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Editor's Note: We are pleased to be able to share this masterful multi-disciplinary outline used by Dr. Bensusan as course content for his online classes. Guy, with effortless grace, wove together art, music, history, and culture, covering a sequence of a hundred years. The rich panorama of societal change provided depth and substance for his comprehensive Humanities Studies. The material presents a wonderful model for online (and on campus) teaching.

CARMEN AND HER UPDATES:
AN INTRODUCTION

Guy Bensusan

The basic story of Carmen and José is that in Spain's northern mountains near the French border, a young and unworldly man from a good family of minor nobility lived with his mother. This Don José, while studying for the priesthood, got into a fight over a game and killed his opponent. He fled, enlisted in the army and then began a promising career in Seville, a major garrison far to the south. He met the gypsy temptress Carmen, who flirted and fascinated until he lost all sense of his family and professional responsibilities. Breaking army rules, getting ever deeper into trouble, he killed an officer and fled to the mountains with Carmen, joining her bandit friends in thievery and smuggling.

He then killed Black García, Carmen's original husband, and took charge of the smuggler band so effectively that government officials posted a big reward for his capture. But Carmen he could not take over: she simply refused to be ruled. They argued, fought, and when he beat her in exasperation, she ran off to her bullfighter friend, Lucas. Risking certain capture, José followed. When neither threats nor pleadings worked, he killed her with García's knife, and then surrendered to be executed for his many crimes.

This elemental nucleus has evoked endless variations. They are found in literature, verse, opera, instrumental music, vocal music, theater, dance, motion pictures, staged musicals, filmed opera and ballet, and community plays. Carmen and José have appeared in movie cartoons, comic strips, and slapstick vignettes by Jack Benny, Fred Allen, The Honeymooners and Lucille Ball, as well as longer parodies by Spike Jones, Stan Freeberg, Monty Python and Benny Hill. They and the well-known operatic music have been the frameworks for countless television advertisements for automobiles, breakfast cereals, appliances and other consumer products.

There are social-comment Carmens, political Carmens, cultural-diversity Carmens, pornographic Carmens, voluptuous vampy Carmens, disturbed Carmens, spacey Carments, old-fashioned Carmens, modern Carmens, multi-level Carmens, surreal Carmens, deconstructed Carmens, and expurgated Carmens for children of varying shades of innocence. Regardless of their nature, however, they all share two basic features: José always kills Carmen in the final act, and the authors telling the story are always male. It is past time for a change!

One Carmen is an all-Black almost-minstrel show. Another uses a Flamenco dance frame and setting. A recent spectacular motion picture is an outdoor extravaganza, magnificent with soft Andalusian and Goya colors, filmed on location in one of Spain's historic southwestern countryside and town, replete with its small bullring. In contrast, a tense, somber theater production uses a minimal cast, minimal orchestra, and a closed-in stage set focusing on the dehumanization that resuslts from grinding poverty. Another exploits a manipulative female in a New Wave display of clever filming techniques, camera angles, mind-jolting edits, and similar visual devices, commenting brazenly on nature, culture and art.

There are Classy Cabaret Carmens and International Ballroom Dance Carmens, exaggerating the male-female roles. The l988 Olympics publicized skaters Debbie Thomas and Katerina Witt as "the Dueling Carmens," while the sequel with Gold Medalists Katerina Witt and Bryan Boitano was called "Carmen on Ice," filmed in Seville anticipating the 1992 Quincentennial. With today's fascination for ice skating, the Carmen singles and the Carmen-José doubles portrayals are presented to a wide array of Tango, Paso Doble, Rock and Country-Western music.

These Carmens exist over and above the continuous operatic stagings: Carmen is clearly the most popular opera ever written, judged by frequency of presentation, multi-national acclaim and constantly favorable reviews and commentary. The story of Carmen, the tragedy of José, or maybe the joint tragic situation, carries a potent message for audiences of varied generations everywhere. Despite her violent, inevitable death in the final moments, and regardless of the worldwide growing objection to this abuse of woman, Carmen lives. She remains alive and well in today's art forms; and where Carmen captivates, will a José not be near?

Prosper Merimee's Carmen.

While one might make a case that Eve, Lilith or Delilah were "earlier Carmens," the original Carmen story appeared in 1845 by the French author, Prosper Merimee, who claimed to have earlier heard a Spanish legend from a noblewoman he knew in Madrid. Writing a short novel, Merimee introduces us to the interesting, cavalier activities of a learned, likeable French scholar traveling in Spain. He narrates amusing anecdotes and describes his meetings with bandit José, who in turn recounts his troubles with gypsy Carmen and her many lovers, including Lucas, a minor hero of the Andalusian bullring. The scholar also dallied dangerously with Carmen, who steals his heirloom watch and otherwise treats him shabbily.

However, our knowledge of and information about Carmen is all second hand: all from the mouths of men, or, in the case of Carmen's spoken words recorded on paper, from the pen of the male author, Prosper Merimee. We are caught in the same difficulty that we have in knowing Eve -- since the witnesses are not female, neither is the point of view. Might not a courtroom judge today disallow all of such testimony as hearsay.

Merimee's story is solid Nineteenth Century Tragic Romanticism. For setting he uses the rustic color of rural Andalusia -- a land familiar to Frenchmen whose forefathers fought pagan Moslems and the powerful armies of Spain's wealthy Hapsburg Kings. Later, French soldiers supported a member of their Bourbon family when he became King Philip V of Spain. At the turn of the nineteenth century, France's population heard countless war stories told by veterans of Napoleon's Peninsular War (1808-1813). Those military men spoke of seductive Gypsy women, perhaps fondly and longingly? Is Carmen perhaps a French man's locker-room story? Or was Carmen packaged and marketed as an Exotic, Foreign, Seductive, Culturally-Diverse Charmer, the type so admired by the Nineteenth Century Romantics?

Merimee's scholar is an interesting protagonist: urbane, courageous, a gentleman of reason, observing details objectively, displaying good manners, and projecting intelligent, logical, sensible foresight, sympathy and wisdom. How ennobling may it have been for French men to perceive themselves portrayed in this fashion? Merimee ridicules the incompetence shown by government and military officials, along with their greed. He is also fascinated by gypsy culture, telling us of their colorful proverbs, hostility to central authority, zeal for freedom and the open road. One might naturally expect the use of such images in a national society beginning to notice that it lived in the soot, urban crush and pollution of the early industrial revolution.

The Petipa Ballet. Merimee's novel met with instant acclaim -- so much so that the noted choreographer Marius Petipa immediately created a concert ballet out of the story. It was called Carmen et son torero (Carmen and her bullfighter) and was presented in Madrid that same year, 1845. It was a success overnight, and its showy costumes, settings and choreography is rather well-described in most major reference works on the history of ballet. However, there is irony in Petipa's success -- in Bourbon and urban Spain it was in vogue to accept French cultural enactments as the artistic model, in spite of the fact that Merimee's verbal portrait of Spain was less than flattering.

Georges Bizet's Carmen.

Thirty years later, Carmen was recreated by Georges Bizet into an operatic form which was performed in Paris in 1875. The story-line and dialogue departed from Merimee's story in several ways, being written under the vastly different social-political conditions of the Franco-Prussian war and for the more overtly monetary purposes of the libretto writers, Meilhac and Halevy. Bizet composed melodies which are among the best known songs in operatic literature, making Carmen the most popular of operas. It is common for people not to know Merimee and to assume Bizet's Carmen is the original story!

The opera altered the story theme by adding two significant characters, both serving as dynamic contrasts to Carmen and José. Opposing the "unholy" Mary of Carmen is pure, virginal, motherly Mary, Micaela -- added to satisfy the operatic need for a soprano as well as to portray idealized moral qualities of womanhood. Micaela intensifies awareness of José's pathetic choices, magnifying the dramatic struggle. Bullfighter Escamillo provides the gallant, wealthy, adored hero: an ideal figure making young girl's hearts palpitate. Poor mediocre José never has a chance: he lacks the wealth, the aura, the brass, the style -- one eventually wonders what Carmen could possibly have seen to admire in José! But that is the way the author wrote it, revealing contemporaneous intentions.

The initial performance of the Opera in 1875 was not a smashing triumph, and Bizet died disappointed some three months later. Still, Carmen soon became a regular offering at the opera house. Thirty-seven performances were given in Paris that first season, with many famous singers such as Celestine Galli-Marie and Minnie Hauk later achieving great acclaim during the remainder of the century. The opera was introduced into England in 1878 and into the USA later that year, and Carmen was highly popular long before World War One.

Early Motion Pictures.

When silent motion pictures appeared, Carmen not only began to reach a far wider public than those who went to the opera house, but also became a much more intimate and meaningful character, since camera techniques brought the drama and actor's expressions so much closer to the spectator. The first Carmen film appears to have been made in France in 1909. A Spanish version appeared in 1910, with another was produced in 1914. Hollywood created two entries in 1913, the first with Marguerite Snow and the other with Marion Leonard.

In 1915 came Cecil B. Demille's Paramount production starring opera singer and actress, Geraldine Farrar. Fox Studios countered simultaneously with Raoul Walsh directing "the Vampire Woman," Theda Bara -- ironically, the version by the singer was adapted from the original novel, while Vampy Theda slinked about the operatic staging on silent film! One may read about audience response to these two films in the New York Times film review, dated November l, 1915 (See the essay called, Reviewing the Reviews). The critic was certainly not impressed with movies as a vehicle for serious art! Nor did he appreciate the local theater musicians' un-operatic effort to provide some sound.

Charlie Chaplin. Despite critics, audiences adored the new Carmens. Small wonder that Charlie Chaplin filmed his four-reeler burlesque of the Farrar and Bara films in 1916 with Edna Purviance as the lead and himself as José. It is melodramatic fun to watch as Don José (called Darn Hosiery), sent to capture the smugglers, turns out to be un-bribeable and is given Carmen as a booby prize. He fumblingly falls for her, but she scorns him and heads for town. Hosiery follows and watches her take up with an enormous, gluttonous Escamillo. Ranting and raging, Hosiery gets Carmen alone, stabs her and then, himself. At that moment Escamillo walks in, but seeing the corpses, wanders off in search of other fun. We feel some sorrow, but they both bounce back to life -- Hosiery shows us the rubber dagger, and tragedy ends as farce.

After Chaplin, Carmens proliferate. In 1918, the German director, Ernst Lubitsch, cast Pola Negri, the African American actress who had climbed to stardom in Europe after leaving the United States. Pola's sensuous dancing achieved enormous continental success in Western Europe before the film toured the USA in 1921 under the title, Gypsy Love. French, Spanish, and English directors provided more Carmens in the 1920's, and in Hollywood, Raoul Walsh turned from his earlier opera to an original version of the Merimee novel: The Loves of Carmen (1927), starring Dolores del Rio as a zealous, creatively resourceful and very daringly-devilish Carmen for that date.

Early "Talkies." "Talkies" (meaning added sound track), developed at the end of the 1920's. The first sound version of Bizet's Carmen was filmed in England in 1932, though it was in black and white and the reproduction of the operatic voices was not realistic by modern standards. In Germany during 1933, Lotte Reiniger directed a short film combining the opera music with visual silhouettes. As pantomime, it received favorable response. Other Carmens were produced in France and Spain, but I haven't seen them.

Florian Rey's Andalusian Nights. In 1938 Florian Rey presented the lovely actress, Imperio Argentina, in his Buenos Aires production of Noche Andaluz (Andalusian Nights). The tone and theme clearly echoed the traditional if paradoxical lament of the extremely popular Argentine tango. One can easily imagine José, like Carlos Gardel, leaning against a lamp-post on the corner, with a long cigarette hanging from his lips, and singing such lyrics as:

"Oh, women are beasts: evil, lusting, deceitful, hateful, grasping, treasonable; impatiently waiting to bankrupt and destroy some innocent fellow. A man should place trust only in his mother."

This was certainly not the way in which women were normally portrayed in motion pictures made in the United States at that time, even if we consider Scarlet O'Hara and the Wicked Witch of the West.

Interestingly, on the eve of the invasion of Poland, this Argentine film was modified in Germany into Andalusiche Nachte, and later readapted by Italian and French directors in 1942 and 1943 -- at the height of German and Italian military defeats in North Africa, Sicily and Stalingrad. Here the directors maintain the formula of flawed, tragic hero: falling because he lacks weapons for defending his feelings against "innate animalistic wiles of a street-smart, sexy seductress." Shades of Evil Eve?

Neither mother, nor "pure maiden," nor his own love of honor can prevent complete disaster: in more recent words, José cannot fight Mother Nature, either with ideals or theories. Rey's Argentine thesis is perhaps a political allegory, personifying the hopelessness of Germany, Italy and Japan in trying to fulfill their long-range, politico-military global conquest goals against more numerous, more versatile opponents who had access to a wider and more reliable pool of resources during World War Two.

Carmen Jones.

In contrast, Carmen became a Broadway musical with societal and old-timey vaudeville minstrel flavor. In 1943 the war was going well for the allies, even though it was not yet won. Billy Rose, collaborating with Oscar Hammerstein II, reframed the opera into a rural Southern Negro adventure. Carmen Jones was a busty, hip-swinging good-time gal with a job in a parachute factory, even if she didn't seem patriotically dedicated to the war effort. Air Force Corporal Joe had demonstrated potential and was given a chance to be officer and fighter pilot, which would move him socially into a fraternity restricted to white men.

His sweet-Micaela girl-friend is called Cindy Lou: she is cute, petite, rural and uneducated. The bullfighter rival was now Husky Miller, a heavyweight boxing champion, though he could easily have been a jazz musician. There is plenty of patriotic, "win the war, fight like hell, don't quit until you hear the bell" rhetoric in the lyrics. The music was Bizet's, with jive-talk mannerisms creating an inaccurate, unconvincing and unflattering "down-home" image.

Despite an excellent performance by the "All Black Cast" (a "famous first" at the time), the underlying message to the white Broadway audience turned Carmen Jones into a cultural distortion: this was a white middle-class idealized image of what Blacks might turn out to be "if they would only try to better themselves." Given the changes which have occurred in American society since World War II, it is much easier to discuss such racial or racist matters in 1994 than it was in 1943 -- and not only because of "political correctness."

As a musical theater hit, it was first recorded on 78's by Decca, issued in 1952 as an LP (MCA-2054). It was another "famous first" when Otto Preminger turned it into a successful motion picture with Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Olga James, Joe Adams, Brock Peters, Pearl Bailey and Diahann Carroll. It won several awards for best musical, despite dubbed operatic voices. It was film of the year, and Dorothy Dandridge barely lost the Best Actress Oscar to Grace Kelly.

This Carmen is unlike others. She flirts with the sergeant and later with Husky, but she really seems to care for Joe -- cleaning mud from his uniform, brushing his shoes, straightening his belt and shirt, preparing a home-cooked meal, and refraining from going out with other fellows while he's in the guardhouse! More than sinister, she seems reckless and immature during the seduction scene at her home. Nor is she Gypsy: just a sexy Southern Black girl with urban manners, enjoying "good-timing" in the big city, in this case Chicago. She doesn't seem to believe in the fate symbols which her aunt tells her not to defy. No cultural differences exist between Carmen and Joe here.

Intra-Black hostilities are implied through casting -- light-colored, socially-mobile Joe is harassed by his sergeant, who is far darker. Had they been the same degree of "dark," the unclear motives might have more easily been seen as a matter of personalities and career opportunities. Instead, they seem to be related to matters of color, since the sergeant might have envied Joe being awarded a chance to go to flying school, while he, the veteran was not. The visual truth of a Black officer exists in the film: a timely casting choice, since the motion picture came out at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. During the Korean War, Black military officers served -- there is more realism in the 1954 movie than the 1943 Broadway version since Black officers were not in World War II.

Social mobility through sports is highlighted visually and through dialogue -- one thinks of Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson. The focus is on violence, with long scenes devoted to Black boxers pounding each other in the ring while the audience screams for blood, something not emphasized in the Broadway show. Moreover, Joe doesn't stab Carmen, he chokes her -- and in his final lament asks to be hanged high on a tree! One might suggest that hanging and garrotting (which Don José was entitled to as nobleman) are parallel, but for the general Anglo-American audience, probably unfamiliar with Merimee's novel, the allusion probably is more akin to "lynchings." Carmen Jones is a collector's item -- hard to find and rumored to be withdrawn from circulation at the request of the NAACP. Rumor says the remake is in "rap."

The Loves of Carmen.

The first post-war "Carmen" was in 1946 with Vivian Romance's lusty characterization of a carefree, unprincipled seductress, in a non-singing role which had been dramatically adapted from the novel and filmed in Rome by Director Christian Jaque in 1946. The costumes and acting in this one were highly dramatic, "molto Italiano."

A similar portrayal was given two years later by flashy glamour queen, Rita Hayworth. The well-known Loves of Carmen was adapted from Merimee by Helen Deutsch, filmed in Technicolor, directed by Charles Vidor for Columbia Pictures, and featured a young Glenn Ford as the innocent youth about to be transformed into a killer. His metamorphosis is foreshadowed early in the introduction with the Genesis allusion to forbidden fruit -- not apples but oranges, stolen by the "evil woman," then presented by her to the naive man who foolishly accepted them.

When the owner cries "thief," Carmen and José run away. The treatment is melodramatic, with flavors and trappings of a Western, so popular at that time: cavalry chase, stagecoach holdup, and multiple wanted-posters shown sequentially with ever-increasing reward amounts. We get homespun philosophy about good and evil, making proper choices, getting caught in vicious cycles, starting over in a new land, and having a sense of honor, right and wrong.

It fulfills public morality in the 1948 post-war era: outlaw José stabs the anti-societal Gypsy Carmen and is then shot by a soldier, a symbol of orderly society. Carmen is not the ideal needed in 1948, one who will be satisfied as a consumer-oriented housewife in expanding suburbia -- one instead wonders if she might have been a good wartime Rosita-the-Riveter.

As in Carmen Jones, red-haired Rita is not "true Gypsy:" maybe the US can't comprehend Gypsies since they do not exist here as they do in Spain and other parts of Europe. Rita talks about being one, but acts more like a pouty, moody, fun-loving, big-city woman in the United States. The apparel is also unrealistic -- Rita's sumptuous, colorful and frequent costume changes are highly Hollywood and out of place. Popular then, it evokes laughter now. Rita sings and dances -- but music and movements are Mexican; what did the movie public know of Spain in 1948? The Loves of Carmen contains excellent camera work, for which cinematographer William Snyder received an Oscar nomination. It is a wonderful film to use for teaching about film making.

Other Carmen Ballets: Ruth Page and Roland Petit.

Back at the concert hall, Carmen had again donned ballet slippers. At least two dance versions appeared during the l930's, including a modern one by the renowned Metropolitan Opera ballerina, Ruth Page. This was her first effort at a ballet from an opera, and others followed. Supported by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), her work was performed under the title of Guns and Castanets in Chicago in 1937.

A decade later dancer-choreographer Roland Petit, abandoning his classical training, began to develop post-war sensual patterns and movements with the Paris Opera Ballet. After founding his own Ballets de Paris in 1948, Petit created a gutsy Carmen around Merimee's story with Bizet's music, starring his wife, Zizi. In five unconventional scenes, it began with the tobacco factory fight. Soldier José separates the two women, asking Carmen for a date. They meet in the tavern, where Carmen is fighting off a would-be suitor. Getting impassioned, José carries her off to bed. The two wake up and plan a robbery, where José kills one of the victims, and the robbers drag him off to avoid being captured. Carmen then flirts with a bullfighter, enraging the possessive José, who ends her life. The show opened in London in 1949, ran four months and then five more in Paris and the US. Critics wrote, "satanic woman had again led innocent man to destruction!"

Interestingly, while audiences loved it, some critics complained that Bizet's perfect plot had been distorted. However, since Petit had worked with Merimee's story, critical reaction illustrates how deeply Bizet had created the standard that other productions were measured by. Various later versions of Petit's ballet used music from Sarasate's Carmen Suite. In 1980, a 44-minute video was released by KULTUR in France, and starred Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing the leading role along with Zizi Jeanmaire and the National Ballet of Marseilles.

The Alonso Ballet. The next major Carmen ballet creation was developed by Cuba's Alonso family. Choreographer, Alberto, had a younger brother, dancer Fernando, who married Alicia. All had been born about the time of World War I, had become well known in the ballet world by the thirties, with Alicia creating a successful "Giselle" in the United States. Deeply involved with both Cuba and the United States, and later developing the Ballet Nacional of Cuba after Castro's rise, both worked at developing a non-traditional Carmen who emphasized the pureness of spirit described by the Spaniard, García Lorca.

In 1966, Alberto created the Carmen Suite for Maya Plesitskaya at Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet. Alleged eroticism brought government complaints, but the debut was on April 20, 1967, contrasting an honest, sincere and free-spirited Carmen with an untrustworthy, ever-compromising, moody José -- a role reversal. Bizet music was adapted and modified for the Russian performances as well as the 1970's abbreviated version danced by Alicia Alonso in Cuba at age fifty. Alicia, as seen on a video released in 1986, gives a personal, feminine interpretation, dancing like a real woman, whereas Maya is more traditional and classic.

Italian Carmens. By the 1960's additional directions were visible. Up-to-date, sexy, pouty Carmens had appeared in the works of Italian directors Mario Scotese (Carmen Proibita) and Carmine Gallone (Carmen '63 or Carmen di Trastevere) -- though neither seems to have lasted long at the box office.

Carmen of Ronda. In contrast, a popular movie filmed on location in the spectacular cliff-edged town of Ronda in Southwestern Spain, gave a far different and highly Spanish story of the Gypsy girl. The context is Napoleon's occupation of Spain in 1807, with Spanish citizens rebelling against that invasion. José is a French soldier, while Carmen is a patriotic Spanish woman. Unlike Bizet, the lusty-busty-crusty schemer is Micaela, while Escamillo is a bullring star who has been given great freedom of movement by the French commander and can thus serve as courier for the rebels. José falls for Carmen, betrays his flag, and both get killed by French troops in the uprising. It is intriguing and evokes many questions about the original story Merimee might have been told in Spain.

"Looney Tunes." More important for US audiences were cartoons in the Porky Pig format with traditional comic pursuit involving Bugs Bunny as a toothy, flop-eared Carmen, replete with mantilla, fan, painted beauty mark and ridiculously long false eyelashes -- while the bull chased Elmer Fudd. Two of the offerings had punning titles, such as Carmen Get It (1963) and Carmen's Veranda (1964), a frolic on Brazil's singer-dancer, Carmen Miranda.

The Opera as Technicolor Film. The first major color film came in 1967, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Salzburg Festival production starring Grace Bumbry. This made the actual opera into a motion picture, altering its essence with camera work and making it more widely available. It added the exciting dimension of zoom lens, allowing the audience to see expressions on the faces of the singers more clearly. This step was an important technological event in that it began to blur the border between opera and film. Henceforth, the element of "the close-up" would be in the operatic vocabulary.

Carmen in the Buff. A more revealing approach came out in the same year as, Carmen, Baby. Radley Metzger, an American producer known for erotica, filmed a bisexually-explicit set of repetitions-variations at a small village on Yugoslavia's Adriatic coast. Carmen, played by young Uta Levka (resembling Rita Hayworth), is involved with crime, including the blackmail of tourists photographed in bed with whores. José is a jealous cop, willing to shoot Carmen's playmates, while Escamillo is a rock singer called "Baby Lucas," alluding to Merimee's bullfighter. There is no Bizet orchestration, only rock and roll. As Vincent Canby said in his New York Times review on October 7, l967, the Rialto Theater spectators were more interested in looking than listening. Despite substituting flesh for drama, the classy photography and setting are perhaps ironic commentary on sex-obsession!

The Big Six.

From 1983 and 1985 six new Carmens appeared from six different nations: France and the US in 1983, Italy and Spain in 1984, and Russia and England in 1985. All came out on video, marketed internationally by networks of book, tape and video sellers, made available to video rental shops, and televised over satellite and cable. The approaches, characterizations, character-conflict developments, socio-cultural settings, meanings and humanistic implications, to say nothing of the artistic and aesthetic values, are highly "Post-Modern."

Jean-Luc Godard. One was First Name, Carmen, directed by Frenchman Jean-Luc Godard, who first achieved renown as a revolutionary New Wave filmmaker in the 1950's, and continues his off-beat presentations in this later eighty-five minute work. He may even be poking fun of his own earlier movie-making here, since, under his own name, he assumes the role of Carmen's uncle. The character is that of an aging, unhappy former movie director who considers himself to be all washed up in the profession -- we get visual references through endless waves being "washed up" and "dissipating" on the shore.

Carmen convinces Uncle to join her in a new moviemaking venture, and he owns a beach house where much of the story's plotting and naked interplay will occur. Carmen poses as a filmmaker to disguise her criminal activities. She runs with several men who utter revolutionary cliches but act like greedy gangsters. José is a policeman named "Joséf." He appears early in the film with some gendarmes who ineptly interrupt Carmen's robbery. Joséf protects Carmen for no visible reason, driving off with her to Uncle's beach house. The two spend much sex time -- flesh scenes ping-ponged with the sight of endless ocean waves lapping at the beach -- truly a New Wave film!

Joséf shows he does not belong -- certainly not with police life. He has no ambition, drive or competence; his criminal comrades barely abide him and keep pushing him away despite Carmen's many efforts to bring him into the gang. And after her lust wears off, Carmen doesn't want him either. He persistently, petulantly pursues, pathetically obsessed with intercourse. Full of plot twists and often alluding to natural tides and flows, this neo-naturalistic display of the overwhelming urges of nature may be the underlying thesis.

The story line is unclear: it hops, moods change, there are unusual camera juxtapositions, startling edits, and many surprises. Is this an attempt to show life's incongruities? We hear Beethoven quartets, revolutionary and disquieting in contrast to the flowing beauty of Bizet's melodies. But this may be part of the deliberate statement on disharmony today. Allusions are made to Merimee and Bizet in music and word, but they are tangential to Godard's story. The movie is a reel maverick -- regarded as high art by some and a waste of film by others.

Peter Brook. The French-North American production, by director Peter Brook, La Tragedie de Carmen, opened in Paris in 1981 and New York in l983. Controversial for different reasons, it is a skeletal version of the opera, with a cast of seven -- José, Micaela, Carmen and Escamillo have singing roles, while Pastia, Zuñiga and García only dialogue. The music is Bizet's, but the orchestra has been pared to fifteen instruments. The total film length is only eighty-two minutes, or one-third of the time it takes to present the opera. Here is one objection: critics complain, "This is not Carmen; where is the beauty, the joy, the fun, the big crowd scenes, the full sound of the music? The characters are too complex and dismal, things are out of order, many adaptation liberties have been taken; artistic license without responsibility or sense of aesthetic value."

Brook may want the audience to concentrate on social or societal problems rather than personal, moral ones. As the title suggests, this is the tragedy of Carmen, not of José: indeed, it might be viewed as a tragedy for society as a whole. Carmen is not cast as a fun-loving gypsy, she is a prostitute who tries to make the best of her unfulfilled life by finding an escape from her situation: first with her original bondage with García, then through a gypsy marriage to José and finally by a relationship with Escamillo, who does not survive the bullfight.

Nor is Micaela lily white -- she is tough, slapping, kicking and brawling in the dirt when she must. José is NOT a promising young officer -- he is grubby, an ungenial soldier assigned to a remote, dead-end post: he angers fast, kills easily, and focuses on his own wants. Escamillo is no golden boy, either -- he is human, with lusts, postures and fears. It is only Pastia the Pimp, the criminal, manipulator, climber and people-user, who survives and keeps on climbing, leaving the audience wondering about Brook's message.

This is not a gay and pretty Carmen, it is a Carmen without Romanticism; it focuses on the real struggles of an uneducated woman who may only exist as the chattel of some man. Is that a relevant thesis for us to reflect on? Or perhaps it is a ghetto view, where human competition, economic pressures, hopelessness, complexity of vested interests and the weight of the traditional power structure all combine to keep people down in the dirt: homeless, unemployed, uneducated, victimized? The vision is timely, worth considering.

The film works well as art: it is thematically consistent. It starts in the dirt and ends there. It is filled with images and acts which mold our understanding during the singing of the arias, which have been put in a different sequence. Photography is excellent -- we are constantly aware of artistic repetitions and parallels. Blocking and framing are extremely tight, such as the tavern encounter between José and Escamillo and especially the disengagement of Carmen and José in the mirror during the last act. The characters are multi-dimensional and unusual; similar enough to traditional ones to be convincing, and unique enough to keep us aware that we are being led to consider new perspectives.

This Carmen was filmed with at least two different casts at Lincoln Center; they are often shown on the A & E television channel. While both are the same play, it is enlightening, even astonishing, to watch the subtle changes of implied meaning resulting from (1) varying the camera positions, (2) changing the amount of time and emphasis on specific pieces of business and prop usage, and (3) the altered personal responses one feels in looking at different faces and bodies.

Eva Sauvrova is an older Carmen, slowly losing hope for the future, having faith things will still work out for her. Helene Delavault is younger, more playful -- even ingenuous, she does what she must, but at Escamillo's death, gives up and goes to her execution almost as a suicide. Laurance Dale is a young, smiling, clean-shaven Don José who slowly learns the hard facts of life, but is not driven by the innate fury of Merimee's bandit character. Howard Hensel, on the other hand, seems sad and resigned to whatever fate is coming -- he never appears to have expected success at anything, he just goes on. It would be most interesting to be able to view these different casts in simultaneous or rapid sequential order. In 1994, however, both versions seem to be out-of-print.

Francesco Rosi. Yet another film is by the Italian director, Francesco Rosi, with the title, Bizet's Carmen. Filmed near Seville at splendid locations in the mountains as well as in the old town and bullring of Carmona (or Carmen's town), this outdoor epic stars Julia Migenes-Johnson and Plácido Domingo. This film-opera is two and a half hours long, thirty minutes less than the normal indoor performance. Not that much dialogue is cut -- rather, Rosi uses the overture and inter-act music to provide dramatic visual settings, or better said, setups, which anticipate clearly the conflict-conditions of the forthcoming scenes, the immediate characterizations, and a strong imagery consistent with the mood of that moment.

More than that, Rosi frames, positions and steers our thinking with those same filmic introductions. For instance, the first thing we are shown, even before music begins, is the right leg of a matador, followed by a contrasting shot of the red cape and sword, which become enveloped with a full shot of a bleeding bull. The beginning bullfight intensifies the final, Act Four bullfight -- or rather two fights, since José, dressed in black, confronts Carmen, dressed in red. The finale gives us two parallel killings in two different rings at the same time by cutting back and forth between them. Rosi cleverly uses our expectations, coupled with fine blocking, camera work and the sound track juxtapositions to maintain intensity, excitement and anticipation.

Rosi frequently presents overt visual juxtapositions which are not in the original opera. In the introduction, he shows bull-killing and the exaltation of the bullfighter, then moving directly to a Holy Week procession in old Seville which adulates the statue of a weeping Virgin -- two activities which in real life are in reverse order, but also artistically remind us here of the literal grief over death, as well as the images and symbols of the dual aspect of sacrifice and sorrow.

In Act two, we are first shown the sumptuous home of Escamillo in whose patio a high-class, lavishly costumed dance is presented as a performance for the bullfighter and his guests. Then we cut to the contrast of the gypsy camp, where uninhibited and earthy dance movements are dynamically different, further molding our split-level thinking about class differential and possible implications for Carmen in becoming attached to either of the two leading men.

One may object that Plácido Domingo is a bit old to be a dashing José and also perhaps a bit too tubby to inflame Carmen's passions. After all, this is film, not opera, so appearances count as well as voices. One may find Faith Esham's Micaela too sweet, too simple, and too pure to be believable. Julia's Carmen may be too happy and lacking in what is traditionally a somber moodiness of her fatalistic beliefs. And Ruggiero Raimondi may be too short to strut well even if he sits tall on his white horse, especially as filmed from below.

One may also protest the matter-of-fact way Rosi makes us conscious of the violence, manipulation and intimidation existing in male-female relationships. Still, the singing, acting, camera work, the visual allusion to the days of the happy Garden before "sex became a sin" are delightful. The ardent, fully-clothed seduction scene in Act Two is most memorable -- audiences simply squirm while viewing it; though numbed from nudity in televition and movies, the fully-clothed seduction appears far more sensual.

Carlos Saura.

The Spanish entry is called Carmen, by Carlos Saura. A fascinating integration of several arts, ideas, and values, it is "a story about a story within a story," making it hard for a viewer to know which parts are real, which are literary-artistic allusions and which are surreal fantasy. The film begins in a mirrored studio; dancer-director Antonio auditions "his" girls while seeking "the perfect Carmen." We are introduced to Spanish popular dance and Flamenco music when renowned Paco de Lucia, after hearing Bizet's Seguidilla, seemingly improvises a guitar rendition in a popular "jazz" Flamenco style called "Bulerias."

Likewise, Antonio is so enthralled by Paco's invention that he calls out to Cristina, his best dancer, and the two perform another apparent "improvisation," this time with the extemporized dance steps which introduce us to the multiple- interpretation layers of this story. Merimee, Bizet and current Spanish culture are closely interwoven in this film; but while it is helpful if one knows the first two sources in order to understand Saura's messages, adaptations and pointed social-surreal commentary, the film is so powerful that it stands on its own!

In the plot many things progress simultaneously, and even though the dialogue is in rapid, slang-ridden Andalusian Spanish, subtitles and especially the body language make the story clear -- or at least as clear as Saura seems to want it to be. Antonio finds a novice dancer named Carmen (played by Laura del Sol): immature, untrained, eager and willing, in whom Antonio perceives the fiery qualities of eyes, lips, body and spirit about which Merimee had written in 1845. A Pygmalion quality emerges in that creator Antonio alters his created Carmen and then tries to possess her, only to find that the reality did not turn out in the way his original illusion had been perceived.

Antonio asks his aging star, Cristina, to help Carmen become a fine dancer, which she unwillingly does, but then is knifed in a spectacular dance number (reminiscent of West Side Story -- or was it just a rehearsal and not the real enmity between leading lady and her ambitious understudy?) There are intriguing, emotion-manipulating reversals, as in our recognition that the young dancer with whom we had earlier sympathized suddenly becomes dominant: Carmen is now the man and Antonio the woman, with each character mouthing relevant dialogue while projecting the appropriate body language.

There are marvelous moments of fun (the mock bull fight) contrasted with the obsessive cane duel (where it is obvious Antonio no longer knows whether he is Antonio or José). Changes in pace and mood are sudden, electric. There are stunning, thought-provoking mirrors, lamps, lightings, reflections and shadows. Steps and styles of Flamenco dancing inform and educate, especially traditional "Sevillanas," a complex four-part structure danced in common culture by thirty million Spaniards who take lessons fervently -- similar to Country Swing.

The drama ends when Antonio (or is it José?) stabs Carmen three times with his switchblade (or did he only wish to stab her in his fantasy?). She falls dead, classic, off-stage: the camera pans left, showing no one had noticed. We are left to ask, "did she really die? Was Antonio exorcising her from his mind? Was the whole thing a male fantasy?" We don't know Saura's intent, but we won't soon forget the heart-pounding staccato music and dance.

Bolshoi's Maya.

The Russian film, Carmen Suite, features the Bolshoi Ballet with Maya Plesitskaya as Carmen in a modern dance style, utilizing Bizet's music, adapted and modified by Rodion Shchedrin. The forty-five minute rendition is unfortunately marred in the video's technical translation ("envelope" is wider but not as high), resulting in our occasionally losing the dancers off the edges of the screen. Set in a mock arena, with look-alike spectators and a uniformed judge sitting atop the surrounding wall, one is thus initially placed in a regimented society prepared to disapprove of any kind of social non-conformity. And Carmen does not conform, either in dress, movement, attitude or expression.

In contrast, José is compliant, neatly uniformed, goose-stepping to the magistrate's commands. Dancing about, Carmen slowly awakens him, turning his inhibited stiffness into fluid, intimate joy. Offered a mask (of social conformity?), Carmen rejects it, causing her arrest by the magistrate, who also desires her. José tries his best to take her to jail, and she is amusingly exasperating in her digressive and distractive non-compliance. After all, short of using threats or actual force, how does one make a spirited woman do something she does not want to do? One feels compassion for José, unable to solve his dilemma.

Escamillo, conversely, "floats" as he strides across the stage, adored by all. Soon we are shown Carmen caught in the visual triangle formed by the three men. The figure of fate, dressed in black, dances in to show us the predicted future. The four meet in the arena: Carmen and Fate (now the bull) dance alternatively with Escamillo and José in simultaneous-contrasting actions until Carmen is stabbed. She lovingly caresses her Jose's face before collapsing in death. One wonders if the ideology of the then socialist state was well served with images that seem to evoke more sympathy for José-Carmen than bullfighter-magistrate. That is my perception: maybe the Russian audience didn't see it that way.

Peter Hall and the Glyndebourne Opera.

Considering all the foregoing diversity, the English "Carmen" by Peter Hall and starring Maria Ewing is a quite traditional performance of Bizet's original work. Filmed at the rather small Glyndebourne theater, this three-hour performance is not a motion picture but rather a videotape of the performed opera. Gone are Rosi's fancy camera movements, spirals and zooms -- we occasionally are given extreme close-ups, but mostly are shown broad views in a box-like though versatile stage set.

We watch Sir Bernard Haitink and his baton while the orchestra plays overture and interludes. We listen to highly-trained operatic voices give us arias and choruses while singers essentially stand fast in their places rather than moving about and acting out, as in the other films. But then, one basic difference between opera and motion picture is that singing has priority over acting. Another is that while movies are young and open to innovation and technology, opera is highly bound by conventions accumulated over centuries. Consequently, the opera is here presented both in its entirety and in Bizet's intended order, accounting for the additional length as well as increased information and character development.

For instance, in the first act, the audience learns more about José's past, his mother's adopting of Micaela, Carmen's sly insinuations, as well as the fact that she initiates flirtation with José's commander, Zuñiga. Rosi had not shown us any of these. In Act Three, Carmen and her two gypsy friends sing enthusiastically about their forthcoming seduction of the customs officers so that the smugglers will be able to slip through the pass -- Rosi doesn't show us that, either.

This trio and dialogue is absent from all recent Carmen films: in this operatic version we get a more complex Carmen and a deeper anguish from José, as he points to the valley and talks about his dying mother still believing him to be honest, moral and reliable. Since many modern persons who "know Carmen" will have seen movies but not the Libretto or a full version of the Opera, it becomes apparent they cannot know the Carmen Bizet created, and therefore his apparent intent. Instead, they know the Carmens "adapted" by other directors.

Maria Ewing's Carmen (along with Rise Stevens'?) is perhaps the least likeable, the most diabolical -- she shows a moody, calculating coldness. Relationships are transactions, and it is much easier to sympathize with and have compassion for José's anger, frustration and desperation, despite his continuous need to make wrong choices. Costumes and sets are designed primarily in brown tones, perhaps suggesting the overall "ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust" theme? It is no surprise that Ewing's New York performance of Carmen drew rave reviews: it is a traditional Carmen fulfilling general expectations: the voluptuous seductress, the Old Testament epitome of the female-evil stereotype so many viewers demand.

Wendy Corbett and the illustrated Libretto.

Another interesting development occurred in 1987 -- an adjunct to opera in general, but still involving Carmen. The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, England, published a series of illustrated operatic libretti, including The Magic Flute, Madam Butterfly, and The Flying Dutchman. Carmen is by Wendy Corbett, with a "Classic Comics" quality since both lyrics and dialogue, in English translation, are given to the reader in the form and layout of colored cartoon strips.

It makes comprehension easy in our days of diminished reading abilities, and at the same time, provides one more Popular Art through which Carmen can be told. However, it is different from reading the libretto, the words written by the librettists in the 1870's. There, one creates one's own visual image of the respective characters, with mind's eye responding with mental pictures to the stimulus of the printed words.

Here, Wendy Corbett draws pictures for us, and we have our thinking pre-programmed with a young, pleasant face with blond hair for José, and a dark, rather hard-looking, leggy, full-breasted, not-terribly pretty Carmen with a very noticeable "beauty mark" near her eye. Micaela, in contrast, is also blond, has a pretty face and a winning smile, and whatever alluring sexual characteristics she might have are given no prominence. Escamillo, like Carmen, is also dark, with flashing eyes and slicked-back hair.

It raises interesting questions. Where is Bizet? Are these stereotypes? Are they racial or physical formulas which serve as shorthand symbols for personality types? Or are we being given Wendy Corbett's personal interpretation, her own visualizing of what she thinks are appropriate physical attributes to characterization synthesis? As usual, the "true" story line becomes subordinated both to the author's purpose and the requirements or imperatives of the art form.

More Recent Ballets.

Among newer Carmens also exist, the South African choreographer, John Cranko, who became Ballet director for Stuttgart and then Munich in the 1960's, established a fascinating focus on Carmen as a member of the rejected Gypsy minority and who sought her revenge on society, certainly a historical truth, if not a direct allusion to their extensive though less-well-known Gypsy "holocaust" genocide by Nazis in World War II.

Veteran dancer Ruth Page, whose "Carmen Ballet" debuted in Chicago in 1937 as "Guns and Castanets," reworked that ballet which then ran from 1959 until 1964. She created a performance with the Dance Theater of Harlem in 1976, showing clearly the possibilities of African-derived music. In 1990 she took it to Tulsa, Oklahoma, playing to a most appreciative audience. As yet, however, no film of any of her "Carmens" seems to have been released.

Operatic Adaptation to Spain's Civil War.

A recent adaptation by Frank Corsaro and the New York City Opera opened in August, 1990. Corsaro changed the setting: the context is no longer the Napoleonic invasion, but rather Spain's Civil War, where defeat of the legitimate Republican Government meant the rise to power of insurrectionist Fascists under Dictator Francisco Franco. However, in 1936 Seville was pro-Franco -- we have a lineup of rebel Fascists in control of the city and immediate surroundings, while Carmen is a Republican Loyalist, whose party holds control in most other places. The complicated turnabout is confusing.

In the original story by Merimee, the smugglers were not interested in overthrowing governments -- they merely wanted to avoid paying taxes. In this 1936 version the smugglers become gun-runners trying to get arms into the hands of the supporters of the legitimate Republicans who have been ousted. Carmen is therefore only an outlaw in the eyes of the Fascists -- themselves outlaws because of their revolt against a duly-elected government. José is a Fascist soldier who must arrest the weapon-smuggling Carmen, and who must desert his political cause to run off with Carmen after killing Zuñiga.

The question here becomes, "Have we more concern with political causation or with romance?" In older Carmens the answer is, "the romance," and the story focuses on love while José going AWOL seems only a tangent issue. But here, the balance is different -- there is a war from 1936 to 1939, and its veterans still live, even in the United States, which sent the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to Spain to help the Republicans. (In this one we are closer to the audience impact of Merimee's original novel in 1845, with Peninsular War veterans still alive.)

Carmen and José are political opponents; she is on the losing side, while he is originally with the winners and switches. When Micaela and Mother plead with José to return, is their anguish less that Carmen is evil and more that she is "the Republican enemy, the Communist enemy?" When José smuggles guns and ammunition has he not joined the enemy, turning his back on the Right Cause? There are similarities here with the Boshoi Ballet -- politics and love/lust.

Thus, when José kills Carmen at the finale, can his motives be perceived as the same way as more traditional versions? The historical adaptation is both interesting and useful, but not likely to reproduce the "same work in another place and time." An arts imperative exists, and also a historic and a location-context imperative. Adaptations and reframings will always be unique.

Carmen on Ice.

Another highly promoted version with a 1990 debut was "Carmen on Ice," filmed in 1989 in Seville, using portable rinks with artificial ice, and hiring local folk for the crowd scenes. The stars, who had all participated at the 1988 Winter Olympics "Dueling Carmens" at Calgary were Katarina Witt as Carmen, Brian Boitano as José, and Brian Orser as Escamillo.

However, with no Micaela, no García and only mini-roles for Pastia and Dancaire, one can guess that the story line would focus on the love triangle rather than contrasting female purity with sensuality or the struggle between smugglers and soldiers. Story-telling with ice skates makes the viewer rely on movements, gestures, possible symbols and acting ability of the skaters to create the characterization and character development.

Neither happens. The characters are two-dimensional, skating is uninspired, choreography is uncreative and the story of Carmen gets lost in the skates. José is a sad-sack with two emotions, anger and sadness. Even when he has it made with Carmen, he seems not to believe it himself, and therefore, how can we? Carmen and Escamillo skate, having neither personality nor character development. The final bullfight evokes laughter -- everything else has been on skates and in period costume -- but the bullring bit is live, "real" and now!

One scene is clever, well-choreographed, and encapsulates the theme of a competent woman unfortunately choosing a stupid man. When Zuñiga orders José to take Carmen to jail, José picks up a rope, ties her hands and starts to pull. The rope works both ways; she pulls back -- who is on the leash? The way it ends, Carmen escapes, José becomes entangled and Zuñiga demotes him.

While not plagiarised, director and choreographer must have watched many other films. One is repeatedly reminded of scenes in Peter Brook, Francesco Rosi and the Alonso Ballet. With so many differing styles, the whole thing never comes together. I felt this film was rushed to capitalize on the current mania for Spain, anticipating the 1992 Columbus Quincentennial.

Some Conclusions.

Many of these Carmens are commercially available. Based upon what has already been produced, there will certainly be many more, probably in many new and as-yet-unused art forms, as well as laser disc and interactive computer technologies. Older Carmens beget younger Carmens who beget newer Carmens. The arts interpret life and often serve as models upon which some people pattern their lives, which in turn serve as life-experience on which later artists will create new commentary, and so on.

Things may change as people learn that Carmen is always unjustly blamed for José's downfall and is always killed. Might we see Carmen avoid past fate and run off with a good-looking, well-heeled and non-abusive Escamillo as in A Fish Called Wanda? Or a counselled Carmen, with José rehabilitated for his anger and mother-fixation? Carmen and José could go to trial with both male and female attorneys. Carmen might teach sex education in schools, have to deal with multiculturality, or explore various religions in her afterlife. She could enlist and deal with sexual harassment. She could be an illegal alien, gay, get pregnant, or contract AIDS. These would push the social tragedy.

Carmen has significance. The interaction we perceive in Carmen, José and the others hits deep, emotionally, at karmic level. The evolution of our cultural conditions, historical past and written interpretation are vital to us in at least two ways. First, they are powerful, triggering visceral reactions:

1. to the circumstances of men and women,
2. to the problem of good versus evil,
3. to expected gender roles and behaviors,
4. to the complexity of love-sex-marriage-divorce,
5. to conditionings influencing our reactions,
6. to the responsible making of choices,
7. to the rights and responsibilities of humans, and
8. to the establishment of global principles for social justice.
9. to the tolerance and understanding of other races.

Second, the many artistic renderings of Carmen are a mirror of societal ideas and attitudes which have accumulated over a long, long time. As humans we are channeled by our past. What we believe, what we value, the way we structure our society and institutions as well as how we organize the various expressions of our beliefs and values are primarily inherited and conditioned phenomena; they are not new ideas and inventions created by us. They are passed down to us.

But things are not tranquil now. We are in flux, our society groans with immigration and internal migration, changing ethnic ratios, diversifying sexual orientations, increasingly revisionist politics, and an ever accelerating velocity of technological change.

We can and do change, we can and do modify, and since we have already reinterpreted, we can learn to reinterpret even more. More often, however, we take the easier path, perpetuating our inheritance without evaluating it, without examining whether we need or want to repeat yesterday's inequities.

Opera is a highly conservative art form, and in staging new productions we sometimes slavishly try to keep going back to the original and simply make the costumes fancier.

But while past concepts, beliefs, forms, images, messages, conditions, contradictions and dilemmas clearly have engulfed us, we are also influenced by what we have not been allowed to inherit because of past societal decisions and conditions.

As the children of past generations, our thinking and defining is at the mercy of what has been allowed to filter down to us, either through deliberate choice or inadvertence. Some past truths have been totally lost, while others have survived partially in spite of extraordinary societal efforts to destroy them.

Still, history is only a literature through which we try to retell what we want to remember about the past: the original writings are not sacred, despite what some people believe, and despite efforts to sanctify them. As humans we can change the way we interpret. History does not require that we perpetuate all of humankind's past habits. Perhaps Carmen and her many updates can well serve us as teacher and humanistic guide.

PS. We are clearly not done yet -- this chapter will have to be CONTINUED as more Carmens appear! Do YOU want to write one?