SPECIAL FEATURE. ENRIQUE MORENTE, PREMIERE OF THE FILM
‘MORENTE. EL BARBERO DE PICASSO’
(Cubist) portrait of a cantaor
Silvia Calado/ Flamenco-world.com. Madrid, April 8th, 2011
There is a scene in ‘Morente. El barbero de Picasso’ which, according to the film’s director, Emilio Ruiz Barrachina, and surely according to any sensitive spectator, is decisive. Enrique Morente is in a rehearsal, wearing a white shirt with a skull consisting of icons of tiny shoes, and he is explaining to his musicians how to apply abstraction to a soleá, how to make a soleá with rests… That’s to say, how his overflowing creative machinery was set into motion. And there are many more special clips which make up this audiovisual collage, a film which the Granada-born cantaor had “recorded as if it were a wedding, as if the audience believed they were the ones who were making it… like standing before the sketches of the ‘Guernica’”. Images and sensations intertwine without any apparent order in the film. But with a clear purpose, according to Estrella Morente: “What he sought was emotion through his art”.
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Estrella Morente, premiere of the film at Museo Reina Sofía
(Photo Daniel Muñoz) |
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The painful circumstances in which the film comes out, scarcely three months after his death, emphasize the emotion which it already contains in itself. Yesterday it was presented to the press at the Auditorio 400 of the Reina Sofía Museum. Just that setting was already affecting. Not so long ago on that same stage, Enrique Morente held the live premiere of his album ‘Pablo de Málaga’. And the film, whose underlying theme is the friendship between Picasso and his barber Eugenio Arias, ends with Morente singing before the painting ‘Guernica’, a scene which was shot hardly a few days before he died. The director explains that “he had a fixation with that painting and what he wanted was to go and shout in front of the ‘Guernica’… he shouted and only at the end did he sing por seguiriyas”. He called it ‘Seguiriya del Reina Sofía’.
Another thing he didn’t want to leave out of the movie was ‘Ángel caído’, a spine-tingling song by Antonio Vega - inspired by Van Gogh - which he had sung at some of his last concerts (the one at Suma Flamenca 2010 and the one at Casa de América, for example), but not in the ones that are recorded by Barrachina, which are the ones at Buitrago de Lozoya in the setting of the same Madrilenian festival (which had to be suspended due to rain) and the very inspired one at the Liceo in Barcelona, which opened the 2nd Catalunya Flamenco Art Series 2010. And the solution was to get the recording straight from CATA Studios which he did together with Argentinean pianist Federico Lechner. The emotion brims over on the big screen…
Estrella Morente and Emilio Ruiz Barrachina. Premiere of the film at Museo Reina Sofía (Photo Daniel Muñoz) |
Besides the music, Enrique Morente’s words are in the film. There aren’t many, since the director says that the camera intimidated him, but there are enough to synthesize his philosophy of life and his concept of art. For example, he relates how he had “different phases as a cantaor, but the feeling is still the same”. And he also speaks about how after becoming aware of the world, of social injustice, of the dictatorship in Spain… he sealed a firm commitment to the defense of human rights, “but in a nonpartisan way: I support people, not ideologies”.
And besides the music (the soundtrack will soon be released) and the words, according to Barrachina, there are “the regards”. Following them in the film - which premiered last week at the Málaga Film Festival and which will be shown, besides at cinemas in Spain, in Shanghai, Havana, London, New York and Buenos Aires, among other cities - you understand how he communicated so much with his musicians as well as with his family. Proof of it is the scene in which he sings with his three children - Estrella, Soleá and Quique - at El Bañuelo in Granada. And nearly more so, the stroll he takes with Estrella around the neighborhood where he was born, El Albaicín. The director recalls that everything was recorded naturally, nearly casually, hence the members of the technical crew appear every once in a while, that a telephone interview was recorded in which he refers to his wife Aurora Carbonell ‘La Pelota’ with immense affection and that you see when he tests the echo of his voice with Estrella at an old Arab well.
The presence of his elder daughter is special. And she herself made that known following the showing of the film which, of course, she can’t see. She says that she got involved in the project as soon as he told her that he was in it: “My father was a transparent person; at home he always shared with us what he was doing and he was always working on three or four projects at the same time, all of which were really interesting”. And one day she got home, and there he was with Barrachina sketching out what would then be his last will and testament as an artist, Enrique Morente’s last work.
Frames from 'Morente. El barbero de Picasso' |
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