic and the prosaic, the suspended ritual temporality of carnival and the ordinary ‘real time’ of Ash Wednesday. Camus’s film might, therefore, arguably be closer in spirit to Vinicius de Moraes’s early thinking about the affinities between Afro-Brazilian and Greek cultural life than his own stage play. In Act Two of the latter, Perrone argues, when Orfeu searches in vain for Eurydice at a carnival ball: ‘There is no suggestion of recovery, and, consequently, no enactment of the myth’s crucial syntagm of looking back and losing her’ (1988: 5). The film, by contrast, does retrieve that key idea in the scene of the macumba session; Orfeu’s singing invokes Eurydice’s soul through the spirit possession of a medium, only for Orfeu to lose her again when he ignores her plea to have faith: ‘Do you love me enough to hear me without seeing?’ As important as the film’s diegetic movement in suggesting this tension and convergence between mythic time and the ‘real’ time of modernity, the musical soundtrack works fundamentally as a dialogue between the stylistic idioms and functions of samba and bossa nova; the first being a core tradition of the country’s musical life, with its intimate relations with carnival and Afro-Brazilian religion, while bossa nova was (in 1959) the ‘new wave’ in songwriting and singing, which Black Orpheus itself was so instrumental in introducing to European and US audiences. However, whether in the context of the film or in their own right, samba and bossa nova should not be seen as simply standing for the mythic/ritual and for the modern, respectively. Rather, bossa nova can best be heard as a contemporary interpretation of the samba tradition: profoundly rooted in its sense of spirituality, its cyclical, repetitive structures, its polyrhythmic approach to musical time and the interplay of language and melody, but combining these with modern concepts of melodic chromaticism, harmonic modulation and a minimalist performative attitude that together tend towards a more contemplative, reflective commentary on the experiential present, the unfolding of time in the here and now (Treece, 2007).

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The opening scenes of the film establish this dialogical approach to the orphic drama and its musical expressions: amid the frenetic pulse of a samba batucada, Afro-Brazilian women carrying water up the hillside favela join others washing clothes to form an exuberant, dancing multitude blurring the boundaries between work and play; Eurydice is meanwhile seen arriving in the city, making her way across its concrete landscape, which significantly includes an icon of modernist architecture, Lúcio Costa’s Ministry of Culture building, also known as the Capanema Palace, located in the city-centre street Rua da Imprensa. If the euphoric, collective polyrhythms of carnival samba juxtapose in this way the narrative pace of urban modernity with its ludic, ritual antithesis, then the first bossa nova song to be heard, Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes’s ‘A Felicidade’ (Happiness),6 intervenes to transport us to a different realm of transcendent contemplation, on the hilltop above, where some children are trying to fly a kite. The song itself, in its musical and thematic tension, comments on the allegorical mini-drama unfolding before us on the screen, as the kite struggles precariously to remain afloat in the sky above the city. It shifts between the suspended limbo of its refrain, the eternity of sorrow – ‘Tristeza não tem fim’ (literally ‘Sadness has no end’) – and the realm of the present (‘But happiness does’) and of tempus fugit, the brevity of life’s successive moments, epitomised by the transition between Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, between the euphoria of carnival and its aftermath. Like the kite defying the forces of gravity and inertia, or a feather hovering in the air, the gesture of song enacts this defiance of the onward logic of real time, eternally deferring its end. Even after Death has finally caught up with Eurydice, and Orfeu carries her electrocuted body back up the hillside, he intones the words and melody of ‘A Felicidade’ once more, insisting that ‘the sun will rise to greet us’, before being stoned by the jealous ‘maenads’ of the favela and falling to his own death. The film’s closing scene, back on the hilltop, re-enacts the orphic faith in the magical power of the mythic order, the rituals of song and dance, to transcend the constraints of the real, as the children joyfully perform Luis Bonfá and Antônio Maria’s ‘Samba de Orfeu’ (Orfeu’s Samba: ‘I want to dance, I want to live / when the samba’s over, my love, then I can die’), in an attempt to make the sun rise ‘just like Orfeu’. Ambivalence and duality are therefore central to the orphic

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narrative, which asserts the transcendent power of the creative imagination, while simultaneously reminding us of its fallibility and frailty in the face of the real. In the four decades between Black Orpheus and Carlos Diegues’s Orfeu, which encompass a twentyone-year military dictatorship, the profound economic crisis of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s and a democratic transition to civilian rule, the realist imperative has not surprisingly become the orthodoxy, both in the language of political and social critique, and in their aesthetic counterparts in the artistic realms of fiction and film. An intense cycle of production of documentary and journalistic reflections on urban poverty and violence was matched from the 1990s by a new wave of literary and cinematic representations focusing particularly on the favela (Jaguaribe, 2004). And if one assumption of these new representations was the disintegration of the old national-populist rhetoric of social harmony, what George Yúdice has called Brazil’s ‘consensual culture’ (1997), then it seems to have followed from this that, musically, the realist perspective could no longer be vocalised in the traditional idioms of collective solidarity and dialogue, such as samba and bossa nova, but would require a more ‘modern’ and ‘realistic’ soundtrack. In Diegues’s Orfeu, Myriam Sepúlveda dos Santos observes, ‘the romantic atmosphere [of Black Orpheus] is replaced by a realistic perspective that aims to expose the links between carnival festivities and the cultural industry’ (2003: 50). Yet samba, the quintessential music of carnival, figures very little in the film, and aside from a nodding reference to the 1959 production in the form of the bossa nova song ‘Manhã de Carnaval’ (Morning of Carnival), the dominant sounds are those of pop, MPB (an eclectic post-bossa nova style of vocal-and-guitar based songwriting epitomised by Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso) and hip-hop. These idioms, and the characterisation of the modern, professionalised musician-protagonist Orfeu (played by Toni Garrido, vocalist of the pop reggae band Cidade Negra) have none of the symbolic and expressive meanings that were previously so essential to articulating the orphic narrative’s convergence and tension between the mythic and the real. Orfeu is challenged by Eurydice to confront the violent gangsters who tyrannise the favela (and are associated somewhat simplistically with the film’s hip-hop soundtrack), but it is hard to imagine his mundane character or his creative capacities being remotely up to the task. As Santos

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puts it, ‘Orfeu shows a hero who is a musician by profession. He uses his laptop to compose his music, and his success comes from this activity. The exceptional powers of music, which could even change the course of life and death as present in the legend, do not appear in the film’ (2003: 63). For all the film’s apparent aspiration to a more naturalistic and sociologically ‘authentic’ perspective on the Rio favela, its unimaginative deployment of romantic pop, MPB and hip-hop has the effect of exchanging the mythic realm of Black Orpheus, its aura of musical enchantment, for the melodramatic register of the TV soap opera and the MTV video-clip. One of the advisers on the production of Orfeu was Paulo Lins, a sociologist from the Cidade de Deus (literally, City of God) neighbourhood and the author of the novel which gave its name to the 2002 film directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. In the transition from one ‘favela’ film to another, in the space of just four years, the orphic model – with its theme of a redemptive struggle between the musician’s magical creativity and the forces of reality and death – has given way to another mythical narrative, that of the ritualistic cycle of dynastic power and violence, the endless rise and fall of successive gangs and their leaders (a structure even more striking in its epic scale and extent in the first edition of Lins’s novel [1997]). If the musician, as an agent of transformation, has now disappeared from the scene, though, music itself remains a vital signifying element in the film’s social and cultural narrative. An interesting feature of Cidade de Deus – and perhaps a contributing factor in its success internationally – is a soundtrack which, while including some familiar ‘Brazilian’ sounds, also challenges audiences’ expectations about the musical affiliations and identities of young, urban working-class blacks in today’s Brazil. The film’s chronological span encompasses two moments – the 1970s Black Rio soul movement and the era of 1990s hip-hop – when the hegemony of samba, as the symbol of an optimistic, one-nation populist consensus rooted in the idea of an integrated mestiço (mixed-race) culture, was challenged by a self-conscious and militant identification with non-local, diasporic black musical idioms. Clearly, the impulse to embrace diasporic expressions of black identity has been, for many Afro-Brazilians, a response to the sense that, in being appropriated by a paternalistic mestiço nationalism,

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traditional musical forms such as samba cease to represent their experience. As one young participant of the Black Rio soul movement complained: ‘Samba? Samba isn’t ours any more. Samba schools haven’t got room any more for the likes of us’ (Anon., 2002). On the other hand, the musical idioms of funk carioca and rap have supplied Afro-Brazilians with a critical and self-assertive language for characterising their place in Brazilian society and culture, a language we could define as ‘realist’. This rhetoric of realism is drawn from ‘foreign’ musical styles whose controversial, critical edge precisely draws attention to the disjuncture between Afro-Brazilian and Brazilian, to the social difference that divides the city from itself, the City of God from Rio de Janeiro. To take one key, rhythmic feature of this disruptive musical language, which figures prominently in the film Cidade de Deus, the author of a 1976 report about Black Rio observed that, ‘when James Brown’s anthem-like song “Soul Power” is sung [by Afro-Brazilians], the expression soul power is repeated rhythmically by the audience in packed out sports halls in a whisper, in a murmur’ (Frias, 1976: 1). For Ricky Vincent, the revolutionary innovation of James Brown, and the key to funk’s sense of streetwise ‘realism’, its gritty, earthy immediacy, was the shift of the pulse ‘to the front’, hitting the accent ‘On the One’, away from the more relaxed ‘swing’ of the off-beat that was typical of the r&b style (and of samba, of course) until then (1996: 8). But if that shift of the pulse to the front is clearly incorporated into the sound of Brazilian soul and funk, this is not an uncritical, unreflective assimilation. The One does not so much replace the off-beat ginga (lateral swing) of traditional samba, as dialogue with it. It therefore introduces a certain tension between front and back, between the assertive, no-nonsense ‘realism’ of the funk groove, and the playful, often ironic back-beat of samba, between the critical, foreign edge of the modern, diasporic black power sound, and something more familiar: the relaxed, playful syncopation of Afro-Brazilian musical tradition. Just as the chronology of Cidade de Deus bridges and confronts two defining moments in Rio de Janeiro’s modern social and cultural history, the film’s soundtrack reminds us that Rio’s musical identity is endlessly performed in the dialogue between tradition and innovation, the local and the diasporic, the ritual and the modern, none of which has a more privileged claim upon reality or the ‘real’ than any other.

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Notes

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1 2 3 4 5

See Dennison and Shaw, 2004, and Chapter 17 of this volume. Author’s translation from the Portuguese, Andrade (1967: 105). Author’s translation from the Portuguese. For a fuller account of this experience, see Treece (1997). For Luís Alberto Rocha Melo, Rio, Zona Norte is a film essentially defined by the concept of ‘enchantment’ (Melo, n.d.). 6 Author’s translation from the Portuguese: How long must sorrow last When joy so soon is past? Happiness is like a drop of dew Clinging to the petal there, above So still, you see it glimmer It barely seems to shimmer And falls just like the tear we shed for love The poor man only gets his glimpse of happiness That fleeting day when carnival comes round For twelve long months you labour Just so that you can savour The dream that lives for a moment While you pretend to be A king, a pirate or a casanova Then Wednesday comes and all your joy is over How long must sorrow last When joy so soon is past? Happiness is like the lightest feather That’s carried by the breeze upon the air It glides without a sound And then falls floating to the ground It only lives while there is breath to spare This happiness of mine seems to be dreaming Deep within my darling’s sleepy eyes It’s like the night that’s moving Towards the light of dawn Soon the sun’s going to rise So whisper softly as a dove Then she will wake tomorrow smiling sweetly With kisses poised like offerings of love How long must sorrow last When joy so soon is past?

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References Andrade, Carlos Drummond de (1967), Obra Completa, Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar. Anon. (2002), Sleeve notes. Black Rio STRUTCD 015. Dennison, Stephanie and Shaw, Lisa (2004), Popular Cinema in Brazil, 1930–2001, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Frias, Lena (1976), ‘Black Rio: o orgulho (importado) de ser negro no Brasil’, Jornal do Brasil (17 July), Caderno B. Grasse, Jonathan (2004), ‘Conflation and conflict in Brazilian popular music: forty years between “filming” bossa nova in Orfeu Negro and rap in Orfeu’, Popular Music, 23: 3, 291–310. Guerrini Jr, Irineu (2009), A música no cinema brasileiro: os inovadores anos sessenta, São Paulo: Terceira Margem. Herschmann, Micael (ed.) (1997), Abalando os anos 90: funk e hip-hop, globalização, violência e estilo cultural, Rio de Janeiro: Rocco. Jaguaribe, Beatriz (2004), ‘Favelas and the aesthetics of realism: representations in film and literature’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 13: 3, 327–42. Lins, Paulo (1997), Cidade de Deus, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Melo, L.A. Rocha ‘Rio Zona Norte de Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Brasil, 1957’, Contracampo: Revista de Cinema, 80. Online: www.contracampo.com.br/80/riozonanorte.htm (accessed 19 February 2011). Perrone, Charles (1988), ‘Don’t look back: myths, conceptions, and receptions of Black Orpheus’, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 17, 155–77. Perrone, Charles A. (2001), ‘Myth, melopeia, and mimesis: Black Orpheus,  Orfeu, and internationalization in Brazilian popular music, in Charles A. Perrone and Christopher J. Dunn (eds), Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 46–71. Santos, Myriam Sepúlveda dos (2003), ‘The Brazilian remake of the Orpheus legend: film theory and the aesthetic dimension’, Theory, Culture & Society, 20: 4, 49–69. Treece, David (1997), ‘Guns and roses: bossa nova and Brazil’s music of popular protest, 1958–68’, Popular Music, 16: 1, 1–29. Treece, David (2007), ‘Suspended animation: movement and time in bossa nova’, Journal of Romance Studies, 7: 2, 75–97. Ventura, Zuenir (1994), Cidade partida, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Vincent, Ricky (1996), Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One, New York: St Martin’s Griffin. Wisnik, José Miguel (1995), ‘A gaia ciência: literatura e música popular’, Revista de Occidente, 174, 53–72.

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Yúdice, George (1997), ‘A funkificação do Rio’, in Micael Herschmann (ed.), Abalando os anos 90: funk e hip-hop, globalização, violência e estilo cultural, Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 22–49.

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Discography Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro): The Original Sound Track from the Film. Verve. B000004726. 1990.

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Index

20 centímetros 30–2, 39–44 Agujeta 120 Alaska (Olvido Gara) 40, 44, 76 alegrías 145 Alfonso, Gerardo 200–2 Almodóvar, Pedro 3, 30–2, 36–9, 51–64, 86, 229, 259 Alquézar, retablo de pasión 128 Altman, Rick 3 Alves, Francisco 269 Ama Lur 114–15, 125, 128–30 Amador, Raimundo 147 A mi madre le gustan las mujeres 153 amor brujo, El 151–6 Andalusische Nächte 18, 21, 24 Anderson, Bibi 58 Ângela Maria 305 Argentina, Imperio 17–28, 206 Argentinita, La (López, Encarnación) 35 Armendáriz, Montxo 83, 85, 93 Armistead, Samuel G. 124 ¡Átame! 59 Aviso aos navegantes 289–93 Baddeley, Oriana 222 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 119–24, 129 Bandera, Juan 168 Banderas, Antonio 56–7, 60, 161, 226 Barroso, Ari 287–8 Basterretxea, Néstor 114, 127–9 Before Night Falls 196 Begin, Paul 95 Beltrán, Lola 59, 62 Berger, Pablo 78 Bergfelder, Tim 4 Bergson, Henri 117–18, 129

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Berlim na batucada 268–70 bertsolari 114, 124–31 Bethânia, Maria 250 Bizet, Georges 18, 24, 206 Black Orpheus 256, 298–310 Bocca, Julio 207, 216 Bodas de sangre 68, 115–16 Bola de Nieve 61, 64 bolero 24, 31, 34, 37, 57, 59–61, 64, 154, 156, 159, 170 Bollaín, Iciar 153 Bonezzi, Bernardo 56, 64 Borges, Jorge Luis 208–10, 216–17 Born, Georgina 151 Bosé, Miguel 60 bossa nova 57, 303, 307, 309 Bravo, Hernán 224, 226 Brel, Jacques 57, 59 Brito, Joaquim Pais de 242 Buarque, Chico 253, 309 Buena Vista Social Club 190, 194, 196, 198 Bueno, Descemer 193 Burle, José Carlos 290 Burning 75, 91 Buse, Peter 77 Butler, Judith 34, 137–8, 140–1, 191 Bwana 153 Byrne, David 2, 259 Caballero, Vanito 191 Caley, Matthew 2 Calparsoro, Daniel 84–90 Camacho, Juanito 197–8 Câmara Cascudo, Luís de 276 Camarón de la Isla 134–7, 141–8 Camus, Marcel 256, 298, 301, 305, 307

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316 canção de Lisboa, A 239, 242, 245 canción de Aixa, La 18 Cannon, Steve 4 cante jondo 36, 114, 120 Capas negras 246 capoeira 286 Carballo, Cuquita 290–2 Carlos, Roberto 271–2 Carmen 68, 115–16, 206, 208 Carmen, la de Triana 18–24, 28 Carne trémula 61 Carrillo, Isolina 159 Cartola, música para os olhos 251–60 Carty, Gabrielle 162 Carvalho, Walter 250 casa do Tom: mundo, monde, mondo, A 251–5, 259–60 Casal, Luz 60 Castro, Athanai 193 Castro, Maleni 52, 105 Castro, Ramón 183 Catani, Afrânio 268 Cavaquinho, Nelson 303 Cavestani, Juan 72 caza, La 52, 115 Cervera, Mónica 40–2, 45 chachachá 154, 286 chanchada 249, 256, 267–73, 283, 285–8, 290–3, 304 charanga 172, 179 Chavarrías, Antonio 154 Chichos, Los 98, 100, 104, 105, 110 Chion, Michel 103, 159, 220, 223 Chiozzo, Adelaide 289 Chunguitos, Los 98, 100–1, 105, 109, 110 Cidade de Deus 310, 311 Cillow, Halim 84 Cinco Latinos, Los 52 Clifford, James, 137, 139, 141 Colmeiro, José 21, 28 Colomo, Fernando 154 conga 157, 176, 181, 183 Connell, John 151, 161 contradanzas 154 Cooder, Ry 198 Cooke, Mervyn 152 Copes, Juan Carlos 212 copla 34, 42, 46 Coração vagabundo 251–2, 258, 260 Cosas que dejé en la Habana 151–63 Costa do Castelo, O 239, 245 Cría cuervos 115, 208

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Index Crumbaugh, Justin 84, 88–9 Cruz, Penélope 19, 23, 25, 26, 62, 63 Cuestas, Mary 103, 108 Cugat, Xavier 161 cumbia 154, 158 danzón 169–75, 179, 183 Davies, Ann 84, 86, 90 Decoin, Henri 63 Delabastita, Dirk 223 Deleuze, Gilles 118, 122 Delgado, Issac 155 Dennison, Stephanie 268 Deprisa, deprisa 98–103, 106 Derrida, Jacques 123, 125, 137–41 Deus e o diabo na terra do sol 277, 303 Díaz, Telmary 196–7, 200 Díaz López, Marina 68–70, 72 Dickinson, Kay 249 Diegues, Carlos 270–1, 298, 309 D´Lugo, Marvin 37, 69, 213 Doane, Mary Ann 1–3 Doimeadiós, Osvaldo 197–8 Dois filhos de Francisco 250 dos lados de la cama, Los 70 Downs, Lila 220, 226–9, 231 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos 300–2 Duarte, Arthur 239–40 Dulces horas 210 Dunn, Christopher 260 Duo Dinámico, El 60 Durán, Modesto 183 Dyer, Richard 2, 216 Eliana 287–90 Elisa vida mía 208 En la puta calle 153 Entre tinieblas 51–4, 59 E o mundo se diverte 286, 289 Esse milhão é meu 285 Esteve Flores, María 68, 73 Evans, Peter William 25, 41 fado 4, 235–46 Fado: história d’uma cantadeira 246 Fados 116 Faria, Miguel, Jr. 251, 254 farruca 121 Fecé, José Lluís 68–9, 72, 74 Fejerman, Daniela 153 Feliciano, Cheo 55 Fernández, Emilio 168–72, 175–84

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Index Fernández Franco, Ángel 99, 102–3, 105, 109–10 Fernández, Ramón 75 Ferrão, Raul 239 Ferreira, Lírio 251 Ferreira Vargas, Suzana 269 Feuer, Jane 3, 121 Fiestas, Jorge 18, 20 Figueroa, Gabriel 168–9, 171, 178–9, 182–4 Finisterre 153 Flamenco 114–24 flamenco 4, 31, 35–6, 63, 76, 100, 115–26, 134–43, 158, 206, 285 flor de mi secreto, La 61 Flores de otro mundo 153, 158 Flying Down to Rio 287 Freire-Medeiros, Bianca 287 Fresa y chocolate 151, 196 Frida 220–32 funk carioca 299, 311 Gabriel, Enrique 153 Gades, Antonio 68, 116 gallega baila mambo, Una 161 García Bernal, Gael 37, 63 García, Esteban Alfonso 172 García Lorca, Federico 35, 116, 142–3 Gardel, Carlos 63, 206, 213, 216 Gibson, Chris 151, 161 Gnatalli, Radamés 284, 285 Goldenthal, Elliot 220–30 golfos, Los 98, 107 Gómez, Concha 93, 104 Gómez Muriel, Emilio 161 Gorbman, Claudia 110, 155–6 Goya (award) 17, 66, 72, 193, 207 Goya en Burdeos 216 Grainge, Paul 209 grande cidade, A 270 grande Elias, O 240, 245 Green, Jennifer 67 Grostein Andrade, Fernando 251 Grutman, Rainier 223 guagangó 155–7 guarachas 154, 162 Guerra, Jesús 177 Guerra, Pedro 153 Guijarro, Antonio 41 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás 151, 196 Gutiérrez Aragón, Manuel 152, 154 Gutiérrez, Chus 154

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Habana abierta 190, 196 Habana Blues 189–202 habanera 170 Hable con ella 62 Haraway, Donna 45 Hayek, Salma 220–31 Heelas, Paul 33 Henseler, Christine 94 Heredero, Carlos 88, 89, 93 Herschfield, Joanne 170, 173, 182, 184 Herrera, Hayden 225, 228 Hesmondhalgh, David 151 Highmore, Ben 107 hip-hop 4, 193, 196, 299, 309–10 Hispano, Andrés 67, 68 Historias del Kronen 90–5 Iglesia, Álex de la 77, 78 Iglesia, Eloy de la 109 Iglesias, Alberto 37, 51, 64 Inglis, Ian 105 Inquilino Comunista, El 85, 89–90 It’s All True 256, 265, 268 Jaguaribe, Beatriz 306, 309 Jamón, jamón 25 Jardiel Poncela, Enrique 69 Jazeel, Tariq 102 Jobim, Ana 251–3 Jobim, Tom 308 Johnson, Randal 270 Julien, Isaac 152 Kahlo, Frida 220–32 Kassabian, Anahid 2, 38, 40 Kéti, Zé 271, 272, 303, 305 Kika 61 Knights, Vanessa 3, 54, 60, 61, 64, 151 Kracauer, Siegfried 119 Labanyi, Jo 22, 28 Laberinto de pasiones 51 Lacan, Jacques 3, 46 Lacerda, Hilton 251 Lacuesta, Isaki 134, 136, 137, 141, 145 Laing, Heather 4 Lannin, Steve 2 Larruquert, Fernando 114, 127–9 leão da Estrela, O 239 Lee-Wright, Peter 251 Lefebvre, Henri 107, 121, 122, 275 Lencero, Carlos 135, 143 ley del deseo, La 51, 56–62

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leyenda del tiempo, La 134–48 Loma, José Antonio de la 98–9, 103–5, 109 Lopes Ribeiro, António 239 López, Ana 184 López, Marga 171 López Rubio, José 69 Lund, Kátia 310 Lupe, La 59, 60 Lyra, Carlos 303 Macedo, Watson 286 Machín, Antonio 159 Maestro, Mia 207 Magdaleno, Mauricio 168–72, 178–81, 184 Maisch, Herbert 18 mala educación, La 30–2, 36–9, 45, 63 mambo 169, 177, 283, 289, 290 Manga, Carlos 285, 290 Mañas, José Ángel 83, 85, 90–4 Marcus, Greil 91 mariachi 171, 173, 183, 184, 227 Marisol (Josefa ‘Pepa’ Flores) 41–3, 68 Marisol, rumbo a Río 68 martinete 120, 123 Martin-Jones, David 122 Martín-Lunas, Milagros 19, 154 Martínez-Lázaro, Emilio 66, 69–71, 75, 79 Massey, Doreen 108 Matador 51, 56–7 Matarazzo, Maysa 57 Maura, Carmen 52, 55, 56 Mazzini, Mina 57 McCann, Bryan 257, 260, 285, 289, 293 McLaren, Malcolm 85, 92 McLean, Eddy 161 McNamara, Fabio/Fanny 56 Medem, Julio 71, 114, 129, 130 Meirelles, Fernando 310 Méndez, Tomás 62, 221 menina da rádio, A 239 Merello, Tita 216 merengue 42 Mérimée, Prosper 18, 19 Mermelada de Lentejas 75 Meseguer, Nicolás 20, 21 Metz, Christian 1, 2, 119 Mexicanos al grito de guerra 175

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Middleton, Richard 32 Mihura, Jerónimo 69 Mihura, Miguel 69 milonga 211–14 Mira, Alberto 34 Mira, Carles 153 Miranda, Armando 246 Miranda, Carmen 256, 287–8 Moix, Terenci 18, 25 Molina, Miguel 55, 56 Monge Cruz, Manuel 144, 147 Monge, Rafael ‘Pijote’ 144, 147 Montaner, Rita 179–81 Montiel, Sara 37, 44, 63 Mora, Miguel 71, 75, 76 Moraes, Vinicius de 253–5, 298, 303, 306–8 Moreno, Sebastián 18, 28 Moreno Cuenca, Juan José ‘El vaquilla’ 99, 104, 105, 110 Morente, Enrique 63, 145 Morente, Estrella 63 Mosquera, Gerardo 191 movida, la 51–4, 76, 83, 86 Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios 51, 58–9 Muñoz Aunión, Marta 20 Nazareth, Ernesto 274 Niña, La 19 niña de tus ojos, La 19–28 Nirvana 91, 94 No desearás al vecino del quinto 75 Nobleza baturra 18 Noches de Casablanca 63 Ocaña: retrat intermitent 30, 33–46 Ochoa, Kelvis 192–3, 196–7, 200 Oliveira Dias, Rosângela de 268 olvidados, Los 102, 107 Ordovás, Jesús 75–7 Orfeu 298, 309–10 Orfeu negro 256, 298, 309, 310 Orovio, Helio 176–7 Oscarito 290–2 Oteiza, Jorge de 127 otro lado de la cama, El 66–79 Padilha, José 301 pai tirano, O 239 Palacios, Fernando 68 Panchos, Los 57, 58, 161 Panicalli, Lyrio 285

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Index Paredez, Deborah 222 París, Inés 153 paso doble 158 pátio das cantigas, O 243, 245 pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra, La 71, 114–15, 125, 129–30 Pelotari 127–8 Peña, Rosa 100, 102, 104, 105 Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón 51–4, 59 Pereira dos Santos, Nelson 299, 303, 306 Pérez Chaviano, Amilcar 202 Pérez, Fernando 196 Pérez Ocaña, Jesús 33–6 Pérez Prado, Dámaso 180, 182 Pérez Torres, Amador 171 Perrone, Charles 260, 298, 306–7 Perros callejeros 98–103, 107, 110 Perros callejeros 2: busca y captura 98, 101, 109 Perugorría, Jorge 151, 154, 190, 196 petenera 123 Piaf, Edith 61, 289 Piazzola, Astor 211 Pobre menina rica 303 Poniente 154 Pons, María Antonieta 290–2 Pons, Ventura 30–3, 36 Portela, Raul 239 Powrie, Phil 4, 21 prima Angélica, La 115 próximo oriente, El 153 Pugliese, Osvaldo 212 punk 52, 63, 76, 83–95, 108, 196 ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? 51, 53, 55, 59 Queiroga, Perdigão 246 quinqui 98–111 Quiroga, Alejandro 66 Quitandinha Serenaders 286 rancheras 81, 168, 229 rap 124, 249, 260 Raza 18 Rebello, Luiz Francisco 237–8 reggae 4, 152, 309 Rey, Florián 18–23, 27 rey del mambo, El 153 Rey, Ruy 290–1 Ribeiro, Fernando 243 Rica, Kiko de la 89

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Ricardo, Sérgio 303 Rio, 40 graus 304 Rio, Zona Norte 299, 304–6 Rivera, Diego 221, 224–31 Road to Rio 287 Rocha, Glauber 303 Rodrigues, Amália 236, 246 Rodríguez, María Pilar 91, 93 Rogin, Michael 284 Rombes, Nicholas 83, 84 Romney, Jonathan 2, 152, 249, 251 Rose, Gillian 275 Rosenberg, Stuart 207 Rot, Ariel 75–7 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 123 rumba 100, 106–7, 111, 153–5, 161, 169–70, 283–4, 291 Saborit, Eduardo 176 Sáenz de Heredia, José Luis 18 saeta 36, 45 Saïd 153 Salazar Mallén, Rubén 167 Salazar, Ramón 30, 31, 39, 40–2 Salón México 168–84 salsa 42, 155 Salto al vacío 83–90 samba 4, 57, 249, 250, 255–7, 264–72, 277–8, 283–93, 303–9 Samba em Brasília 286 Sánchez Martínez, Pedro José 63 Sánchez, Yoani 189 Sánchez Vidal, Agustín 21, 102 Sandrich, Mark 214 Santaolalla, Isabel 213 Santos, Myriam Sepúlveda dos, 309, 313 Santos, Vítor Pavão dos 238, 298, 309 Sanz, Luis 34 Sartre, Jean Paul 63 Saura, Carlos 52, 68, 98, 105–6, 114–16, 119–23, 128, 206–10, 215–17 Schifrin, Lalo 206, 210, 211, 215, 216 Schnabel, Julian 196 Seiter, William E. 161 Serrano, David 69, 75, 76, 79 Sevillanas 114, 116–24 Sex Pistols 85, 91, 94 Shaw, Lisa 222, 231, 243, 268 Shohat, Ella 284, 286, 293

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320

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Shubert, Adrian 103 Sidney, George 161 siguiriya 35, 123, 130 Silva, António 240, 244 Silveira, Breno 250 Smith, Jeff 2, 55 Smith, Paul Julian 54, 59, 221 Soldados de Salamina 67, 77 son 169, 172, 176, 184, 202 Son Clave de Oro 172, 173, 176 Sontag, Susan 60 Soto, Arturo 190, 196 Springfield, Dusty 40, 44 Stam, Robert 116, 122, 270, 273, 284, 287 Stiltskin 85, 89 Stivel, Alejo 75, 76 Stone, Rob 25, 41, 128, 139, 140 Storaro, Vittorio 207, 212 Strauss, Frederic 54, 57, 58 Suite Habana 196 Sus años dorados 71 Susanna 154 Tacones lejanos 60, 229 Takimoto, Masanobu ‘El Cartero’ 146–7 tango 4, 63, 209–16, 226 Tango 116, 206–17 Tavares, Hekel 278 Taxi 98 Taymor, Julie 220, 221, 224, 228 Telmo, Cottinelli 239 Tequila 72–7 Terra em transe 303 Thompson, Stacey 85, 87, 88 Tierney, Dolores 174, 176 Tinhorão, José Ramos 275, 289 Todo sobre mi madre 61, 62 Toledo, Guillermo 72, 77 Toquinho 253 Trapero, Maximiano 125, 126 Triana Toribio, Nuria 25, 26, 41, 55, 56, 59 Tropa de elite 301 Trova 202 Trueba, David 67 Trueba, Fernando 18, 19, 24, 27, 28, 161 Truffaut, François 115, 127 Two Much 161

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Ulrich, John M. 93 Últimos golpes del Torete, Los 98, 101 Uribe, Imanol 153 Valdelomar, José Antonio 99, 100, 104, 110 Valderrama, Juan 100, 102, 104, 105 Valdés, Abelardo 171 Varela, Carlos 200, 201 Vargas, Chavela 60, 61, 64, 220, 229–31 Vargas Júnior 305 Veloso, Caetano 62, 227–9, 250, 253, 258–61, 265, 309 Venegas, Christina 194 Veneno, Kiko 72, 77 Vernallis, Carol 105 Vernon, Kathleen 51 Vernon, Paul 236 Víctimas del pecado 168–9, 178–9, 182, 184 Vieira, João Luiz 267 Villaverde, Xavier 153 Vincent, Ricky 311 Vinicius 251–5, 260 Viola, Paulinho da 250 Vitier, José María 155, 163 Volver 63 Washabaugh, William 100 Weimer, Tanya N. 191 Welles, Orson 256, 265, 268, 269 Wenders, Wim 190, 194, 198 Werneck, Sandra 250 Wild West 152 Wisnik, José Miguel 300 Wooton, Adrian 152, 249 Xalbador 128 Yarza, Alejandro 53 Yo, El Vaquilla 98, 100, 105 Yo La Tengo 90 Zambrano, Benito 190–6, 199, 202 zarzuela 31, 53, 56, 59 Zavala, Antonio 125 Zemke, John 125, 126 Žižek, Slavoj 46 Zorrilla, Virginia 71, 72 Zúñiga, Mariano de 100

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