The confusion between person and character in Cravan vs Cravan (Lacuesta, 2002)

Abstract

A character split into two bodies: the real Arthur Cravan, an eccentric character who moved in the intellectual and artistic circles of the first decades of the 20th century, and Frank Nicotra, the one in charge of interpreting him at the beginning of the second millennium. Both fighters and poets, although separated by decades of difference. Isaki LaCuesta offers a hybrid of documentary and fiction where Cravan’s character engulfs Nicotra’s until the line that separates one from the other is lost. This communication studies the strategies used by its director to achieve this symbiosis between the two main protagonists. The use of recreations of a past time to visualize the life of Oscar Wilde’s nephew in contemporary times to the making of the film and the maneuvers that Lacuesta follows to blur past and present not only in the main characters, but in the rest of the cast are the objective of this article. The forms of acting in this non-fiction film will also be studied according to the Thomas Waugh’s theories and it will be analyzed whether the characters are part of the borderline individuals typical of postmodern cinema that Gérard Imbert has studied.