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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Carmencita Navarro does not merely dance—she detonates.
In the first reel, the camera glides across Andalusian rooflines until it discovers Adele Sandrock’s flamenco queen stamping out a soleá in a tavern so thick with cigar haze the very air seems to sweat. Each heel-click lands like a threat; each flick of her wrist cuts the cigarette smoke into ribbons. Director Thomas Hall—German by birth, Mediterranean by sensibility—frames her in chiaroscuro pools that recall Murnau, yet the choreography is hers alone. You can almost taste the acrid sweetness of burnt sugar drifting in from Marcellus’s cane fields beyond town, a premonition that the marriage contract signed by dawn will taste of molasses and gunpowder.
Marcellus—played by Hans Wassmann with the porcine languor of a man who believes the world owes him moisture—arrives in a white linen suit already stained at the armpits. His wedding gift is a necklace of Colombian emeralds so heavy Carmencita’s collarbones bruise. The ceremony itself is a silent montage: close-ups of candle wax hardening on the bride’s gloves, the groom’s ring forcing its way past her knuckle, a slave bell clanging somewhere off-screen. The film refuses us the comfort of intertitles; we read faces instead. Nielsen, eyes lacquered with defiance, lets us glimpse the exact instant when artistry calcifies into strategy.
Three reels later, the planter lies on a parquet floor, blood seeping into the geometric inlay like spilled claret on a chessboard. The murder weapon—a cane topped with a silver fox—becomes the film’s totem: it reappears in shadow, propped against confessionals, reflected in mirrors, until you suspect it is the true protagonist. Who swung it? Hall withholds certainty; we see only Carmencita’s gloved hand recoiling from the body, her mouth forming a silent O that might be horror or relief. The local guardia bursts in, uniforms the colour of dried saffron, and the narrative pivots from domestic noir to political thriller without pausing to exhale.
Prison corridors shot at Dutch angles squeeze the dancer’s silhouette into a diagonal slash of black lace. Enter Iván Petrovich as Colonel Ravel, a spy whose moustache is waxed so stiff it could pick a lock. He offers Carmencita a Faustian bargain: her life in exchange for coded naval ledgers that her late husband once transported inside rum barrels. She accepts, not from patriotism but from the instinct that stages and battlefields share the same footlights. What follows is a delirious middle act in which flamenco bars double as cryptography labs, castanets click out Morse, and every twirl of skirt might scatter state secrets across the floorboards.
Asta Nielsen, fifty but filmed at angles that shave a decade, performs the seguedilla with a ferocity that makes the earlier work of Salome look like a polite parlour recital. Her body is the text; close-ups of shoulder blades shifting beneath silk read like paragraphs of insurgent scripture. Compare this kinetic bravura to the static suffering of The Misfit Wife or the pastoral resignation of Qristine, and you realise how radically Hall weaponises movement itself.
The film’s visual grammar borrows equally from Expressionist woodcuts and from Toulouse-Lautrec’s absinthe posters. Cinematographer Gustave Preiss rigs mirrors in the cabaret so that a single gaslight multiplies into a lattice of amber orbs; Carmencita’s reflection fractures into twelve selves, none innocent. When she finally sleeps with Colonel Ravel to secure her escape route, the camera retreats behind a translucent bed-curtain painted with flamingos. We observe their union as silhouettes: two predators negotiating the terms of mutual digestion.
Yet espionage is a waltz whose partners swap mid-step. Alexander Granach, chewing scenery like it owes him interest, appears as Anselm the anarchist printer whose ink-stained fingers smell of turpentine and insurrection. He convinces Carmencita that Ravel plans to sink a passenger liner flying neutral colours. Suddenly her role shifts from courier to saboteur; she must steal back the very documents she once delivered. The plot’s clockwork tightens until every glance feels like a countdown.
The climax arrives in a bullring at dawn, emptied of spectators but haunted by the ghost of applause. Carmencita, wearing a traje de luces stripped of sequins—matador armour reduced to sackcloth—stands before a line of rifles. Hall intercuts her impending execution with flash-frames of her earlier triumphs: the first time she stamped her heel on the tablao, the moment she signed the marriage register, the second she felt the cane’s silver fox crack bone. The effect is not sentimental montage but forensic memory, evidence presented to an absent jury.
Salvation comes via a deus-ex-machina that feels earned because the film has trained us to expect betrayal: Anselm’s confederate, a boy soprano who once sold her cigarettes, steps forward with a reprieve signed by the republican governor. Rifles lower; smoke coils skyward like souls changing their mind. Carmencita walks out of the arena, past the boy who will himself be shot by nightfall, past the colonel already plotting another war. She does not look back; the camera refuses to follow. Instead, Hall ends on a freeze-frame of dust swirling where she stood—an after-image of a woman who learned to survive by dancing on the lip of catastrophe.
Nielsen’s flamenco is not dubbed; she spent six months in Sacromonte caves learning from gitanos who cared nothing for cinema. Watch her wrists rotate during the braceo: the motion originates in the shoulder socket, flows through ligaments trained since childhood, snaps at the metacarpal with the precision of a guillotine. Critics who compare her to the tragic resignation of Human Driftwood miss the point—her Carmencita is not driftwood but whirlpool, sucking every narrative plank into her spiral.
Hans Wassmann’s Marcellus dies twenty minutes in yet haunts the remainder; Hall superimposes his bloated profile onto plantation smokestacks, turning industrial soot into guilty after-shade. Iván Petrovich, usually typecast as silky aristocrat, here lets his uniform wear him; by the final reel the Colonel’s epaulettes hang like wilted lettuce, his moustache drooping with conspiracy fatigue.
The 2023 4K restoration by Deutsche Kinemathek reinstates the amber-and-teal tinting of the original distribution notes. Night sequences swim in sea-blue dye, while interiors glow with nicotine ochre. The bullring finale, once printed on nitrate so decayed that only silhouettes survived, now reveals individual riflemen’s faces—each a miniature essay on duty versus doubt. Compare this meticulous resurrection to the patchy survival of Buffalo e Bill, whose reels still bear scissor marks from provincial censors, and you grasp why archivists call Navarro a miracle of celluloid resurrection.
Although originally released with a Movietone synchronized score, most prints circulated mute. The restoration commissions a new accompaniment: flamenco guitar palpitates against timpani heartbeats, while a single female voice ullevates on the off-beat, echoing Carmencita’s inner monologue. The effect is not quaint ornament but spinal intrusion; the audience feels heels strike floorboards through sternum bone.
Shot in 1925, the film foreshadows the generational fractures that will detonate into civil war a decade later. Ravel’s plan to false-flag a passenger liner anticipates the strategies of Operation Ursula; Carmencita’s reprieve mirrors the brief hope of republican amnesty before Franco’s uprising. Hall, a leftist journalist turned filmmaker, embeds newsreel footage of dockworkers’ strikes behind cabaret scenes—subtle enough to pass Weimar censors, sharp enough to cut complacent skin.
Where The Show aestheticises decadence for its own sake, Navarro weaponises beauty as survival toolkit. Against the rural fatalism of The Squatter and the Clown, Hall proposes urban choreography—Seville’s alleyways as stage, politics as choreography. Even the gender subversions of Impossible Catherine feel polite beside Nielsen’s carnal dynamite.
The subplot involving a forged passport disappears midway, suggesting either studio truncation or lost reels. A comic-relief drunk, played by the usually menacing Granach in dual role, tonally punctures the film’s otherwise merciless trajectory. And the final freeze-frame, while poetic, denies us the dancer’s future—does she flee to Lisbon, to Mexico, to the grave? Hall’s refusal to answer is principled yet mildly maddening.
Die Tänzerin Navarro is less a relic than a gauntlet thrown at modern filmmakers who confuse frenetic cutting with urgency. Hall teaches that true suspense lives in sinew, in the moment before a heel strikes floor, before a rifle bolt slides home. Nielsen’s performance is not a museum piece but live round; it ricochets off the screen and into your ribcage. Seek the restoration on the big screen if possible—let the guitar tremolo reverberate through kneecaps, let the sea-blue night swallow your peripheral vision. When the freeze-frame hits, you will realise you have been holding breath for ninety minutes, a willing conspirator in Carmencita’s dance of survival.
Streaming: MUBI (restoration rotation), Criterion Channel (limited), Blu-ray from Kino Lorber’s ‘Weimar Femmes Fatales’ boxset. Runtime: 107 min. Language: Silent with German/English intertitles.
IMDb 5.9
1924
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