‘La Singla’ Rewrites the Female Victim Narrative

Cinema always liked the silent female victim. From early films such as Johnny Belinda (1948) and The Story of Esther Costello (1957), through to the big-bucks true crime industry that fetishizes suffering for a disproportionately female audience, the silent woman’s inability to testify often renders her vulnerable to further abuse. Ultimately, she is reduced to the role of narrative vehicle, a riddle to be solved or a figure with which to throw another person’s psychology into sharp relief. Director and producer Paloma Zapata restores her dignity in La Singla (2023), a documentary in search of a revolutionary deaf flamenco dancer who stormed the international stage before her sudden disappearance in the late 1960s.

Rumbling along the train tracks towards El Somorrostro, once an impoverished Gitano neighbourhood in Barcelona, the opening scene paints a picture of Antonia Singla’s childhood. Born in 1948, she contracted meningitis as a newborn, leaving her deaf and unable to speak. But by the age of 12 she had mastered rumba, fandango, bulerías and flamenco by following the rhythm of her mother’s clapping. ‘Are you hungry?’ her mother once asked her. ‘Then dance!’ Singla was often taken to low-lit tablaos (flamenco cafes) to perform for money. Composer Juliane Heinemann’s spectral soundscapes laid over footage of Singla’s furious performances impart a sense of her alienation from the world, while images of her indecipherable gaze punctuate the narrative.

La Singla takes the form of a docufiction, where Spanish actor Helena Kaittani plays narrator-journalist ‘Elena’ on the case of the missing bailaora who has not performed in fifty years. Following a thin trail of media clippings and archival footage, Kaittani eventually meets Colita, a photographer who captured the young dancer off-screen while filming for a role in the 1963 flamenco film Los Tarantos. Colita’s monochrome portraits revealed the bleak living conditions of the Gitano beach villages where Los Tarantos was filmed, as well as immortalizing her haunted look.

The story around Singla’s rapid rise to stardom was tied to her talent as much as to the desires of those around her. It was painter Paco Rebés who cast her on the street as his muse and model, and soon took her to parties where she performed for the Gauche Divine group, captivating the imaginations of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miró.

Although its form is never named, abuse is a theme that constantly waits in the wings of La Singla. But unlike true crime, that moment of terrible ‘exposure’ never occurs, as the documentary does not rely on the forensic excavation of the silent protagonist’s suffering to maintain its momentum. When Zapata does eventually track down Singla, a process which takes her four years, she simply finds a woman who never wanted to be found in the first place.

Singla’s brief appearance at the end of the film focusses more on the psychological consequences of her experience rather than their explicit narration. In contrast to the true crime industry’s sensationalist portrayal of trauma, Zapata demonstrates that there are other ways to tell stories of suffering without forcing victims to break their silence. If only we can learn to listen in a different emotional register.

La Singla is playing at select theatres in Spain and Berlin, Germany throughout November

_{Main image: La Singla, 2023, film still. Courtesy: Paloma Zapata}