Bailes boleros y flamencos en los primeros cortometrajes mudos. Narrativas y arquetipos sobre "lo español" en los albores del siglo XX

Abstract

The article locates and catalogues a corpus of 37 early cinema recordings (1894-1910) containing Spanish bolero and flamenco dances. These silent movies were recorded at universal exhibitions, or as a result of theatrical dramatizations, parodies and fiction stories, and are now in the archives of the Library of Congress, Gaumont-Pathé, Pathé and Frères Lumière collections and the Huntley Films Archive. An analysis of the contents of these archives demonstrate the potential of pioneering filmography as a documentary source for the construction and reproduction of national clichés. We consider two coexisting narratives in these early records: Testimonial to dance as artistic expression and the identity discourse of "Spanishness" through the bodily disposition and environmental elements of the frames. The representation of the Hispanic archetype shows that early cinema was a continuist route of transmission of the aesthetic, psychological and moral images of the "espagnolade" for which ethnicity and gender operated as substrata that became clichés in a peripheral and fascinating Spanish culture.