Authors
Brígida M. Pastor
Topics
Spanish Culture and IdentityHistory, Culture, and SocietyCinema History and CriticismResumo: para o cineasta espanhol Carlos Saura, o tema da guerra civil e suas profundas ressonâncias na arte e na sociedade espanholas refletem a devastadora repercussão artística e cultural da censura política. O filme de Saura, Ay Carmela ! (1990) , é uma crônica grosseira da memória histórica espanhola, da dignidade republicana e da tragédia social coletiva. O filme se plasma como a politíca e a arte, incompatíveis na essência, quando forçadamente unidos desembocam em tragédias conseqüentes para a sensibilidade moral humana.Palavras-chave:Carlos Saura, Ay Carmela, cinema, memória his tórica, Guerra Civilarlos Saura, a major force in the New Spanish Cinema of the 1960s and 70s, is one of the few Spanish directors whose films have been successfully distributed throughout the world. Saura grew up in the years that followed the Civil War and witnessed its effect on his country. He still recalls those times of hardship: "It is perhaps the period of my life that I remember most clearly: the songs from the war, the children's games, the bombings, the blackouts, the hunger, the dead..." (EDWARDS, 1995, p. 15) . He portrayed some of these memories in his film, La caza (1965) , though they were carefully disguised since censorship was still very active at that date. By the time ¡Ay, Carmela! was released in 1990, however, Saura was much freer to express his views fully and, in the intervening years, he had become able to view some aspects of the war in an almost farcical light. ¡Ay, Carmela! is based on the play by the Valencian writer José Sanchis Sinisterra and examines the role of the variety theatre in the context of the Spanish Civil War. Saura adapts the story to the cinematic medium and transfers the role of the performance into a mechanism, which ties the rest of the plot together.For Saura, the theme of the Civil War and its profound resonances within Spanish art and society is inevitably highly subjective -after all, the government's systematic policy of censorship (EDWARDS, 1995, p. 15) was perhaps the most artistically and culturally devastating repercussion. ¡Ay, Carmela! is a historical film, set on the Aragonese war front in 1938. It was well received commercially, and the root of its appeal to modern viewers may be its treatment of preoccupations which can be considered constants within human experience: war and the tenuous balance between life and death, theatre, the deliberate infliction of human suffering -an homage to artistic integrity and human dignity.The film takes its title from a pro-Republican song which itself features at various points; yet rather than serving to politicise the film's narrative in an obtrusive way, the song has the effect of accentuating the human discourse. The plot centres on three variety performers: Paulino, his wife Carmela and their mute assistant Gustavete, who are first seen entertaining Republican troops, but who find themselves involved in a risible and tasteless parody of their original act, after they are captured in the nationalist zone and effectually forced to comply with the fascists' aesthetic predilections. They are then held along with other prisoners of war in a local school. It is here that they meet the Polish International Brigade, the allies of the republican troops, who are awaiting execution. The three variety artists are taken to meet a fascist Italian lieutenant, Ripamonte, who orders them to mount a show for the fascists, and forces Paulino to rework much of their act so that it complies with Ripamonte's ideas. Carmela, however, objects to the anti-republican nature of the show she is required to perform. Given this context, the film clearly comprises historical-political elements, yet interlaced within them are the concordant motifs of art and the "theatre of life" itself. It can be argued that the historical context of ¡Ay, Carmela!, the Spanish Civil War, is in fact incidental, peripheral to the occasion of the characters' response.
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PublishedJan 1, 2006
TypeArticle
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