Antonia Mercé La Argentina and the Moving Image: Attractions and Frictions between Cinema and Dance

Abstract Despite her fame and cultural prominence as a Spanish dancer, Antonia Mercé La Argentina did not appear in major film projects, like many of her peers. In this article, we examine the recent discovery of footage of Mercé and contextualize these preserved fragments within the development of Western cinema and the presence of the Spanish imaginary in the film industry of the time. These visual sources reveal how Mercé negotiated between art and technology, stage and screen, economy and aesthetics in establishing her cultural position and resisting particular constructions of Spanishness.


Introduction
Do not write scripts for Madame Argentina. It's useless. Fate has taken care of it. At the Epinay studio, during an endless rehearsal, we asked for Death to prompt the debutant's gestures. The film was premonitory. Now that the real scene is over, the great Argentina has changed roles, and we cry real tears for her, while she, for the first time indifferent to atrocious suffering, rests motionless, for eternity. Dauset, aka Carmencita, the first woman immortalized by Thomas Alva Edison's kinetoscope in 1894 in the first production studio of the film industry, the Black Maria of West Orange in New Jersey. 2 She would be followed on the big screen by such important colleagues as T ortola Valencia, Pastora Imperio, Vicente Escudero, Carmita Garc ıa, Mar ıa de Albac ın, Encarnaci on L opez La Argentinita, and Carmen Amaya. So why did such a famous and applauded dancer as Antonia Merc e die without being filmed for the cinema?
Dancers worked with film, the dazzling new technology of the time, since the inception of the medium. Film combines art and science in the examination of the relationships between movement, light, the body, representation, and perception. Worth mentioning, as a representative example, are the shows of Loie Fuller, whose dances were captured by the Lumi ere brothers' cinematograph.
Ã Pioneering promoters of film sought to record performing artists as a means to generate publicity for their new medium. This strategy turned the dancers into a link between the stage and the screen, attracting traditional theater audiences to screenings of projected moving images. However, in this context as Judy Mitoma explains, "Dancers were at the mercy of the filmmakers who were interested in technology rather than dance itself." 3 Nevertheless, commercial considerations did not cause aesthetic ones to be ignored. As Kiko Mora points out about Carmencita's dances, filming dancers posed the unique aesthetic challenge of capturing bodies and costumes in movement, 4 while Nell Andrew discusses in her recent research, many artists working with abstraction would centralize cinematic tools as a new art language, placing cinema in a dialogue with dance and plastic arts. 5 Thus, from an artistic perspective, at the turn of the twentieth century, filmed dance would emerge as a synergy from the paradoxical contrast between the physical presence on the theater stage and the twodimensional nature of filmic illusion. This article analyses how Antonia Merc e faced both commercial and aesthetic motivations when she received offers to participate in the world of cinema throughout her career, as did other dancers of the time. We interpret Merc e's response to cinema in light of the association of Spanish dance as a genre with Romanticism's tendency to represent Otherness.
Jacinto Benavente (1922's Nobel Prize in Literature) detected the connections between dance, cinema, and modernism in 1911 by writing on Antonia Merc e's cinemat ografo viviente dance: "It is the dance a living cinematograph that presents us with the same figure in an instant in various attitudes. If only one destroys the harmony, the charm of the animated sculpture is undone." 6 It is worth highlighting this pioneering connection, as it linked the aesthetics of the new technology with the language of Spanish dance. Benavente's article served as a turning point for Antonia Merc e; receiving the support of such an important intellectual at that time in Spain helped catapult her career. Benavente-who wrote scripts, directed two films and produced others, and would be honorary president of an important production company at the beginning of Spanish sound cinema, C.E.A.-framed La Argentina as a potential discovery for the incipient industry in Spain.
Besides this, the support by such a relevant name as Benavente would condition Antonia Merc e's praise by intellectuals, including those of the socalled Generation of 1898 who supported regenerationism (an intellectual trend that promoted the modernization of Spanish society as a reaction to the economic recession and political instability that took place in 1898, when Spain lost the last colonies in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico). Embracing this trend, La Argentina sought the modern stylization of Spanish dance, from the bolero (a Spanish dance genre that emerged in the eighteenth century), to flamenco and popular dances, whose living sources she studied in many cases. She incorporated elements of artistic modernism and vernacular vocabulary, mirroring developments in Spanish music by composers such as Isaac Alb eniz, Manuel de Falla, and Enrique Granados. Her career achieved a powerful international presence, especially from 1915 onward. She choreographed and starred in the ballet L'amour sorcier by Falla in 1925, whose premiere in Paris propelled her success. Ã In the autumn of 1927, emulating Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Antonia Merc e founded Les Ballets Espagnols. Antonia Merc e played an important role in the development of Spanish dance. During the three decades of her artistic career, she was supported by renowned dance critics; † she met and formed relationships with relevant dancers and choreographers wherever she went, painters and sculptors dedicated works to her, and poets and writers were inspired by her for their texts. She was also a model for fashion houses. Her international importance, critical reception, and recognition from her peers made her the epitome of the Spanish dancer.
Her contribution to the formation of a modernized imaginary of Spanish culture on an international level earned her the role of an unofficial cultural ambassador. Though she tried to keep her distance from politics, this status led to a certain identification with the modernization and reforms undertaken by the new left-wing regime of the Second Spanish Republic, established on April 14, 1931, which provoked the flight of King Alfonso XIII. Many intellectuals and artists who were committed to the new Republican regime held positions of leadership within the structures responsible for the modernization of the country, including those who were collaborators of Antonia Merc e.
The importance of these contributions by Antonia Merc e for the evolution and international spread of Spanish dance has been explored by recent historiography, following a pioneering article by the feminist writer Antonina Rodrigo and a collective catalogue arranged for the centenary of the dancer's birth in 1990. 7 Soon after, other books began to examine aspects of her career and biography, from Carlos Manso in her native Buenos Aires, to Suzanne de Soye in her adopted Paris. 8 With the first academic monograph in English, Ninotchka Deborah Bennahum placed Antonia Merc e in a broader Western artistic context, detailing some of her contacts with the film world. 9 In recent years, Ana Alberdi Alonso has investigated Merc e's training and initial professional period, illuminating these aspects of her career. 10 In our previous work, we have examined Merc e in relation to the formation of the imaginaries of Spanishness and the impact of her contributions on the configuration of the national identity associated with Spanish dance. 11 This article studies the relationship of this Spanish dancer with the emerging cinematographic medium, which has been an unexplored and ambiguous aspect of Merc e's life and work. 12 This perspective furthers the understanding of this dancer, placing her in dialogue with other artists of her time. In their attractions and frictions with the cinematographic medium, artists of the period showed their interest in a new technology, their valuation of it within an artistic hierarchy, and its role in the configuration of identities associated with their dances.
The international renown of Antonia Merc e's work coincided with the two decades of silent film, an era when visual narrative developed before the arrival of sound in 1927. As Lynn Garafola accurately summarized, "The rebirth of twentieth-century ballet coincided with the birth of film as an art form: never again would the two media be so close as during that period of genesis." 13 But the fact that cinema was a medium identified with mass culture led those who considered dance to be high culture, such as Serge Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, to renounce it. Diaghilev, moreover, as Garafola points out, "could never . . . countenance a form of theatrical representation that eliminated or dismembered the human figure." 14 In line with the Russian impresario, Antonia Merc e also showed her mistrust of motion pictures and navigated an ambivalence toward the medium. Her resistance to being at the service of film productions was due to a reluctance to lose the artistic status of the work as well as the authority over the creative process. Her hesitancy also reflected her suspicions about the lack of documentary fidelity within cinema and the way that films can configure cultural stereotypes. Antonia Merc e lived in Paris intermittently during the 1910s and 1920s, and as Bennahum states, "There is no question that Argentina saw a number of [the Diaghilev's Ballets Russes] productions from her time in the French music halls to the time she formed her own company." 15 She became a friend of Manuel de Falla and others close to the Ballets Russes milieu. For Spanish dance, she desired the same recognition and high art status held by the Russian company and its creations. As Bennahum remarks, "Her desire was to create a Spanish form of modernist dance-theater much like that created by Diaghilev." 16 As we have mentioned in previous studies, Antonia Merc e never appeared in a fiction film.
Ã Although she received a series of proposals to participate in film projects, newsreels, and a television concert (in a primitive transmission form) and corresponded with heads of large film companies and Hollywood stars, she never accepted. It was only after her sudden death, and in the context of Nazi- Eight years later, for the celebration of the centenary of the dancer's birth, the Televisi on Española show Informe Semanal broadcasted fragments of the 1930s La corrida dance footage that is later analyzed (Figure 1). A fragment of this was also shown at the exhibition La noche española. Flamenco, vanguardia y cultura The location and analysis of the original footage ( Figure 1), Ã preserved at the Filmoteca Española in Madrid † -of which several fragments have remained unshown-has allowed us to re-evaluate the artist's relationship with cinema. We have discovered her never-carried-out projects, studied the evolution of her choreographic style over time, and integrated her contributions to transnational conversations. This article argues that Antonia Merc e was reluctant to participate in a fiction film due to the risk of being identified with an exoticized version of Spanish culture, from which she tried to distance herself. In her desire to approach Spanish dance through modernist aesthetics, she sought to transcend the españolada stereotypes and achieve a refined cultural status for her shows. ‡ Building on our own and Bennahum's previous work, this study demonstrates how Merc e The Real Academia Española defines españolado/da as follows: "Said of a foreigner that which in its air, dress and customs seems Spanish" and "Action, show or play that exaggerates certain features that are considered Spanish." "Españolado/da," Real Academia Española, accessed on October 9, 2020, https://dle.rae.es/espa%C3% B1olado, www.rae.es.
nevertheless took advantage of this new technology. We can distinguish four typologies among the recordings preserved: early filming for newsreels, amateur filming of a personal nature, working documentation, and screen tests. Together, these form a rich corpus of moving images useful to understanding the interweaving of Spanish culture within Western concert dance of the period.
Antonia Merc e's film projects and the cinematic call: Early newsreel, personal amateur footage, and field work documentation In the eighteen years between the first preserved film of Antonia Merc e in 1918 and the last one, days before her death in 1936, we find material that shows, on the one hand, the unstoppable technological development of the new medium and, on the other, the dancer's interest in what these advances could offer her both socially and professionally. Analyzing the different types of filming preserved during this time frame in relation to the milestones in the evolution of cinema clarifies the motivations that led Merc e to let herself be filmed in both professional and amateur contexts.
Antonia Merc e returned to Spain in December 1917, after two and a half years of work dancing on the American continent. Between her return to Spain at the end of 1917 and her death in 1936, the movies suffered a significant creative and industrial crisis due to the emergence of sound films in 1927 with the release of Warner Brothers's The Jazz Singer, directed by Alan Crosland. As the film historian Donald Crafton states, "In the process, the Art of the Silent Films was destroyed." 17 The technological and artistic demands of the so-called "talkies" affected the quality of the films, as producers, directors, actors, and technicians worked out the requirements of sound. Almost five years passed until Hollywood fully mastered sound films and the audiovisual narrative quality of its productions returned to its previous level.
In Spain, the advance of cinema failed to take the opportunity to lead the market when the First World War affected the film industry of the countries involved. Despite remaining neutral, Spain did not manage to establish a solid film industry. The most cutting-edge sectors of the Spanish industry at the end of 1910s were located in Barcelona, with production companies such as Hispano Films, Barcin ografo, or Studio Films. From 1920 onward, Madrid took the lead with important directors such as Jos e Buchs, who made more than twenty films, including Rosario, la cortijera (1923), starring the dancer Encarnaci on L opez La Argentinita, La verbena de la paloma (1925), and El dos de mayo (1927). 18 Sound cinema production began at the Orphea Films studios in Barcelona in 1932, nearly five years after the talkies emerged in the United States. At the same time that American films were taking over Europe, some Spanish productions such as Morena Clara (1936) by Flori an Rey, starring Imperio Argentina, and other musical films by Benito Perojo, would achieve as much box office success in Spain, comparable to famous Hollywood films. 19 By the 1930s, Hollywood musical cinema was divided into three styles: the musical of stars, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers as its emblems; the director's style, represented by Busby Berkeley; and operettas, where the most eminent protagonists were Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. 20 In Spain, filmmakers looked to Hollywood as the example to follow. Directors such as Francisco El ıas, whose film Mar ıa de la O (1936) was the last to be shot by Carmen Amaya before she left Spain because of the Civil War, used the music-dance genre with the aim of matching the advances being made in the Mecca of cinema. 21 During the Spanish Republican period between 1931 and 1936, at the same time as the Spanish producers and directors looked to Hollywood, where the stereotype of the so-called Spanish films produced under the "Spanish Craze" came to an end in 1930, 22 the most paradigmatic examples of españolada can be found.

Ã
The first film footage of Antonia Merc e dancing is dated one decade before the talkies appeared and is from a Spanish newsreel, rather than a fiction film. The footage illustrates Merc e's interest in boosting her popularity after the two-and-a-half years she spent dancing in the Americas, which kept her away from Spanish stages. We located two preserved film fragments from January 1918, La corrida and Lul u fado, filmed in Ã See Rafael Utrera Mac ıas, "Españoladas y españolados: dignidad e indignidad en la filmograf ıa de un g enero," Cuadernos de la Academia, no. 1 (October 1997): 258. The author breaks down the term españoladas/ españolados to describe the different Spanish films that were released: "In those years, Spain created its own genre in which the variations on the indigenous became the basic material of a varied and heterogeneous filmography (andaluzadas, baturradas, catalanadas, madrileñadas) that confirmed the basis of some peculiar signs of identity that make our cinematography an atypical segment in the European industries as a whole." Barcelona ( Figure 2). This dating is possible because the logo of Studio Films (a Spanish production company based in Barcelona) appears in a part of a frame. Between 1918 and 1920, Studio Films produced a black and white newsreel called Revista Studio (also titled Revista Gr afica Studio) with direction by Juan Sol a Mestres and Alfred Fontanals, also its camera operator. 23 Between January 21 and 31, 1918, Merc e performed at Eldorado Theater in Barcelona. La Argentina's return to Barcelona would surely have reached Studio Films, with offices on Universidad Street, very close to the theater. Launching that year, Revista Studio needed material to fill their weekly newsreel with the artistic and cultural events of the Spanish scene. Merc e probably thought that appearing in the cinema would be good publicity. In this first film she performs La corrida, by Quinito Valverde, and Lul u fado, a Portuguese fado that was a hit at the time, by the Brazilian composer Nicolino Milano. Ã While we do not know her precise opinions, we suspect that this appearance in the newsreel was not to Merc e's liking when she became an international star. As Merc e developed into a sophisticated artist, she gradually renounced the variety shows and music hall theaters where she had previously performed. Moreover, La Argentina did not want to be associated with the exotic and erotic stereotypes of Spanish dance. She pointed out in her writings, "I have long fought against the false or incomplete idea of Spanish dance that has been bruited about almost everywhere!" 24 Among the films that Antonia Merc e would have seen in the years before Hollywood called her were the popular Carmen (Raoul Walsh, 1915), Rosita (Ernest Lubitsch, 1923), and La femme et le pantin (Jacques de Baroncelli, 1928), in which "Spanishness" is associated with the exotic and the protagonist with the femme fatale. Perhaps for this reason, Merc e limited her appearances on film during this interval to screen tests, which were not shown to the general public.
Chronologically, the rest of the footage conserved can be dated from 1925 onward, filmed by her loyal manager, Arnold Meckel, who worked with her until her death. During this period, we can distinguish two types of footage: amateur films of a personal nature and performance documentation. It is important to distinguish between the two because the first provides information about how the dancer and her collaborators shaped her public image, while the second illustrates the type of dance that attracted her attention when she sought creative inspiration. Both typologies must be understood in the context of the marketing of nonprofessional cameras, spurred in 1922 by a French company, Path e Baby, and Kodak's reversal and nonflammable films two years later (Figure 3). 25 Thanks to this new technology, Merc e and Meckel were able to record scenes from their international tours as well as more intimate and personal moments from their   Ã Although in no case does she appear to be dancing, it is possible that both fragments were recorded for local news. The position of the camera, however, makes the recording unofficial and reinforces the idea that it could have been made by Meckel.

The cinema temptation: From Hollywood to Studio Tobis
Despite the fact that Antonia Merc e showed reluctance to appear on the big screen after her 1918 newsreel appearance, she was, perhaps, aware aware of the advantages that the moving image could provide as an instrument for the study of folk dance. She also had a camera with which she could record herself and watch the results privately. However, as the cinema evolved, Merc e's temptations to participate in the film industry continued to grow at the start of the 1930s. Getting involved in a film production meant that the decisions of others would constrain her cinematic representation. She was hesitant to lose control over the process and the image that would be projected of her in the movies. Moreover, at that time in international cinema-especially in Hollywood-the representation of Spanish dancers was subsumed in the stereotypes of Spanishness that she sought to overcome through her modernist aesthetic approach.
In her statements to the press at the end of the 1920s, Antonia Merc e continued to reject film projects. In June 1928, a Spanish journalist asked her, "You have never been tempted by the cinema? -No. I could only submit to that work, which I do not understand, when nothing else is possible. They even gave me 'the test,' which gave an excellent result, and made me very advantageous proposals, but I did not accept." 26 Six months later, she received a letter from Hickman Price, director of Movietone from the Fox Case Corporation, inviting her to an interview likely to propose a collaboration.
Ã In 1926, Fox Film Corporation had bought the patents of Movietone sound for making talkies. However, in the early 1930s Antonia Merc e was still reticent to be part of a fiction film, probably because her authority as a choreographer and director would be eclipsed. She feared being at the mercy of directors and producers. "I receive proposals constantly. I'm very interested, but I can't make up my mind. I have no interest in it, which is the main thing. And I've seen it up close," she said in September 1930. 27 Her interest increased over the years, although when the Cr onica journalist asked if she would ever make a film, she still replied, "If I do, it will be by imposing as a first condition that the scripts, costumes and sets be reviewed by me, because I want the vision of Spain not to be a B vision. It has already been ridiculed enough in cinema!" Concerned with being represented as a cultural stereotype, she wanted to establish particular conditions in form and content before putting herself in front of the camera. On January 11, 1930, Antonia Merc e was "discussing a big movie contract," as Meckel wrote to William Willheim (head of a large New York textile company) 28 from the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, California. 29 Shortly before, the dancer had visited the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in Hollywood where she supposedly received an offer to make a film about her life, a proposal that she rejected for its potential to distort her public image. looks for a script for a forthcoming film." 30 This illustrates how, despite her initial refusals, the dancer's fame was as much a lure for producers as it was for attracting new audiences for the latest technological advances in the moving image. It is worth highlighting another of Merc e's projects from 1934, when the Aldwych Theatre in London offered her a brief appearance on the BBC radio program Spanish Talk, presented by two Spanish language specialists, Professor Mar ıa de Laguna and Dr. Thomas, and broadcast on June 7 as promotion for her upcoming performances. The broadcasting company also offered her the chance to participate in a televised concert scheduled for Friday, June 8. As the dancer had to leave London on Thursday, June 7 in the evening due to previous work commitments, she was then offered the following Tuesday's televised concert, although no documentation remains of this concert. 31 The technology used by the BBC in June 1934 was John Logie Baird's mechanical television, called the Baird Process, an early broadcast system with thirty lines per picture so that people's features were barely distinguishable and looked ghostly. 32 If Antonia Merc e knew about it, and taking into account her reticence toward film where at least the image was cleanly visible, it is understandable why she would not show interest in being on this kind of television program. A letter from the director of the theater, D. A. Abrahams, indicates that Merc e would appreciate the publicity these broadcasts and television appearances offered. 33 In addition to these sessions, Merc e explored a short film project with RKO, although the idea did not come to fruition. A letter sent to Meckel on January 29, 1935, from Hollywood illuminates the moment the sender proposed a film about Antonia Merc e to the then-independent producer Jesse L. Lasky, who was also interested in a biographical film about the prematurely dead Anna Pavlova: Ã Well, the result of my interview with Mr. Lasky is that there is no money in shorts since they can get nothing from the exhibitor for them. But he wants me to stay here and work with him on the Flight of the Swan, the Pavlowa [sic] picture he bought over a year ago. † He thinks I have had very valuable experience, etc. Of course, that is not what I came here to do and I am bitterly disappointed. The scenario I wrote for Argentina shaped up so well … [sic]. I had added another scene to it and he likes it very much and wants to put me to work on helping with the scenario for this picture. I told him I thought a picture of Pavlova was in bad taste as she had been dead too few years, and I could not work on that sort of a picture. But I gave him a lot of ideas about the sort of a dance picture I would work on.
He said if this picture was a success, he might be able to get the backing for the other films.
The story at the other studios are [sic] too heartbreaking to report. They care nothing about art, and you should have heard what they said at RKO. They told me Argentina had been out there and imposed so many restrictions about lighting, wanting her own director and various other things that they simply lost interest and would not consider the picture. At Metro it could not be done this year because Ã Bennahum, Antonia Merc e "La Argentina": Flamenco and the Spanish Avant Garde, 172, identifies its author as the scriptwriter Grace Jones. To no avail, our study has tried to corroborate this claim based on the interpretation of the signature, and no other sources have been found that document the existence of a screenwriter at that time named Grace Jones. Among the possible alternatives, the strongest one is that it could be the scriptwriter Rian James, who in those years was regularly in touch with both Jesse L. Lasky (film producer and founder of Paramount, which he headed until 1932) and the big production companies of the 1930s-Warner Brothers, MGM, RKO, Paramount, and Fox. James was the screenwriter of the now legendary musical film 42nd Street (1933, Lloyd Bacon. Warner Brothers); had directed Best of Enemies their schedule is filled up, but they are still considering it at Paramount and Universal. 34 In her discussions with RKO, we see Merc e's doubts about the medium, which stem from her fear that the big screen would not offer the image of "high culture" that she wanted to maintain. As Virginia Brooks explains in her study, movie "directors chose elements of the movement to create dance as they envisioned it to be appropriate for the screen." 35 The producers at the studios, as the letter points out, did not care about art, and therefore did not take into account Merc e's vision of a refined Spanish dance distinguished from the representations of Spanish dancers so common in foreign mass culture. They did not share her vision of a modernist aesthetic, in which leading artists collaborated on the costumes, sets, and music, as Diaghilev's Ballets Russes had done.
According to Cordelier, Antonia Merc e expressed low regard for a technology that required her to pervert movement in favor of image editing: La Argentina has not sacrificed the taste of her time. While we see our theater stars one by one getting into this art which for a long time was called "the silent art," Argentina, whose whole life is a constant glorification of movement, does not find in cinema, a means capable of faithfully recording her genius, any attraction whatsoever. She admires it, but she doesn't love it. She went to Hollywood, danced in front the biggest stars, and found their lives interesting, but she has always refused to make films because "it is impossible to be oneself in front of this device which demands for us to make all our gestures at idling speed," in her own words. Dance is born from an inspiration which cannot be broken down as banal movement. Imposing on dance a rhythm which is not its own means stripping it of its nature, stealing its character, its life, trivializing it to such a point that it becomes diminished, unrecognizable: Argentina's love for dance is too big to consent [to] this mutilation. 36 Indeed this fear of trivialization recalls Diaghilev's reactions to the cinema world, "with his deep-seated mistrust of mass culture and its allied forms of mechanical reproduction," as Garafola points out, the same way as "he insisted on identifying his company exclusively with 'high art' venues and audiences and dissociating it from the 'popular' ballet tradition." 37 The same aspiration is clear in La Argentina's statements and works.
At some point, however, the dancer gave in and was convinced by those who insisted that her dances should be preserved as moving images, according to the account provided by Cordelier. She recounts the screen test Merc e did at Studio Tobis, located in Epinay-sur-Seine, North of Paris. The extract is interesting in that it describes in detail the qualities that Merc e could offer as a potential actress-beyond her talent as a dancer: Shooting starts. La Argentina is acting in a scene that was supposed to highlight her mimic skills. What matters today are her gestures. We all perceive that the expressions of her moving face are striking in their intensity and sincerity. We need to understand the richness in them when the camera captures them. The casting is excellent; Madame Argentina has revealed herself to be an admirable actress. She is essentially photogenic. An extraordinary mime, endowed with a face capable of extreme movement, she will surprise the world, which she has already enchanted. All that remains is to find a script worthy of her. 38 A film fragment on the Eastman Safety Film celluloid conserved at Filmoteca Española under the label of 15m10 Esai [sic] d'elle Argentina image corresponds to the screen tests carried out at Studio Tobis in 1935, described by Cordelier (Figure 7). Also, the digitalized footage includes a close-up profile of Antonia Merc e lying down for several seconds. These events in 1935 seem to have revived in the dancer the desire to be an actress for the big screen. At the age of forty-four and suffering from the rheumatic disease that often prevented her from dancing, her interest in taking this screen test suggests that the dancer was considering a possible transition from dancer to film actress as a continuation of her career-a leap that other contemporaries had made, such as Mar ıa de Albaic ın in French cinema or Rita Hayworth in American cinema.
This desire is also evident in one of the last letters Antonia Merc e exchanged with the set and costume designer for L'amour sorcier, Gustavo Bacarisas, who in 1936 was in Paris for its revival at the Opera. Bacarisas wrote to Merc e, "What a pity that there was no more talk about that film project! It's a shame that you won't be leaving a record of your art for those who come after you, now that cinema can do it in such a wonderful way." 39 But by June 1936, a month before Merc e's death, the dancer did indeed leave a filmed record, although in a documentary manner and not intended to be seen publicly.
Screen tests filmed between 1932 and 1936, which document Merc e's solo dances, include Danza ib erica (with music by Joaqu ın Nin) ( Figure 8); Garrot ın, in which she dances and gestures in a marked way; and Tango Tachito (also known as Tango andaluz, with music by Quinito Valverde interpreted by the pianist Luis Galve).
Ã In this latter film, Merc e also danced La corrida, a piece that she kept in her repertory throughout her whole career and whose choreography, as we see in both the 1918 film and the 1930s film, was kept the same (Figures 1 and 2). This succession of offers, projects, and screen tests shows the dancer's growing interest in cinema. But her desire for aesthetic control and concerns about the exoticization of her art prevented any of them from bearing Ã We also suggest that these films of her dancing could be part of the screen tests she did in Studio Tobis in 1935, as described by Cordelier, a hypothesis that is supported by the fact that it was filmed on Eastman Safety Film celluloid material, the same film used in the previous fragment identified as Antonia Merc e's essai to which the French writer also refers.
fruit. Despite all the projects to preserve her legacy and extend her acting career, the dancer died suddenly of a heart attack, less than a month after Bacarisas's letter, leaving many plans up in the air. The editing reveals a certain intentionality in the construction and projection of Antonia Merc e as an artist, a perspective evident in the aforementioned warning by Paravicini that begins the film: "Her heart stopped beating when she learned of the start of the Spanish war." 41 Merc e had, in fact, suffered a heart attack as the culmination of her illness and extreme fatigue. Paravicini's interpretation of the dancer's death identifies Merc e as the allegory of Spain, a suffering nation that was breaking apart with the civil war.
Under the war circumstances, La Argentina's image as an icon of Spanish culture had undergone an immediate process of mythification and appropriation by the "two Spains," Ã the Republic and the rebels, who both Ã The term "the two Spains" refers to the confrontation between the two sides during the Spanish Civil War, which Antonio Machado's Proverbios y cantares poem "LIV" described: "Ya hay un español que quiere / vivir y a vivir empieza / entre una España que muere / y otra España que bosteza. / Españolito que vienes / al mundo, te guarde Dios. / Una de las dos Españas / ha de helarte el coraz on." (There is a Spaniard who wants / to live, and is starting to live, / between one Spain that is dying / and another that yawns. / Little Spaniard saw in the dancer the incarnation of Spanish national identity. On the Republican side, rumors had been circulating that the artist had been poisoned "by order of the rebel high command." Ã Many of her artistic collaborators committed to the reforms of the Second Republic-including Federico Garc ıa Lorca, Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Margarita Nelken, Gustavo Dur an, Juli an Bautista, and Isabel de Palencia-had been either victims of reprisals or exiled during the war or as a consequence of its aftermath. In the Francoist Spain many dancers, such as Manuela del R ıo and Mariemma, wanted to identify with and link to Merc e's legacy. Indeed, throughout her life, the dancer maintained friendships with personalities who would be on the side of the rebels or who would decide to return to Franco's Spain in the postwar period, such as M aximo D ıaz de Quijano, Federico Garc ıa Sanchiz, Tom as Borr as, and Vicente Escudero. Both the Spanish republican culture in exile and collaborators with the Franco dictatorship in Nazi-occupied Paris appropriated Merc e as a figure. However, most of the tributes paid to the artist in the years following her death were connected to the Francoist authorities, † as her family and the association resided in occupied Paris. 42 The celebrations of the fifth anniversary of her death in 1941 in the midst of the Second World War provides an example of this Francoist appropriation. In occupied Paris, the prestigious Salle Pleyel organized various events promoted by Bernardo Roland, the Consul General of Franco's Spain in the French capital. The Peruvian-born dancer Nana de Herrera starred in a performance, an occasion that also included the sale of some objects from Andr e de Fouqui eres and Serge Lifar's collections, the latter being the controversial director of the Paris Opera at the time. 43 This event ended with the projection of the documentary film Antonia Merc e "La Argentina," a perfect finale to this commemoration that functioned as a ploy to appropriate the dancer. For the idea of Antonia Merc e as the first victim of the Spanish Civil War, see Antonina Rodrigo, "Antonia Merc e, primera v ıctima del 18 de julio," El Pa ıs, July 18, 1986. † One of the earliest tributes that Antonia Merc e received after her death was on May 10, 1939 In spite of the attempts by fascist and collaborationist authorities to appropriate the dancer both in Franco's Spain and in occupied Paris, the symbolism of Antonia Merc e as an icon of Spanish dance and an allegory of Spain managed to transcend the war. Despite the politicization of culture within a wartime context, the film, written by Jos e Merc e and Monique de Paravicini, managed to convey, through the mosaic of fragments, the main role of Antonia Merc e in the development of Spanish dance. Future generations of dancers would recognize her as the founder of a modernist branch within Spanish dance traditions.

Conclusions
The analysis of primary sources and digitalized footage allows us to reach a series of conclusions related to the interpretation of Antonia Merc e La Argentina's work on film. This study shows that Merc e was no stranger to the world of the big screen. Previous studies have assumed that she declined to participate in projects for the cinema, which was corroborated by the fact that no moving images of her had been located except for the filmed footage in which she danced La corrida and Tango Tachito. This led to the assumption that she was an exception to the long list of choreographers and performers who had appeared on film between 1894 and 1936. In fact, the dancer had received numerous offers to participate in cinema, newsreels, and a television concert. The discovery of previously unknown material allows for a rethinking of the artist's relationship to these projects. We connect her initial reticence to her concern with the aesthetic negotiations between dance and film and how the artistic language of the new cinematic technology compared to traditional arts. Merc e's attitude was analogous to that of other colleagues in the profession, such as Diaghilev, who wanted to remain closer to art than to the commercial world.
As the new medium evolved, its quality consolidated and its popularity spread. We see how Antonia Merc e compromised and participated in some screen tests to assess a possible move into the field of cinema. She took advantage of the latest advances in the medium to capture moments of her personal life. She also understood the potential of the medium for her choreographic studies and made use of this tool to document the popular dances that inspired her. Moreover, during the 1920s and 1930s, she tried her hand at Hollywood and Studio Tobis. After years within the physically demanding profession of dance, Merc e's change of attitude toward Ã The dancer Mariemma, for whom Antonia Merc e was a role model and guide in her work, systematized and organized the Spanish dance disciplines into four groups-bolero school, folklore, flamenco, and stylized dance-and structured them in the Spanish academic system. Mariemma, Tratado de danza española. Mis caminos a trav es de la danza (Madrid: Fundaci on Autor, 1997). film may have been influenced by her advancing age and her illness, which forced her to spend time in health resorts and undergo harsh treatments. Owing to her unexpected death, however, the projects were never completed.
Merc e had two primary concerns in her negotiations with filmmakers. The first had to do with her wariness to hand over control of the outcome to directors and producers. She was used to having the last word in the staging of her ballets. She choreographed, performed, directed the company, participated in developing the plots, hired the collaborators, and gave opinions on costumes and sets. Participating in a film meant leaving practically all these tasks behind and putting herself in the hands of filmmakers who would shoot and edit her as they pleased. Merc e's second concern was the stereotypes and deformations of "Spanishness" that were in vogue within variety shows and filmed españoladas. She wanted to distance herself from both. Her attitude toward the big screen corresponds to a hierarchical valuation of the two artistic media. Despite Merc e's concerns, the documentary by Jos e Merc e and Monique de Paravicini manages to capture this iconic Spanish dancer on film, providing evidence of her influential role within the history of Spanish dance in the twentieth century. After her death, this was the only way for an audience to see her dances.
This article locates Antonia Merc e's contributions to a fruitful period for the crossover between dance and cinema. As both her proposed and rejected film projects show, Merc e configured a stylized Spanish dance based on the direct study of traditional sources, while incorporating aesthetic influences from modernist Paris and distancing the genre from outdated romantic encumbrances. As a Spanish dancer with a formidable presence on the international scene at the time, her hesitation toward film had repercussions for her supposed "double death"-her absence both onstage and onscreen-and for the hagiographic writing that emerged about her. What is often missing from stories about Merc e is a key element for the interpretation of a dancer's contributions: the ability to see her dance. This study has shown that the newly found moving images complement and enrich the analyses carried out so far from written and graphic sources, offering dance historians material to interpret both Merc e and the relation of dance and film in new ways. exhibition Poetas del cuerpo. La danza de la Edad de Plata. We would like to thank Ana Alberdi Alonso, member of a discussion panel on this topic, for her generous collaboration in the study of these audiovisual fragments; Carlos Manso, for help in analyzing various primary sources; and the external reviewers and Olive Mckeon, for their suggestions and comments on improving the text.