Carlos Saura’s Carmen: Hybridity and the Inescapable Cliché

Andrés Lema-Hincapié

Carlos Saura’s Carmen (1983) is posited in this chapter as a hybrid work that attempts to challenge Carmen as cliché but fails. After discussing hybridity as a cultural concept, the chapter argues that Saura does not simply retell the story but offers it as a form of intertexuality with both Bizet’s opera—in the juxtaposition of flamenco music with the opera score—and Mérimée’s novella as Andalusian travelogue. In this way, too, Saura transfers the story out of its traditionally rural Andalusian setting, so that his version offers us a context of contemporary Madrid. But the tendency of the story to cliché—thus petrifying both Carmen and her context—acts here as a force that ultimately constrains both Saura as director and Antonio Gades as choreographer. Nonetheless, Carmen is not totally lost to the force of the stereotype, and the chapter concludes with examples of Saura’s attempt to critique the cliché as a sort of last, desperate stand against it.

Andalusia Cliché Hybridity Intertextuality National Identity (Spanish) Saura, Carlos: Carmen

Carlos Saura’s film Carmen (1983) is a child of uncertain parentage. Rather than deliver a straight adaptation, the filmmaker has created a fusion of elements from diverse cultural traditions: the Romantic, from Mérimée’s novella; the musical, from Bizet’s comic opera; and the flamenco, with its voluptuous song, dance and Gypsy resonances. This fusion is both the film’s genius and its downfall. Saura appropriates these disparate and derivative components and sets them in unexpected coordinates—cinematic, choreographic, and diegetic— achieving a richness and a dissonance that did not exist before. This allows the filmmaker a fuller palette of languages and milieux: those of the cinema, of Antonio Gades, one of the great figures in Spanish dancing and flamenco, and of ‘the fictional content of a narrative world’ (Brooker 1999: 169). Though the setting is purposely ambiguous, the story probably unfolds in the Madrid of the 1980s. It moves along two interweaving narrative threads: one thread documents the rehearsals of a ballet company that is adapting Bizet’s opera for the stage; the second follows the lives of certain of the dancers. 152 Andrés Lema-Hincapié

The confluence of the elements that the various traditions provide, and of the specific features of Saura’s cinematic art, give the film its hybrid character. This hybridization redefines, in a less than flattering manner, the myth of Carmen. The film’s critical impetus, though timid, comes from its self-conscious treatment of Carmen’s character as cliché. In fact, the entire film can be seen as a study of the concepts of hybridization and cliché at work. Although Néstor García Canclini describes hybridization as a mix of ‘lo culto, lo popular y lo masivo’ (the learned, the popular, and the mass-consumed) (García Canclini 1990: 15), this narrow definition is inadequate to the study of Saura’s film. For hybridization is also the result of relocating pre-existing elements within new co- ordinates. In this sense we are following Tiphaine Samoyault, for whom the hybrid reshapes (‘déforme’) by various means such as substitution, inversion, and collage (Samoyault 2001: 177-178). For Samoyault the hybrid’s use in art is a response to the already known (‘déjà connu’)—which here takes on the meaning of the cliché. The culturally fecund hybrid, dedicated ‘à reconfigurer les éléments du monde’ (to reconfiguring the elements of the world) opposes the repetitive and regressive nature of the cultural representations, that is, the cliché, replacing them with ‘le bouleversement infiniment plus dérangeant du nouveau ou du renouveau’ (the infinitely more bothersome unsettling of the new or renewed) (185-186). Charles Stewart’s article ‘Syncretism and Its Synonyms: Reflections on Cultural Mixture’ is especially pertinent to the concept of hybridization. According to Stewart, many cultural theorists and anthropologists have used syncretism, hybridization, creolization, synthesis, and mestizaje (despite these concepts’ less than virtuous colonialist pasts) to debunk the notion of culture as something ‘too stable, bounded, and homogeneous’ (Stewart 1999: 40). According to Stewart, by means of the aforementioned concepts we become aware that culture is essentially a mixture, and that this mixture occurs within a frame of reference that is at once social, political, and historical (57). At this point I depart from Stewart, who sees hybridization as a function of interrelated cultures. The concept could be better explained, in terms both more neutral and more precise, as a mixture that is more intra- than intercultural, thereby underscoring its botanical and zoological origins. How, then, is hybridization, as an intracultural phenomenon, expressed in Saura’s Carmen? From the opening frame of the movie, we are in hybrid situations. There is, first of all, an intersecting of arts. Saura’s camera