Bodas de Sangre
Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada on June 5, 1898; he was the son of a liberal landowner and a teacher. In 1908 he moved to Granada, where he attended high school and studied music. In 1915 he started his studies in philosophy and law in the University of Granada, but he would soon abandon his legal studies for music, literature, art, and theatre. He met and befriended one of the most important musicians of the 20th century, Manuel de Falla.
In 1918 he published a prose book inspired on a trip through Castile titled Impresiones y paisajes. The following year, he transferred to Madrid. He lived in la "Residencia de Estudiantes," a cultural center for college students that was founded in 1910. One of the main goals of the "Residencia de Estudiantes" was to deepen university studies by creating an intellectual environment for students. The aim was to favor constant dialogue between science and arts as well as to act as a center for international vanguard movements. Lorca became there associated with a group of artists and intellectuals who later on would be known as Generación del 27, including Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Rafael Alberti.
Lorca's first theatrical production, El maleficio de la mariposa (The Butterfly's Evil Spell), opened in 1920, having to close a day later since it was a failure. He published his first collection of poems in 1921. The following years he got his degree in law and continued drawing and writing. In 1928 his Romancero Gitano (The Gypsy Ballads) made him famous. He suffered an emotional crisis that led him to move to New York in 1929, where he attended Columbia University. During the years he spent there, he came into contact with amateur theater groups and professional repertory companies. The profound impact New York had on him is reflected in the poetry collection titled Poeta en Nueva York (published posthumously). This collection was to be one of the main works of European surrealism.
Back in Spain, with the Republic having been proclaimed in April 1931, art and culture spread rapidly throughout the country. Artists and intellectuals became quite involved in this process. Lorca founded and directed "La Barraca" ("The Shack"), a university student theater company that was funded by the Ministry of Education to introduce modern and radical interpretations of classic Spanish dramas to all sorts of audiences in rural and remote areas of the country. From this moment on, Lorca felt deeply involved in the diffusion of culture among the poor. The years to follow he spent most of his time in theater. The first of his tragedies, Bodas de Sangre (1933) was based on a newspaper account of a bride who ran off with a lover on her wedding night. Some other tragedies worth mentioning would be Yerma (1934) and La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba, 1936). As for the farces, Lorca worked up several: La zapatera prodigiosa (The Prodigious Cobbler's Wife, 1930) and El amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín (The Love of Don Perlimplín with Belisa in Her Garden, 1933).
On July 18, 1936 Franco led a military uprising against the Republican government that would eventually result in the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Unfortunately, Federico García Lorca was murdered in Viznar, Granada in the early morning of August 19, 1936. His works were outlawed and burned, and his name forbidden. His plays and poems were not revived until the 1940s, and some of his works remained banned until as late as 1971. Lorca is considered the greatest Spanish poet and dramatist of the 20th Century.
The Tragedy: Federico García Lorca's Bodas de Sangre
Bodas de Sangre (1932) is the first part of the author's "Rural Trilogy," Yerma (1934) and La Casa de Bernarda Alba (1936) being the other two. The main common themes in these three are love, pride, passion and violent death.
Lorca's text reflects his effort to transform what would have been a folkloric melodrama into an authentic folk tragedy. The core of the tragedy lies in the treatment of the codes of honor and revenge which define social action in terms of primitive instincts, something vital to the Spanish cultural tradition. The code of honor was the main theme in hundreds of dramas during the Spanish Siglo de Oro (Spanish Golden Age), a period of flourishing in arts and literature in Spain.
The tragedy is divided in three acts and seven scenes. I consider it important to give a brief description of the synopsis since it is necessary to know the story very well in order to recognize what is happening in Saura's movie.
In Act 1, scene one, the Bridegroom asks his mother for a knife (the symbol for death) and we learn that two men in her family—her husband and a son— had died stabbed in a fight with men of the Félix family. She mentions they will ask for the Bride's hand on Sunday. A neighbor stops by talking about how people say that the Bride's former love is Leonardo—a Félix—now married to her cousin.
In the following scene, Leonardo's wife and Mother-in-Law sing a lullaby about a dying horse (the horse symbolizes passion). Leonardo's Wife, pregnant again, tells him of her cousin's wedding. Leonardo reacts strangely and then leaves.
In Act 1, scene 3, the Mother and the Bridegroom arrive at the Bride's home. The Father is really pleased with the match. The wedding is planned for the Bride's twenty-second birthday. The Bride seems to be serious and not too happy. Leonardo arrives riding a horse, only the Bride's servant notices.
Act 2, scene 1: The wedding day. Leonardo is the first guest to arrive. He accuses the Bride of pushing him to marry someone else, of rejecting him because he was poor. He insists that the Bride's feelings and his are too deep to fade. He tells the Servant not to be worried since he will not speak to the Bride again.
Act 2, scene 2: after the wedding everyone returns from the church for the party. The Bridegroom insists on dancing with the Bride, but she says she needs to rest in her room for a while. Leonardo's Wife announces that her husband and the Bride have left together on his horse. The Bridegroom goes off to chase them while his Mother urges him: "The hour of blood has come again."
Act 3, scene 1: The forest at night. Three woodcutters are convinced the couple will be found and they will die. The Moon (the moon symbolizes fecundity, life and death), hungry for blood shines intensely for Death, personalized as an old crone, who leads the Bridegroom. The Bride and Leonardo appear. Death returns to speak, while offstage the Bridegroom and Leonardo kill each other in a knife fight.
Act 3, scene 2: The bodies are carried out from the forest. The Wife will live in seclusion with her children. The Bride, though she is still a virgin, has lost her innocence. She begs her husband's Mother to give her a cruel death, but she refuses. The Bride will live, mourning as women do.
Bodas de Sangre (Spain, Carlos Saura, 1981)
Bodas de Sangre is the first part of a series of flamenco dance films. It is a very simple and clear adaptation of Garcia Lorca's drama. The film avoids any kind of convention. The author does so by presenting the film as an artistic process through rehearsals of Lorca's tragedy by Gades and his ballet company. Saura presents an interplay between film, ballet, literature, and flamenco music through the formal rhythm created with detailed close-ups of the dancers' bodies and observational wide-angles of the action, which unfolds on a bare stage in order to avoid theatricality.
Saura was afraid to make too local a movie in which people could only see stereotypes of Andalusia. He emphasized performance as such by purifying the dance elements to their essential form through the repetition, the preparation, the warming up, an uninterrupted dress rehearsal and the bare studio walls. He also gave the film a quotidian touch by showing the dancers preparing backstage: getting dressed and putting make up on as Gades describes his beginnings as a dancer.
The film is divided in two main sections: first, the arrival of Gades's dance company members at the hall where the rehearsal is going to take place, and second, the ballet itself with no interruptions or fancy settings. The first section was initially going to be a filler since the ballet was not long enough to be commercialized as a film. Far from being a filler, this first part is key as it brings into focus the transformation the dancers go through.
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