Don't look for the silent film "Thais", the first directed by a woman in Spain, based on Massenet's opera of the same name. You won't find it: we know, from numerous mentions, that it was released in 1918, but it was lost, and to date no copy has been found.
Don't look for its author either, Montserrat Casals Baqué; the first years of her life were confusing, the last discreet: nothing was known about her after 1929, when she retired completely, and she was buried in an anonymous niche in the Les Corts cemetery, Barcelona, in 1945. Nobody remembered that this name was the baptismal name of the brilliant actress Elena Jordi, a beautiful actress and theatre entrepreneur who in the 1910s was one of the stars of the Paralelo. We are talking about a time when theatrical shows continued to be the main entertainment of the people, of the glory years of a young Margarita Xirgú, with whom Elena shared company, and the beginning of the avant-garde movements.
Elena was born in 1882; she became known with a work by Bataille in which she stripped naked on stage. She had already played Salomé, by Oscar Wilde, and several works by Santiago Rusiñol, in which her beauty and youth possibly stood out. Little by little, the critics also recognised her talent. The success she achieved encouraged her to form her own vaudeville company in 1914.
From 1916 she began to work with the cinema: it was an expensive and still minority novelty, but in which a future almost without limits could be seen. For this new format Elena acted, but she also got involved in direction and production, and, at the same time that she bought a plot of land on Via Layetana, with the intention of building her own theatre, she directed her first and only film: Thais.
It is not known what happened after 1918. Perhaps the deadly flu epidemic that took her partner marked a before and after in the tastes and habits of theatre-goers? Could it have been a failure in the choice of subject matter, or was Elena ahead of her time? There are many unknowns. Thais premiered, but the theatre project was never carried out. She herself hardly ever took part in any plays or projects, and her name and figure vanished. As in so many other cases, the interest in female faces absent from history rescued her and placed her name among the pioneers of cinema.
