Flamenco (1995 film)

Flamenco is a 1995 Spanish documentary film directed by Carlos Saura with camerawork by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. The film is entirely musical and dancing vignettes, composed and photographed on a sound stage.

As a hall fills with performers, a narrator says that flamenco came from Andalucia, a mix of Greek psalms, Mozarabic dirges, Castillian ballads, Jewish laments, Gregorian chants, African rhythms, and Iranian and Romany melodies. The film presents thirteen rhythms of flamenco, each with song, guitar, and dance the uptempo bularas, a brooding farruca, an anguished martinete, and a satiric fandango de huelva. There are tangos, a taranta, alegras, siguiriyas, soles, a guajira of patrician women, a petenera about a sentence to death, villancicos, and a final rumba. Families present numbers, both festive and fierce. The camera and the other performers are the only audience.This film shows a world of flamencosinging, dancing and guitarplaying melded into an intense, enclosing and dramatic space. Song, guitar and dance are blended in inventive ways. They are performed sometimes a cappella, extending the guitar playing in subtle and intense solos accompanied often by handclapping or knuckles rapped on a table. These dancers have learned the technique but they make the flamenco their own. Here we see children dancing with their parents and grandparents demonstrating that flamenco imbues the spirit with a graceful power that does not age. At the end, we see the form of flamenco symbolically passed through a class of aspiring dancers. ........

Source: Wikipedia