He always said this in his interviews. tried to be a dancer, and because he failed to do so, he became film director. The truth is that since his first short film -named Flemish (from 1955)-, career of Aragonese director carlos saura, Born in Huesca in 1932 and died this Friday, he became associated with flamenco. “Maybe that’s why I made flamenco movies: what I couldn’t dance to others did,” she said in an interview with RTVE. a country that dances in 2021.
He approached her first, hand in hand with the great bailaor. Antonio Gades, with the trilogy blood wedding (1981), Carmen (1983) and love wizard (1986). It was the first of three films in ballet format that captivated the director as a viewer and prompted him to recommend this collaboration to Gades. Three films served the director drive away Flemish trite To try to bring dance closer to contemporary times and to the level of other artistic disciplines, as the dancer Gades did in his productions, treated as a minor folkloric art imposed by the Franco dictatorship. Playing with fiction and documentary. CarmenAn adaptation of Bizet’s opera, it also achieved great international success and Awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and was selected for the Oscar.
I would go back to this genre but in a completely different way, in form and content, Sevillanas (1991) filmed at the height of the genre’s boom, when millions of records were sold and many flamenco artists approached him. He didn’t want to talk about this movie and the next movie. Flemish (1995) and flamingo, flamingo (2010), as he did with Gades: format closer to documentary, but with artists performing in a studio.
All three titles a wide variety of trends coexisting in its own kind at that time – From the Lebrija corraleras popularized by Lorca and la Argentinita to the slow sevillanas on the piano by Manuel Pareja Obregón and of course the different ways to dance them – and they also serve as recordings of great artistic moments: guitar dialogue between two maestros, Paco de Lucía and Manolo SanlúcarLola Flores dancing to a bata de cola or island shrimp To cite a few examples, to sing the sevillanas that Manuela Carrasco danced for her in the last months of her life.
Saura was able to develop one with these tapes. visual language is closely linked to natural representation itself. Music and dance, playing with light, the movement of the camera and the decoration of the sets will accompany the artists, but without highlighting them.
Relying on reference names from the ’90s when it comes to flamenco and the 2000s when it comes to flamenco, he also had the ability to immortalize the flamenco of the moment on every tape, but it’s the diversity that always shows.