El mito de Carmen: exotismo, romanticismo e identidad

Abstract

This article proposes an itineray by the different adaptations from Merimée's Carmen, recognized in the entire world like the romantic representation of the ideal of Hispanic women. The text emphasizes the almost antihistorical continuity of the myth, the emphasis of the identity elements, that oppose the progress and the endemic underdevelopment. If in its origin Carmen revealed the foreign look, at the moment its reproduction is incumbent on almost exclusively to self-complacents native creations, that have not yet taken advantage from the knowledge of Spanish reality to recreate a more critical version.

How ‘Carmen’ became a flamenco doll. Andalusian women and Spanish folklore in films featuring tourists (1905–1975)

“…And the cinematic reworkings of the myth became innumerable, because of what Hernández (2008) has called 'romantic stubbornness'. See, in this respect, the exhaustive works of Perriam & Davies, 2005;Davies & Powrie, 2006;Powrie, Babington, Davies, &Perriam, 2007, andat national level, those of Medrano García, 1990;Vera & Meléndez, 2008or Guarinos, 2010 give just a few examples. Our analysis introduces a new variable into the equation, insofar as it incorporates the various reinterpretations of the myth of 'Carmen' for tourists in the films of the period 1905-1975, a period that begins with the emergence of the first Spanish and European tourist boards and that culminates with a point of inflection after the end of Francoism and its centralised tourist management in Spain.…”