
From Le Monde Libertarie
by Daniel Pinos
February 19, 2023
On Friday February 10, Carlos Saura, the Aragonese director, died at the age of 91.
Carlos Saura joined Buñuel, Berlanga and Bardem, the greatest Spanish filmmakers of our time. Together with his illustrious friends, he created the essence of Spanish cinema during the most difficult period of its recent history, the Franco dictatorship and the transition.
Until his last breath, Saura never stopped filming and creating, going from one horizon to another. He depicted the world with his camera, which he never parted with, like an appendage of himself. Intrepid, curious, music lover, Carlos Saura would always surprise us.
Everything interested him, he made the most of all his experiences. The director died at the age of 91, the day before the Spanish Goyas ceremony, the equivalent of our Caesars, during which he was to receive an honorary award.
A cinema of resistance
Born in Huesca, in Aragon, in 1932, he began studying industrial engineering, but changed direction to join the Institute of Cinematographic Research and Experiences in Madrid. In 1952, he directed his first short film, "La tarde del domingo" (Sunday afternoon), followed by the documentary "Cuenca" and, in 1960, he released "Los golfos" (The thugs), a fundamental work directly linked to Italian neorealism transposed to Spanish reality. It is through an idle youth and typically Spanish petty crime that Carlos Saura attacks the Franco regime.
But it was "La caza" (The Hunt) in 1966 that catapulted him to success only five years later. How best to represent the Spanish Civil War without talking about it, only from an allegorical point of view? With "La casa," the director chooses a minimalist device, but with a very effective symbolism: José, Paco and Luis, three friends who once fought in the camp of the nationalists, meet for a hunting party in a scrubland drowned by the sun and the silence. The aridity of this space crushed by the sun is a beautiful metaphor for what Spain was like at that time: a dying country that no longer offered the slightest oxygen.
It was only the beginning of a varied and radical career, courageous and full of symbols that only challenged the reality of the time.
The productions of Elias Querejeta and Carlos Saura
His relationship with the producer Elías Querejeta was fundamental for the development of his career, as well as for many authors of the moment, such as Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón or Víctor Erice. The association of Elias Querejeta and Carlos Saura gives us avant-garde films like "Peppermint Frappé," in 1967, or "Stres es tres tres" ( Stress is being three) in 1968. These two titles shape the modernity of Spanish cinema and manage to bring it out of the country's borders at a particularly difficult time.
Carlos Saura sifts through Francoism and a bourgeoisie that adhered to the dogmas of the dictatorship. Works that flout censorship, with which he had more than one run-in. This is aesthetically and thematically radical cinema.
"La caza" won the Silver Bear in Berlin and "Peppermint Frappé" the prize for best director, which would be completed by the Golden Bear in 1981 with "Deprisa, deprisa" (Hurry, Hurry).
But the Berlinale is not the only one to appreciate its value. For many years, he was the only Spanish director to go to the Cannes Film Festival, where he won the jury prize for two of his emblematic works, "La prima Angélica" (The Angelic cousin) , in 1974, and "Cría cuervos" (Nourished crows) in 1976.
In this last fiction, the director tells the life of an eight-year-old girl who discovers with her big eyes (the crushing gaze of Ana Torrent) the world of adults. A world of hypocrisy, adultery and lies. "Cria Cuervos" addresses themes such as the loss of innocence, nostalgia for the past and the search for affection, but also deals with death and current issues such as the consequences of machismo and the application of euthanasia.
In Carlos Saura's films, children watch adults without illusions and prefer to lock themselves in their imaginary universe fleeing the suffocating world of Spanish society under the boot of General Franco.
Saura uses metaphor to talk about Franco's repression, historical memory, the emptiness that his generation suffers from, and he is responsible for x-raying all the ills of Spanish society through a symbolic style, but at the same time raw, revulsive and combative. And he does this through films that are still as enigmatic and fascinating such as "Ana y los lobos" (Ana and the Wolves), in 1973. A film loaded with symbolism and political allusions with the right balance to both provoke and circumvent censorship. Carlos Saura realizes in his first works a devastating criticism of the Spanish aristocracy at the time of Francoism.
After the death of the Caudillo, in 1975, the filmmaker continues for a while to paint Hispanic society. In 1979, "Mama cumple cien años" (Mom is a hundred years old) was released. Around her, and in the old house, the family gathers to celebrate the grandmother's 100th birthday. Her two sons, Fernando and Juan arrive home with their wives, as well as their three daughters.
Ana (Geraldine Chaplin), the former governess, and her husband, who arrived from Argentina, also attend the party. All the children can't wait for Mom to die so that the estate becomes their property and they can sell it and put an end to the ruin in which they are all mired. The film was nominated in Hollywood for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Finally, he leaves the field of social criticism to the young directors of the Spanish Movida, in the forefront of which there is Pedro Almodóvar. As he told Le Monde in 2009, he felt “after Franco's death, freed from a moral obligation.”
With "Deprisa, deprisa," he radically changes his style and approaches quinqui (scum) cinema from a perspective that is as realistic as it is poetic. Pablo, el Meca, el Sebas and Ángela are four young people who want to escape from the marginal environment in which they live. To do this, they need money, but they are not willing to work for years to be able to save it. They only think about getting it fast and living fast. Deprisa, Deprisa was a financial and critical success, it received a very good reception in Madrid and proved to be the most important production of Elías Querejeta during his 15 years of collaboration with Saura.
A passion for music
In 1981, he began a new stage which led him to explore a large part of the musical genres with Latin roots. His first approach is the adaptation of "Bodas de sangre" (Blood Wedding), by Federico García Lorca, with Antonio Gades, Cristina Hoyos guitarist Paco de Lucia. "Bodas de sangre" is one of Federico García Lorca's best-known plays, a tragedy published in 1931 and inspired by real events, a crime that took place in Níjar in 1928. He continues his work with "Carmen," magnificently embodied by Laura del Sol, in which he continues to explore the forms and origins of flamenco. With "El amor brujo" (The sorcerer's love), based on the work of Manuel de Falla, he closes his trilogy with "Gades," while interspersing works of fiction such as "Los zancos" (The stilts) or the blockbuster "El Dorado."
Out of loyalty to his mother who was a musician and out of passion for music, he will return to the musical essence, in an increasingly conceptual way in "Sevillanas," "Flamenco," "Iberia," "Fados," "Jota de Saura," "Tango" or "Flamenco, flamenco."
In 1991, he directed "¡Ay Carmela!" with Carmen Maura and Andrés Pajares. In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, Paulino and Carmela, two traveling actors, accompanied by their assistant Gustave, sing for the Republicans, they are arrested in an area controlled by the Francoists. Under pressure from the latter, they agree to host a last evening offered to Polish fighters from the International Brigades who have been captured and will be shot the next day.
Goya, Buñuel and Lorca
He then approaches some historical figures linked to painting, cinema, or artistic creation. He gave actor Francisco Rabal his last major role, that of Francisco de Goya in "Goya en Burdeos" ( Goya in Bordeaux) and invents a surreal adventure between Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca in "Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón" (Buñuel and King Solomon's Table).
Saura describes Buñuel, during his old age, imagining a film where he stages himself, young, in search of the legendary table of Solomon in the company of Salvador Dali and Frederico Garcia Lorca. Saura and Buñuel were very close. "Buñuel was a free spirit and I learned from him to work with my imagination,” writes the filmmaker.
Despite his advanced age, Saura continued to work. In recent years he would give us films such as "Goya 3 de mayo" (Goya May 3rd) and "Rosa Rosae: The civil war." In this animated film, through thirty images, drawings and photographs, Carlos Saura invents a story which, if it recreates the Spanish Civil War, above all reflects the horrors of a universal war. The point of view is that of an innocent child.
The life of Carlos Saura and his cinema are marked, like Spanish history, by the civil war. Saura defines himself as a child of war. The military coup occurred when he was four years old, his family left Huesca and took refuge in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. A traumatic experience that he always remembered and always talked about. In recent years, with the rise of the far right, he has used his own example to warn against the filthy beast.
He then directed "El Rey de todo el mundo" (The king of everyone) and "Las paredes hablan" (The walls speak) which will be his last film. It depicts the evolution and relationship of art with the wall as a creative canvas, from the first graphic revolutions of prehistoric caves to the most avant-garde expressions of urban art.
Books, operas and plays
He wrote an autobiographical novel, "Pajarico solitario" (Little bird), which he then brought to the screen, doing the opposite operation with "Elisa, vida mía" which was first a film and then turned into literature. He also directed operas, "Carmen" and "Don Giovanni," and plays: "La fiesta del chivo" (The feast of the goat), "El coronel no tiene quien le escriba" (The colonel has no one to write to him) and "El gran teatro del mundo" (The Great Theater of the World) by the great classical author Calderón de la Barca.
With director Adela Medrano he had two sons, Carlos and Antonio Saura Medrano, who followed in his footsteps. Geraldine Chaplin, the mother of his son Shane, became his lover for more than a decade. He then married Mercedes Pérez in 1978, with whom he had three more children. His last companion Eulalia Ramón, mother of Ana Saura, shared his last years. His younger brother, the great painter Antonio Saura shaped his artistic tendencies, they collaborated on several occasions, notably for the staging of "Carmen."
It would obviously be impossible to claim to summarize the artistic creation of a lifetime like that of Carlos Saura. We still have his films, his legendary moments that are part of the collective memory, like Ana Torrent's dance with her sister in "Cría cuervos" to the sound of "¿Por qué te vas?" Jeanette's song.
Carlos Saura will have made about fifty films, the last of which, "Les murs parlent" (The walls speak), premiered in Spain on Friday February 10, the day of his death.
"I live with the passion of humanity.”
In December 2015, along with Christiane Passevant, we interviewed Carlos Saura for the program "Chroniques rebelles" on Radio Libertaire , during the release in France of his film "Argentina Zonda." We talked about commitment, he admitted to us that he had never belonged to a political party because he was an anarchist.
The best way to pay homage to this giant of cinematographic art is to watch or re-watch his films, by plunging into his often melancholic and seemingly pessimistic universe, due to the context in which they were created. Beautiful and liberating films, in which Carlos Saura reminds us of the essence of his work: his unlimited passion for humanity and the unconditional defense of freedom and equality, fundamental values so that we can live and dream to the full.
"My cinema is woven in the labyrinths of memory, I hate tyranny and oppression, I live with the passion of humanity," he said.
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