Flamenco and cinema: the films you need to see

Why cinema and flamenco have sought each other out so often

Flamenco is, above all, an art that happens live: in the compás shared between cantaor, guitarist and bailaor, no two performances are ever the same, and that fleeting quality is exactly what makes it so hard to transfer to a screen without betraying it. Even so, Spanish cinema — and to a lesser extent international cinema — has returned to flamenco again and again, searching for formulas capable of capturing something of that stage tension without flattening it into archive-style documentary footage. No director has explored that relationship with as much persistence and as many different results as Carlos Saura, whose flamenco work spans almost three decades and is, on its own, the best starting point for anyone wanting to approach the genre through film.

Carlos Saura and Antonio Gades’s flamenco trilogy (1981-1986)

At the heart of that body of work is the so-called flamenco trilogy, made up of three feature films that Saura shot together with dancer and choreographer Antonio Gades between 1981 and 1986, each one based on a previous work — literary, operatic or musical — reinterpreted entirely through dance.

Blood Wedding / Bodas de sangre (1981) opens the series by adapting Federico García Lorca’s play of the same name, and does so in a very particular way: the film shows Gades’s company rehearsing the choreography in a bare dance studio, with almost no set, before merging into the full performance of the story of the bride who, on her wedding day, is still in love with her former suitor Leonardo. That decision to show the rehearsal process before the polished result was one of the keys to its originality.

Carmen (1983), the second instalment, goes a step further and turns the shoot itself into narrative material: Antonio, the director of a dance company played by Gades, is preparing a flamenco version of Bizet’s opera and becomes obsessed with the dancer he has chosen for the lead role, also named Carmen and played by Laura del Sol, until the line between the fiction they are rehearsing and what is actually happening to the performers blurs completely.

El amor brujo (1986) closes the trilogy by adapting Manuel de Falla’s score, with a cast that again brings together Antonio Gades as Carmelo, Cristina Hoyos as Candela and Laura del Sol as Lucía, in a story of crossed love affairs between two couples that is resolved in the final ritual “Fire Dance”. Unlike the first two, this film is shot almost entirely on a stylised soundstage, with staging closer to a chamber musical than to the realist drama of Blood Wedding.

All three films share their leads — Antonio Gades and Cristina Hoyos head the cast in all three, with Laura del Sol as a third pillar in Carmen and El amor brujo — and a single guiding idea: filming flamenco dance with the respect and attention of a work of danced theatre, without resorting to the usual fragmentation of the music video or an excess of narrative artifice around it. It remains, even today, the essential reference for understanding just how far cinema can serve dance rather than the other way round.

Sevillanas (1992): choral flamenco before the great documentary

Before embarking on his next major documentary project, Saura shot Sevillanas (1992), a much shorter, more choral film that brings together a very wide cast of artists in a single stage space to perform different styles of sevillanas, from the most traditional to variants with concert flamenco guitar. Participants include names as varied within the flamenco and copla scene as Camarón de la Isla, Rocío Jurado, Paco de Lucía and Manolo Sanlúcar, which makes Sevillanas a preview, in condensed form, of the choral formula Saura would develop fully three years later.

Flamenco (1995): Saura and Vittorio Storaro’s choral mosaic

With Flamenco (1995), Saura abandons fictional narrative altogether and offers something different: a documentary made up entirely of musical and dance performances, filmed on a bare soundstage and structured around thirteen different palos, from the cante martinete to the bulería. The cinematography was handled by Vittorio Storaro, Bernardo Bertolucci’s regular collaborator, whose work with light — casting shadows and silhouettes of great visual power against neutral backdrops — proved decisive in the film being received by international critics as one of the finest ever made about dance, as the British magazine Sight and Sound judged it. In front of the camera parades a roster of first-rank artists, including Paco de Lucía, Enrique Morente, Manolo Sanlúcar, Joaquín Cortés, Tomatito, José Mercé and Mario Maya, making the film an almost encyclopaedic document of 1990s flamenco.

Iberia (2005): Albéniz set to dance

In Iberia (2005), Saura switches musical source and takes composer Isaac Albéniz’s suite of the same name as the basis for a series of choreographed pieces that blend flamenco, Spanish dance and elements of contemporary dance. The cast brings together dancers such as Sara Baras, Antonio Canales, José Antonio Ruiz and Aída Gómez, alongside musicians such as Manolo Sanlúcar, Gerardo Núñez and Jorge Pardo and cantaores Enrique Morente and his daughter Estrella Morente. The film won the Goya Award for Best Cinematography in 2006, again thanks to Vittorio Storaro’s work.

Flamenco, Flamenco (2010): the second choral look

Almost fifteen years after his first documentary on the genre, Saura returned to the same choral formula with Flamenco, Flamenco (2010), conceived as a sequel to that 1995 film but without seeking a narrative link between one number and the next, instead letting each performance build its own visual meaning independently. The cast again features Paco de Lucía, alongside Sara Baras, José Mercé, Estrella Morente, Manolo Sanlúcar, Miguel Poveda, Tomatito and Eva Yerbabuena, making it a second major choral document of early-21st-century flamenco, two decades after the first.

Where to start watching

For anyone approaching this filmography for the first time, the most sensible order is not necessarily chronological but one that moves from the most narrative to the most choral: start with Blood Wedding or Carmen, which still tell a recognisable story even through dance, then move on to El amor brujo and finish with the two choral documentaries, Flamenco and Iberia or Flamenco, Flamenco, with no need to follow a plot any longer. Watching the full trilogy before the documentaries also helps you recognise, in the latter, many of the same performers — starting with Antonio Gades and Cristina Hoyos — in a different context, that of pure performance with no fiction around it.