Dance and the Mediated Immersive Flux in Carlos Saura’s Musical Hybrids with Live Feed - Acta Universitatis Sapientiae

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 23 (2023) 160–175

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2023-0009

Abstract: Carlos Saura’s “pure musicals,” as he calls them, are highly based on the formal properties of the image and the expressive use of light in a minimalist scenic space. Although, they have not been declared screendance pieces (as per Rosenberg 2012), which conjoin rhythmic body movements with screen-based, technologically mediated methods of rendering, they are full-fledged screendance examples, being hybrid, symbiotic, and integral (Richard James Allen, 2006). This article concentrates on Saura’s musicals from 2005 onwards – Flamenco (1995), Iberia (2005), Fados (2007), Flamenco Flamenco (2010), Argentina (Zonda, folclore argentino, 2015) and Jota de Saura (2016) – particularly the immersive mediation operated through the use of live video feed as an intermedial sensorial device. Saura’s silky, glossy, and lustrous images form an optical-haptic continuum. The twofold bodies, the digital doubles and the flesh-and-bone act as inducers of crystallization in Gilles Deleuze’s perception of modern cinema (1985), inasmuch as they interact and alternate in a cinematic flux, forming a circuit. Thus, an image of a recorded stage performance enters into a relationship with cinema, a medium already endowed with reflective features, producing the crystallization of these screendance films in all their Saurian immersivenness and sensoriality.

Keywords: screendance, pure musicals, haptic perception, live video feed, sensoriality, Carlos Saura.