ABSTRACT
Clean is the word for Carlos Saura's latest feature film, Flamenco. Its voicing and imaging of flamenco artistry offer a squeaky clean restyling of the flamenco tradition. Flamenco appears in Andalusia in the south of Spain in the mid-nineteenth century as a result of the confluence of communities, religions, and cultures that gave rise to a new style of music. For most of the past hundred and fifty years, flamenco music has meant, first and foremost, flamenco song. Flamenco men have generally come off as superordinately sensitive people. Women have also sung cante, and sung it well. Indeed, the woman's voice may well be the soul of flamenco. Viewers must remember that while flamenco music has been celebrated in bars, on stages, in streets and in homes, it has rarely if ever been presented in a train station, and never with such visual elegance.
