Carlos Saura’s Flamenco Trilogy (1981, 1983, 1986)

One of Spanish cinema’s great auteurs, Carlos Saura brought international audiences closer to the art of his country’s dance than any other filmmaker, before or since. In his Flamenco Trilogy - Blood Wedding, Carmen, and El amor brujo - Saura merged his passion for music with his exploration of national identity. All starring and choreographed by legendary dancer Antonio Gades, the films feature thrilling physicality and electrifying cinematography and editing - colorful paeans to bodies in motion as well as to cinema itself.




Of the three Spanish artists whose work is fused in ''Blood Wedding,'' Carlos Saura predominates. Mr. Saura, in filming Antonio Gades's dance interpretation of Federico Garcia Lorca's play, demonstrates an agility on a par with the dancers'. As his camera moves actively but unobtrusively, Mr. Saura captures both a sense of the dance as a performance and a feeling for its abstract properties. His film is beautifully made, and it carries the added excitement of Lorca's drama and Mr. Gades's magnetism.

IMDB

''Blood Wedding,'' which opens today at Cinema 3, doesn't pretend to be a comprehensive adaptation of Mr. Lorca's play. It is primarily a dance film, as Mr. Gades's choreography distills ''Blood Wedding'' into a half-dozen highly charged episodes, which are performed in a ballet-flamenco hybrid style by a company featuring Mr. Gades, Cristina Hoyos and Juan Antonio Jimenez. The dance is staged in a rehearsal hall and looks seamless, though the variety of Mr. Saura's camera angles indicates otherwise. He brings considerable ingenuity to the task of complementing the dancers without upstaging them.


Mr. Gades is the ballet's greatest attraction, as both choreographer and star. He makes a fiery Leonardo, whether in slow, agonizing battle with Mr. Jiminez's groom or in pursuit of Miss Hoyos's errant bride. In addition to his dancing prowess, Mr. Gades has the facial versatility for a cinematic version of this tragedy, his expressions changing constantly behind the heavy stage makeup that he wears.


All of the dancers are photographed at close range in their theatrical paint. And the first third of the film watches them applying the makeup, getting into their costumes, limbering up under Mr. Gades's supervision and otherwise readying themselves for the performance. Mr. Saura, in emphasizing these backstage aspects of the dance, turns the intense passions of ''Blood Wedding'' into an extension of the mundane activities that have preceded them. In so doing, he underscores the power of dance to both heighten and encapsulate strong emotions.



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AS saucy, wanton, inexhaustible femme fatales go, Carmen, the Spanish gypsy who first appeared in Prosper Merimee's 1845 novel, must be one of the most popular and long-lived. Principally responsible, I suppose, is the continuing popularity of Bizet's 1874 opera. That ''Carmen'' goes on and on and on, whether conventionally performed, as it's done in most of the world's opera houses, or whether ''adapted'', as in Rodgers and Hammerstein's ''Carmen Jones'' and in Peter Brooks's production ''Carmen,'' which will open shortly in the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

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One of the best of these very free adaptations must be Carlos Saura's flamenco ''Carmen,'' which opens today at the Plaza Theater. Conceived by Mr. Saura and Antonio Gades, the famed dancer-choreographer and former director of the National Ballet of Spain, this ''Carmen'' combines dance, Bizet music and a modern if very slim narrative to find its own contemporary equivalent to the passionate 19th-century grandeur of the opera.

Mr. Saura, who directed the film, and Mr. Gades, who choreographed it and plays a central role, use as the frame of their film the story of a dance company rehearsing ''Carmen,'' a production that seems to be as freely conceived as the film itself.


The film serves up bits and pieces of the opera to surprisingly moving effect. There's a riveting sequence near the start of the movie when Paco De Lucia, the guitarist in the movie as he is in life, adapts a Bizet melody to become a flamenco lament. The opera's fight between Carmen and another woman, who also works in the cigarette factory, becomes a dance of the sort of blinding vicious energy that one seldom ever encounters in an opera house. In this way, too, Mr. Saura succeeds in rediscovering many of the emotions that may elude today's opera audiences.


Miss Del Sol, Mr. Gades and Cristina Hoyos, who plays a leading dancer in Antonio's company as well as Carmen's rival at the cigarette factory, are so fine dancing their uncostumed variations on Bizet that it's always a letdown when the film insists on paying attention to the modern story. One longs to watch these performers do an entire, classic ''Carmen'' production, but in the physically pared-down, bare-stage manner of their rehearsal hall.


Mr. Gades, who looks somewhat like a Spanish version of Roman Polanski, is terrific as long as he is dancing or showing others what to do and how. Unfortunately, as the modern equivalent to Don Jose, the soldier whose life is ruined by Merimee's Carmen, he is not very persuasive at all. It's too bad but probably inevitable that the film ends with a giggle instead of a gasp.


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