The analysis of five different Spanish screen adaptations of Carmen by Prosper Mérimée reveals how these films, made in different periods, reflect cultural and political changes, dominant ideologies ...and changing fashions and fantasies. In Spanish film adaptations Carmen has many faces. She is considered to be an icon of españolada, at the same time she is a proud Gypsy pretending to be a Basque, a rebel desiring freedom above all else, yet another incarnation of femme fatale, but also a converted sinner – pious and in love with a soldier, and not with her own independence. On-screen references to Carmen, often dressed in ironic quotation marks and appearing on the margins of – it would appear – unrelated stories are also interesting.
Prosper Mérimée's depiction of Corsica as an anachronistic and primitive society in Colomba (1840) relied significantly on the authors evocation of one of the island's oldest musico-poetic ...practices—the improvisation of funeral laments by female singers in Corsica's villages. Intimately connected to feuding and the practice of vendetta, this distinctly feminine medium of mourning is given voice by the character Colomba, whose spontaneous lamentations are admired by islanders but condemned by French authorities and her Europeanized brother. My discussion will show how the novel sets the oral/vocal practice of women's lamentation in fatal conflict with a French post-Enlightenment culture dominated by the written word, depicting the female voice as a subversive force. To understand what is at stake in this competition I draw out similarities between Colomba and Germaine de Staël's Corinne, Italy (1807), which similarly highlights the tension between feminized, oral forms of expression and the written word.
<!CDATAThe figure of Carmen has emerged as a cipher for the unfettered female artist. Dance historian and performance theorist Ninotchka Bennahum shows us Carmen as embodied historical archive, a ...figure through which we come to understand the promises and dangers of nomadic, transnational identity, and the immanence of performance as an expanded historical methodology. Bennahum traces the genealogy of the female Gypsy presence in her iconic operatic role from her genesis in the ancient Mediterranean world, her emergence as flamenco artist in the architectural spaces of Islamic Spain, her persistent manifestation in Picasso, and her contemporary relevance on stage. This many-layered geography of the Gypsy dancer provides the book with its unique nonlinear form that opens new pathways to reading performance and writing history. Includes rare archival photographs of Gypsy artists.>
