Director: David Casals Roma
Writer: David Casals Roma
Cast: Clara Mingueza
Running time: 1hr 26mins
A big call for anyone making a history documentary is whether to have a narrative voice to shape the film. And, if you go for that option, whether you use a purely spoken, off screen, narration or whether you provide an on-screen presenter. The problem with the latter approach is that often the ego of the narrator takes over the whole movie. Even experienced commissioners, such as the UK’s BBC, ended up choosing personality historians or superannuated politicians wearing pink or lime green trousers that shriek Me! Me! at the camera and invariably make the resulting film unwatchable.
David Casals Roma, in The Voice of Thaïs, employs an on-screen narrator to thread the movie together but in a daring and innovative move they use an actor to play the part of a historian who presents the results of an exercise in historical research. The actor is a young woman, Clara Mingueza.
We are informed that Mingueza is an actor in the movie’s opening shots. Mingueza tells us against a black backdrop with wisps of smoke drifting up to the top of the screen that:
An actor’s fame lasts the same as a smoke whirl…you’ll probably forget my name…but some images will stay in your memory.
Casals Roma got it bang on – after finishing watching the movie – yes, I had to look up the actor’s name for this review. And, yes, many of the images from The Voice of Thaïs will indeed stay in my memory.
To end the introduction, Casals Roma gives us a series of still photographs – Mingueza as a toddler and then various images of them as a child actor and as a musician– the sequence then morphs into film of the Mingueza of now, an adult woman dressed in leotards, performing a ballet routine.
The camera then cuts to bright sunshine and Mingueza in street clothes with daysack playing the part of investigative historian – think earnest graduate student. Mingueza introduces us to the subject of the movie – the life and work of Elena Jordi.
We learn from Mingueza that Elena Jordi was the nom de guerre of Montserrat Casals Baque a Catalan woman born in the 1880s who became a renowned actor, theatre director, and vaudeville singer in the burgeoning arts scene of Barcelona in the 1900s through to the 1920s. Jordi is celebrated as being the first female Spanish film director.
The presenter’s first port of call is one of Barcelona’s cemeteries which somewhat poignantly looks out over a shipping container depot. Mingueza is on a mission to find Jordi’s gravestone. Casals Roman deploys two detective fiction devices to give impetus to the basic story of Jordi’s life and works. It turns out that Jordi’s grave is missing the memorial stone – we see Mingueza grilling the boss of the cemetery as to why this is so. Mingueza commissions a new stone. The commission gives Casals Roma the opportunity of showing us the cutting and inscribing of the new memorial. The sequence is beautifully filmed – the precision power tools have grace as well as power and the images of their workings somehow asks us to reflect on an intimation of mortality.
Later on in the movie, the second device comes into play. We learn that all copies of the film that Jordi directed have been lost and Mingueza sets out to find a copy. By showing us Mingueza’s quest, Casals Roma takes the opportunity to outline the early history of Spanish cinema and to place it in a global context. We are also asked to think about contingency and the survival of works of art. And the quest is certainly global – at its furthest extremity we find ourselves in Dawson’s Creek, Alaska where one of the great troves of cinema archaeology was unearthed. The proprietor of the gold rush town’s cinema had left a pile of unwanted film reels in, bizarrely, an abandoned swimming pool to await rediscovery.
Casals Roma’s script is deft and elegant throughout the movie, but it seems to reach another level when it addresses cinema and the making of film. There are so many lapidary statements but the one for me that truly resonated was:
The paradox of cinema. We need light to make films and darkness to see them.
The title of the lost film of Jordi is The Tears of Thaïs – it was an adaptationof a novel that took fin de siècle Europe by storm. The book is by Anatole France – an author who is pretty neglected nowadays. If after watching the movie, you want to check out Jordi’s and France’s world further, The Tears of Thaïs might be a bit hard going but the Anatole France novel that still resonates and sparkles in 2024 is France’s timeless meditation on the French Revolution: The Gods Will Have Blood (Les Dieux Ont Soif).
Apart from the detective fiction devices, Casals Roma uses all the conventional techniques of documentary cinema to tell Jordi’s life story, and these are superbly achieved. We are shown a wide range of talking heads – academics, including Jordi’s biographer, members of Jordi’s family, and the one I enjoyed perhaps most, the sardonic director of Barcelona cemeteries. The talking heads sequences are sharply edited, there is no drift – each one drives the narrative line effectively.
I particularly enjoyed the shots of archive documents. For instance, a census register, or a newspaper review of one of Jordi’s theatrical performances are shown on screen as the researchers found them – this gives them an immediacy and power and involves the viewer in the nitty gritty of the process of historical research.
The range of the research that Casals Roma and their team undertook is monumental. They manage to track down audio recordings of Jordi singing and footage of contemporary film of theatre productions and the street life of Barcelona from the 1910s. The archive material is skilfully edited and leaves the viewer with a feel for the exuberance of the times. To hear so much of the music of the time is a delight and the excerpts blend in well with the movie’s subtle and atmospheric score – fine work from Cristina Barcelo and Tristan Eckerson.
The work on Jordi’s early life in Cercs, a coal mining town in the mountains above Barcelona is particularly well done. The found footage of coal miners at work is breathtaking and immediate – the sequence where an injured or dead miner is carried from the darkness of the mine into the sunlight of the living certainly hit your reviewer hard. The attention to detail in the presentation is commendable – one minor sequence caught my eye and revealed how much care had gone into the production. We see a black and white still of the main street of Cercs taken when Jordi was living, then this almost imperceptibly morphs into colour footage of the same view as seen now – wonderfully effected.
Reflecting on the scale of Casals Roma’s achievement, after watching The Voice of Thaïs, I noted that this is a movie about someone I had never heard of working mainly in a genre, vaudeville, that I am not especially interested in – yet I was inexorably drawn into Jordi’s world. I realised that that the power of Casals Roma’s work lay in their drawing out universal implications from the particularities of Jordi’s life and work.
Along the way, the director draws our attention to some of the key historical moments of 20th century Spain. There is a portrayal of the embryonic late capitalism of Barcelona in the early part of the century, and the placement of its development in a pan-European context. We learn that during the First World War, Barcelona took off as hedonistic pleasure ground for the rich – just across the border from France and at peace – an oasis of conspicuous consumption based on, in the words of one of the talking heads – prostitution, cocaine, and gambling. The rich are always with us.
To make us of the Covid generation shiver in recognition, we also learn of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 that left millions of people dead, and delayed the post-war economic recovery. And then we are walked through the sad suppression of the liberal arts under the Franco dictatorship, which attempted to destroy the legacy of artists like Jordi – necessitating certain books and films to be hidden from the police. This also led to a subsequent attack on regionalism, and the use of the Catalan language – the language Jordi sung and acted in.
In Casals Roma’s thorough and wide-ranging investigation, I did note one surprising omission. Jordi lived until 1945 – yet effectively the film takes her story no further than her leaving Barcelona to live in Madrid in the 1920s. The only reference to her Madrid life is the weirdly mundane reference that she provided for one of her daughters by setting her up running a dry-cleaning store. The omission means that we the viewers cannot fully place Jordi in the great traumas that wracked twentieth century Spanish society – the Civil War and the establishment of the fascist dictatorship. It is all very odd and left your reviewer curious as to what Jordi’s thoughts on the Franco regime might have actually been. Or, maybe the director was purposely leaving this stage in Jordi’s life blank as a metaphor for the collective amnesia of Spanish society, and the repression of memories of the experience of living under fascism.
That one lacuna aside, Casals Roma and the team have produced a piece of cinema of great power, and they have set a fine example for Indy filmmakers on how to work in the history documentary genre – a stunning achievement.
In closing, I should note that Clara Mingueza’s performance demonstrates what a fine actor she is. That’s not a common thing to point out in a documentary. The part seems to have been a dream job – I should think the chance to be a maestro of the violin and then, in a magic moment near the end of the movie, to actually become Elena Jordi must have been supremely satisfying. A young actor with immense potential – for the future, I guarantee I will not forget their name.