Dancing across European and Latin-American Borders: Pili and Mili’s transnational musical films of the 1960s

ABSTRACT

Pili and Mili were two of the most important musical stars in Hispanic cinemas during the 1960s. They were twins and starred in ten films, from 1963 to 1970, that made them internationally famous. Discovered by powerful Spanish producer Benito Perojo, their stardom was developed mainly in co-productions with different European and Latin-American countries, especially Mexico. This article aims to rediscover Pili and Mili’s films as one of the most important transnational film cycles devoted to musical stars in Hispanic film markets during the 1960s. It pays attention to the distinctive features that their films proposed with respect to others featuring contemporary stars: Pili and Mili hardly sang and did not release music records, but presented themselves mainly as extremely adaptable dancers; moreover, instead of being strongly attached to certain music styles, they constantly demonstrated a transnational versatility in their movies. Transnational mobility, the performance of non-Spanish characters and hybridisations with other transnational film genres of the 1960s, among other transnational dimensions, are also analysed in their films.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnationality
• musical films
• youth films
• 1960s
• Spain
• Latin America

Acknowledgments

This research has been developed within the Research Project ‘Cinematic Cartographies of Mobility in the Hispanic Atlantic’ (CS2017-85290-P), financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Ministry of Science and Innovation – Research State Agency of Spain.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Pioneer director of Spanish cinema during the 1920s and 1930s, emigrated to Argentina in the 1940s after the Civil War, and became a powerful producer in Spain during the 1950s and 1960s.

2. All the translations from Spanish have been made by the author.

3. See the online database Discogs for more information about them: https://www.discogs.com/es/artist/2353626-Pili-Y-Mili.

4. In this sense, it seems apposite that the main image of Como dos gotas de agua on the website IMDB is a Croatian poster for the movie.

5. As Castro de Paz and Cerdán have explained, many production companies then competed ‘for the same audiences seeking to work with a minimum risk and always at a low cost: genre and sub-genre formulas already standardised […]; minimum real shooting budgets, using the advantages offered by the technological renovation of shooting equipment to avoid having to pay for sets, lighting equipment and to shoot with the minimum number of takes; launching new faces’ (Castro de Paz and Cerdán 2005, 137).

6. Data obtained from the Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA) website (http://www.culturaydeporte.gob.es/cultura/areas/cine/mc/catalogodecine/inicio.html) and from Amador and Ayala Blanco (1986, 1988). The difference between the measures in each country is due to the fact that these are the most precise data available about the spectators of these movies in Spain and Mexico (at least, to my knowledge). There is a lack of more empirical work about box office data in Spanish and Mexican film bibliography.

7. Box office figures were not calculated officially nor published by the Spanish state until the mid-1960s.

8. Those three were Marisol rumbo a Río (1963), Búsqueme a esa chica (1964) and Carola de día, Carola de noche (1969). Data obtained from the ICAA website and from Amador and Ayala Blanco (1986, 1988).

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Santiago Lomas Martínez

Santiago Lomas Martínez is a researcher and lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, in the research group TECMERIN (Television-Cinema: Memory, Representation and Industry). His research has been published in journals such as Celebrity Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies or Hispanic Research Journal. His main interests are Spanish film and television history, transnationality in Hispanic cinemas, queer studies and gender studies.