Minutes

July 24, 2001

 

-Professor Reimer talked about the test

-We then discussed the movie, Carmen, and the questions (here is a list of questions and the answers accumulated from the discussion in class)

 

Questions

 

1.      Describe as closely as you can the music and visuals from the opening credits until after Antonio finishes talking with the musicians and singer (about first five minutes).

2.      Discuss the relationship between the following scenes: (1) (a) Antonio is telling Carmen not to let Christina dominate her and tries to get her to be more forceful by counting out the rhythm.  and (b) Antonio is dancing for Carmen when she comes on the stage and counts out the rhythm for him. (2) (a) Carmen introduces her husband to Antonio.  And (b) Carmen's husband and Antonio are playing cards.

3.      Directors often reprise images found early in a film with those appearing later.  2.1a above is an example of an image being reprised in 1b.  Can you locate other examples? Another way to look at this question would be to ask yourself if later images seem to be reflections of earlier ones?

4.      Spanish literature often revolves around two topoi (metaphors); (1) all the world's a stage and (2) the shifting line between reality and fantasy (reality and dream).  Discuss how Saura develops these ideas in the movie.

5.      Carmen can be seen as both a documentary of the rehearsals for a staged ballet of the story of Carmen and as a cinematic fiction of the same story.  How does Saura keep documentation separate from fictional narrative?  How does he blend him?  At what exact moment does fiction first merge with documentation?

6.      What is your understanding of how the movie ends. 

 

Answers

 

  1. Series of pictures showing what the movie was about.  The music follows with a beat.  It then shows dancers in the dance room.  Everything is one shot.  The music was about crying so it was almost foreshadowing.  The pictures on the walls were older prints.  The clothing in the pictures was older as well.  19th Century Romanticism was evident.  The women in the movie were dressed up resembling gypsies.  The first opera the ballet is based on comes from late nineteenth France.  The As with most opera, it was intended for an upper middle class audience and the paintings on the curtain suggest this.  That is, they depict Spanish Gypsies as the French bourgeoisie might imagine them.  The people in this movie were dressed in Spanish style.  The movie is also based on Prosper Merimee’s early nineteenth century novel Carmen and we hear one character, Antonio, quoting from this work.  Paco played the flamenco guitar.  The music was almost dueling for a while, the French opera and the Spanish style.  The dancers had flamenco type rhythms with their hands and their feet.  Everything in the movie was as if we were documenting flamenco type dancing.
  2.  

·        (A.) The importance of the two scenes demonstrated the importance of feelings in dance.  The roles reverse and show when Carmen becomes in control of her destiny as a dancer.  The camera moves in the same fashion, back and forth, to recreate the same movements.

·        (B.) Antonio is not playing cards.  Jose is playing cards with Carmen, the character’s husband in the play.  The man in the play was dressed identically to Carmen’s “real” husband who was introduced to Antonio before.  Carmen’s husband is “King of the Gypsy’s” and he fights Antonio because of the card game.  The character in the movie playing Carmen’s real husband was also a criminal.

  1. Other repeated scenes- Antonio is standing in front of a mirror and he imagines Carmen coming around him.  She had previously come around him before in a similar fashion.  Carmen also uses a substitute dance partner in Antonio’s spot.  She later uses a substitute lover in Antonio’s spot.
  2. Everything is always dealing with a stage throughout the entire movie.  This is because the story itself takes place on a stage.  Reality and fantasy is confused in the movie because Carmen has the same name on and off the stage.
  3. Several people disagreed on whether or not Antonio killed Carmen for real.
  4. Antonio was mad and he acted out of jealousy.  The people that were a part of the play were ignoring what was going on because they were acting out their parts in the play.  This is probably why they did not see what was going on in real life.

 

-We then watched clips of other versions of Carmen and compared and contrasted those versions with the one that we had watched.

 

In one clip that we watched from a Hollywood director, Carmen is dressed in an older costume and we can assume that the director took a conventional advancement to the story of Carmen.  We discussed in class that this clip did not show any blood in the death scenes, and we talked about the foreshadowing of the black cat walking across the screen.  We also noticed that in this clip nobody watches them like in the other clips.

 

In the next clip that we watched with Carmen Jones, the music changes from a kind of opera like sound to a more modern sound.  In this movie the actors are African-American and they have modernized names.  Joe, Jose, strangled Carmen in the death scene instead of stabbing her.  A man watches the entire time and he does not do anything to stop Joe from killing Carmen.