The choreography of longing: songs, screens and space in Carlos Saura’s Fados

Abstract

At the time of its release in 2007, Carlos Saura’s Fados was presented as the third in a trilogy of films about modern urban musics, following Flamenco (1995) and Tango (1998). Like those films, Fados is dedicated to a particular genre – the Portuguese music of the film’s title – and presented as a series of performances. Stylistically it is closer to Flamenco in that it dispenses with plot, narrative and characters (still important in Tango), opting instead to proceed via staged performances involving singers, instrumentalists and dancers. Like the earlier films the main ‘action’ is shot on a large sound stage which has been fitted with an assembly of partitions, screens, mirrors and theatre props to create a distinct space for each performance and to allow the interaction of live and pre-recorded material, the latter delivered via projection, still photography and recorded sound.