Stone, Rob

About the author: Dr. Rob Stone directs screen studies in the Media and Communications Department of the University of Wales, Swansea. He specializes in Spanish, Basque and European cinema, on which he has published numerous articles, and is the author of Spanish Cinema (Longman, 2002) and co-editor of The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (Wallflower, 2005).

Flamenco Tradition in the Works of Federico Lorca and Carlos Saura: The Wounded Throat

2004 0-7734-6429-8
This study explores the meaning and importance of flamenco in the works of two of the most important and influential figures in twentieth-century Spanish culture, the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca and the film-maker Carlos Saura. Lorca and Saura shared a fascination for flamenco as a medium for the existential ideology of the marginalized and disenfranchised and this work evaluates the development of these themes through a close, contextual study of their works, which are linked explicitly by Saura’s film adaptation of Lorca’s Bodas de sangre and, more profoundly, by their use of flamenco to express ideas of sexual and political marginalization in pre- and post-Francoist Spain respectively. The study demonstrates that an understanding of the symbolism, visual style, characters, themes and performance system of flamenco is key to a greater understanding of the social, sexual, political and existential themes in the works of Lorca and Saura, and that this in turn allows for an original and revealing analysis of the evolution of flamenco and the development of modern Spain.