Earlier today, I watched La voz de Thaïs (The Voice of Thaïs, 2021), a work by David Casals Roma. It tells the story of Spain’s first female movie director, Elena Jordi, whose only film, Thaïs, is now considered to be lost.
I had only heard Jordi’s name mentioned before, but was unaware of her relevance to film History. The film follows actress Clara Mingueza as she tries to retrieve Thaïs (1918) and relocate Jordi’s remains to her hometown.
Elena Jordi (born María de Montserrat Casals Baqué) started her career working as a Vaudeville actress. She funded her own theatre company and even started construction on her own theatre building in Barcelona, although that dream never came to be – the details are murky at their best, and shady at their worst.
Much as other pioneers of early cinema, she was all but forgotten in a few years. The dictatorship that governed the country from 1939 to 1975 made a very deliberate effort to erase all traces of Vaudeville in Spain and, in spite of an extensive search by Casals and Mingueza, Jordi’s only feature remains unfound.
In addition to the politics at play, during the first years after the invention of cinema as such, people were not really aware of the importance movies had, and there was little effort to preserve them for future generations.
Even in this modern day and age, it is quite shocking to see the extent cinema pioneers have been belittled. As an example, Georges Méliès’ grave remained in a pitiful state for many years until a Kickstarter campaign helped repair it – and that only after Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) reignited interest in Méliès’ work.
Elena Jordi’s remains were moved to a public ossuary in 2017. In recent years, however, there seems to be renewed interest in highlighting her contribution to cinema. Let’s keep that momentum going.