Vengo: The Soundscape of Duende

Writer, director Tony Gatlif's revelatory and free flowing 1993 film, Latchmo Drom (Ray-Gavras & Gatlif 1993), which followed Romany culture around the world, is beloved. In 2000, he released another timeless film, Vengo. Critics, including those who loved Latchmo Drom, say Vengo's plot is too simple, its action too predictable, and characters two-dimensional. I say Vengo is a film perfectly suited to now, because it immerses the viewer in the realm of the duende, and this is where we need to be, given our global crises. Duende or tener duende loosely means having soul, a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity, often connected with flamenco.

Many of us as Jungians know the concept of duende as it developed in Andalusia in southern Spain, also the location of the film. We are drawn to, or are repelled by, the passionate call of duende with its willingness to acknowledge, even welcome, death as a part of life. Over these last years, we

have certainly been living with terror of the pandemic along with increasing floods, droughts, and fires.

In his famous essay, ‘The Theory and the Play of the Duende’, Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca writes that one must struggle ‘… on the very rim of the well …’ (1933, p. 67) within the space of darkness, death and loss and only then may the possibility of transcendence arise, not from air and inspiration, realms familiar to the muse or the angel, but from the gut and grit of an earthy below.

Vengo may be a film one either loves or hates; there is no middle ground. ‘Half tones do not exist’ in the Andalusian narrative that Vengo chronicles and are almost totally absent in the flamenco musical tradition of ‘deep song’ as Lorca reminds us (1922, p. 9). I love this film and need its immersion in the ‘black sounds’ (Lorca 1933, p. 57), deep emotionality, and reverberations with the nigredo of alchemical lore; these amplifications are the soul of duende that is brought home to us in this film.