CARLOS SAURA. OPEN EYES
Someone wrote that if Carlos Saura had stopped making films around 1975, the ten films made to date would be enough to earn a more than a prominent place in the history of Spanish cinema. Fortunately the artist, almost forty years later, is still alive and kicking and the image he has built of himself in the time that has elapsed since then has added a number of nuances to the somewaht stereotypical one that criticism composed when evaluating his film work, done in the fruitful period that starts in the mid-fifties of the last century and continues until the end of the seventies.
If I point out the above is to suggest that one of the great virtues of Carlos Saura´s has been able to base his creative work on the moments he has lived, looking at each point of them with the most appropriate tuning with the signs of times. To put it more academically, it should be noted that a single Carlos Saura, empirical author, is accompanied by several Carlos Saura, model authors, to use the terminology coined by Umberto Eco. Basically, all his work is nothing but the constant search for ways in which film (or photography or writing, to which he has never put his nose up) is capable of biting the reality from which it springs, to dialogue with the context to which it adheres.
There would be many ways to shed some light on this dimension Saura´s cinema, but I find especially useful to stress the dialogue his work has maintained with other artists. The encounters allowed him to explore new paths, to explore little trodden territory. Certainly the decisive encounter (Saura has never concealed this) was the one with Luis Buñuel, not so much because of the direct influence of the maestro of Calanda on his cinema, but, above all, the ethical mark was imprinted on his person by the person by the author of The Forgotten Ones (Los olvidados).
After the long and fruitful collaboration with Elias Querejeta, so much so that Spanish culture in decades of the sixties and seventies would not be understood at all without the cinema which they both constructed. Although it should be stated that Saura being an essential filmmaker of the so called New Spanish Cinema, which he provided with essential works and the flagship of the movement—The Hunt (la caza, 1965)— he also has the honor to have made, before it existed as such, the only cinematographic piece—I’m speaking of The Delinquents (Los golfos, 1959)—which, viewed from today’s perspective, is without any problems in consonance with all the emerging new cinemas around the world at the time.
But there is another no less relevant Saura: that, in close collaboration with Antonio gades (and the production of Emiliano Piedra), dares to open the spigot that can sprout a musical cinema not to be confused with the stereotype that comes from across the atlantic. between 1981 and 1986, the flamenco trilogy constructs an original way to understand the relationship between dance, music and film image as it had not been seen in our cinema since the memorable Fair of the Dove (La Verbena de la Paloma,1935) by Benito perojo. Saura himself will draw some conclusions from this effort, which will benefit a large part of his films, from Sevillanas (1991) to Flamenco, Flamenco (2020), from Tango (1998) to Fado (2008).
Similarly, the photographer who has never failed to nest in Carlos Saura was called to explore with particular intensity in his cinema the play of light and color. of course, there is the more than suggestive collaboration with that great man of cinema, Vittorio Storaro—Goya in Bordeaux (Goya en Burdeos) would be enough to testify the fruitfulness of collaboration—, but I think it is fair to point out that we should not wait for that meeting to capture in Saura´s cinema a very special visual sensivity, always alert to the play of black and white as well as a color. Therefore it is necessary to point out the role of men as Juan Julio Baena —from the stark black and white of The Delinquents to the searing light of Weeping for a Bandit (Llanto por un bandido)—, Luis Cuadrado—in the first part of the Elías Querejeta cycle—, Teo Escamilla—especially in the films of the flamenco trilogy—or José Luis López Linares—in his later music documentaries—have had in the powerful and progressive visual configuration of Aragonese filmmaker´s universe.
Basically, all these encounters (with producers, dancers, with operators), all these collaborations, have served to reinvent himself at various times in his career, to avoid stagnation of an oeuvre that, rather than wither in the mechanic repetition of a fixed style of once and for all, has managed to regenerate and confront new challenges. in a recent interview Saura summed up his life: “I have made over forty films and am solely responsible for them, I have seven children, thousands of photographs, drawings, records, documents and more than six hundred photographic cameras.” It would suffice to add: and a leading role in the history of Spanish cinema in the second half of the twentieth century.
Santos Zunzunegui
Professor (UPV/EHU)
