¡Ay, Carmela!, 1990
A prevailing thread that continues to weave through Carlos Saura's aesthetically fluid, articulate, and refreshingly (re)inventive cinema is in his instinctual acuity to capture society's moral landscape - invariably transfiguring and adapting conventional film form in unexpected, often groundbreaking ways that, in their bracing novelty, also becomes a refracted, secondary reflection of their culturally rooted contemporaneity. It is within this creative aesthetic of oblique, yet incisive social observation that Saura's audacious, deceptively whimsical, and excoriating transformation of civil war as grotesque farce in ¡Ay, Carmela! seems especially prescient in its depiction of human frailty, cultural rupture, and the absurdity of war. Adapted from the play by Spanish dramatist, José Sanchís Sinisterra, the film chronicles a few fateful days in the lives of traveling performers (a malleable profession that is also explored in Theo Angelopoulos' The Travelling Players, Carmela (Carmen Maura) and Paulino (Andrés Pajares) who, along with their psychologically traumatized mute apprentice Gustavete (Gabino Diego), perform their bawdy, nostalgically sentimental, and overtly propagandist variety show before a motley (and implicitly grassroots) cadre of partisan fighters along Republican strongholds on the Aragonese front. Seeking to escape the austerity and chaos of life in the front lines, the trio impulsively decides to hit the road and take their act to Valencia - a flight to seemingly greener pastures that is soon derailed when the night obscured and sleep deprived performers awaken the next morning to the sight of Nationalist soldiers who immediately detain them and confiscate their incendiary collection of theatrical props deemed sympathetic to the Republican cause. Resigned to a life in the detention camp as prisoners of war, the performers soon find their collective fate hinging with the favor of a theater director turned Fascist officer, Lt. Ripamonte (Maurizio De Razza) who enlists them to organize a variety show program that will serve as a fitting demonstration of Nationalist ideals and sovereignty. Prefiguring Emir Kusturica's idiosyncratically irreverent film on the breakup of Yugoslavia, Underground, ¡Ay, Carmela! delicately - and eloquently - straddles the precarious, seemingly intransectable bounds between comedy and tragedy, mockery and pathos in its wry, yet poignant depiction of the trauma of national rupture as a darkly comic burlesque. At the root of Saura's sobering, cautionary satire is the sense of reckless, instinctual self-preservation, egoism, and ideological indifference embodied by the all-too-obliging Paulino - an allegorical cultural complacency that has not only led to a self-inflicted fractured nation, but also enabled the institution of a repressive regime under the guise of maintaining order and upholding moral values (note the similar social criticism that characterizes Ritwik Ghatak's impassioned expositions on the moral culpability of the Bengali people for the tragedy of the Partition). It is the unrealized toll of resigned complicity and spiritual inertia that is inevitably reflected in the jarring tonal shift of the film's indelible and haunting denouement - the breaking of silence that paradoxically condemns and liberates the performers, transforming their roles from impotent, peripheral witnesses to the integral moral conscience of a rended and foundering people.
This “historical amnesia” (Carr) became the influence of Saura‟s 1990 film, ¡Ay, Carmela! Staged in the years of the Civil War, the film is the story of three Republican variety
show actors who are captured by the Nationalist forces. Upon their capture, they lie to the Nationalist officers and claim to be supporters of the Nationalist cause. The officers then force the actors, Carmela, Paulino, and Gustavete, to perform a variety show for the Nationalist troops as well as prisoners from international brigades. As the three actors perform a humiliating satire of the Republican army, Carmela refuses to continue betraying the Republican cause and mocking the prisoners who cannot understand the performance as they do not speak Spanish. She begins to sing a song of the Republican army, “Ay, Carmela,” with the prisoners and is shot and killed by one of the Nationalist soldiers.
Through this depiction, Saura uses these three characters to represent the Republican voice. At the beginning of the film the actors perform for a Republican audience, and Saura uses a combination of close-up camera shots, bright lighting, and nonuniform staging to portray the Republican side as the side of the people, showing a strong camaraderie among the soldiers and other members of the audience. However, once the actors are captured, Paulino, Carmela‟s lover, becomes completely submissive to the will of the Nationalist officers, and surrenders the voices of the three actors for the sake of protecting their lives. He agrees to perform a show for the Nationalist soldiers, who are presented in the audience as very rigid and uniform in a manner that characterizes the loss of individuality that Saura believes they represent. The performance for the Nationalist troops is rigid and tense; as Carmela struggles to perform a show that she believes is crude and wrong. The contrast of these two performances by Saura makes a blatant political statement intended to remind the audience that the Republican army was fighting for the people, and that their history has been convoluted and disregarded in postmodern Spain. Paulino‟s acquiescence represents the attitude Saura feels the Spanish people have displayed in the years since the Civil War. His abandonment of artistic freedom and the Republican cause demonstrate
Saura‟s argument that the history of Spain needs to be reexamined so that the truth can be exposed.
The youthful character of this film is the third actor, Gustavete, who is a young man who loses his speech after witnessing a traumatic event of the war. He uses a chalkboard to communicate to other characters throughout the film until Carmela‟s death, when he regains his voice. Saura uses Gustavete as a symbol of a generation that did not have a voice during the War, but who must serve as the voice of the people in the future. At the end of the film, Gustavete leaves his chalkboard on Carmela‟s grave, symbolizing that he will become the new voice of the Republic. Through this symbolic gesture, Saura relays the message that the new generation of Spain must recover the Republican history and ensure that this story is not lost again. The story of these three actors in ¡Ay, Carmela! serves a microcosm for the loss of voice that occurred for the Republicans during the war and in the subsequent forty years. This film served to remind the Spanish people of their history and became an important part of the beginning of a continuing movement to discover the true history of these lost years.
Through Saura‟s evolution as a film writer and director, the influence of Spanish history on Spanish society and the individual can be seen. His films serve as a poignant reminder that history is ingrained in the present, and that future generations have the responsibility to uncover the lost portions of Spanish history. For Spain, this is an especially crucial message because, as historian Raymond Carr rightfully states,
“Spaniards, gratefully or unwillingly, learnt to forget about the past because historical amnesia was an unarticulated price of democratic change…The price of the transition to democracy was that the Francoists have not had to answer for their destruction of democracy and their forty-year persecution of its defenders” (282).
If both Belle Epoque and Butterfly's Tongue recreate romanticised worlds, Ay Carmela! presents a different image of Spain altogether. Set in 1938, when the republic looked defeated, Carmela and her compatriots are performers in a republican theatre company who are captured by Franco's troops and faced with the dilemma of whether to perform before a group of fascist soldiers.
Saura uses the situation to present a meditation on questions dealing with artistic and cultural freedom: how much is it possible to compromise in the face of censorship and dictatorial control? What do you do in the face of inevitable doom? These are undoubtedly questions of specific relevance to those who struggled to make films under the dictatorship, but they also raise questions about the here and now, and indicate how the civil war is visited to comment on the concerns of the present.
CLASS DISCUSSION NOTES:
1. Compare 2 audiences from first and last scenes (see handout “preguntas de discusión).
2. Given 2 different audiences, do Carmela and Paulino change their act according to the audience? How?
3. Artistic freedom. Is it normal for artists to change their act according to audience? Why do Carmela and Paulino do it? What would you do in the same situation? How does Paulino react to Ripamonte’s offer to perform for the Nationalist troops?
4. Paulino as symbol of Spanish people during dictatorship. Passive, no real resistance to Franco. As long as order is restored and you don’t kill us, we’ll go along with your ideas/government.
5. What is Carmela a symbol of? Republic. Both die as result of Civil War, both represent freedom and compassion.
6. Gustavete? Voice of the ideals and virtues of the Republic after Carmela dies. Symbolizes Spanish people of today who have the responsibility to speak up for freedom and compassion and equality, the values of the Republic. To prevent them from being forgotten and/or from fascist ideas from erasing them again. (Mensaje del director)