Interview in 2021 Carlos Saura: "Civil war is not such a distant possibility"
Recognition Carlos Saura, the most obvious Goya Award of honor
Saura profile, all Saura, only Saura
It seems impossible to summarize in the narrow ideology of an obituary the entire life of
one of the greatest, most active and longest-lived European filmmakers
of all time.
His career is not only an almost uninterrupted succession of masterpieces since he shot his first short film,
La tarde del domingo
, in 1957, but also, literally,
Carlos Saura
has refused to stop for a second until today, when he has died at the age of 91 in Madrid.
On the verge of receiving a late honor Goya on Saturday the 11th of this month
, he leaves a film on the billboard (
Las paredes habland'
) and the promise of another hundred.
"I never get bored. When I'm not filming, I write, I take photographs, I paint...", he confessed not long ago on the occasion of an award received in Malaga where a large group of new filmmakers led by Carla Simón not only paid tribute to him but, much more important, they thanked him.
How much of the girl from '
Alcarràs
' will not be in the Ana Torrent from
'Cría Cuervos'!
Carlos Saura was born in Aragon on January 4, 1932.
Exactly like Goya and Buñuel.
And who knows if because of that or because of sheer obstinacy very down to earth, he soon learned that industrial engineering was not his thing, which he began to study like every possible son of a family, quite the contrary.
"I live by and for the imagination. It is the imagination that unites us. Imagination travels faster than light itself", he liked to answer anyone who asked him about that strange trans-Pyrenean coincidence.
So it didn't take long for him to enter the already mythical Institute of Cinematographic Research and Experiences of Madrid, and of Bardem and Berlanga, where he became a director.
And from here began a life that does not end through more than
fifty films, a Golden Bear in Berlin, a Jury Prize in Cannes, two Goyas, a few novels, thousands of photographs, seven children, four weddings. ..
So much so that when the director Félix Viscarret insisted on counting Saura in a documentary, he ended up calling it
'Saura(s)
', in the plural.
Saura never ends no matter how much the obituaries say with such rudimentary insistence.
He was expected at the last edition of the San Sebastian Festival because he had to present his latest work.
She couldn't go.
A domestic accident prevented him.
What it was, was precisely the movie.
And to no one's surprise, there was an unprecedented Carlos Saura, curious, provocative and voracious.
Suddenly, the creator of a new language for Spanish cinematography when the whole world was consumed in new waves,
the man who paralyzed the Cannes Film Festival in the midst of the fever of May 1968
(in truth, it was the other way around: the frenzy, Truffaut and Godard were the ones who interrupted the screening of
'Stress-is three-three'
), the deviser of other ways of combining popular music with the image, the shadow photographer and even the occasional painter (all of which Saura was inexhaustible) surprised with the insane and happy proposal of matching Paleolithic art with urban graffiti , the painters of Altamira with Barceló, the first inhabitant of the darkness of a cave with Suso33.
Fascinating.
Well, all those '
sauras
' are still there.
Through all of them, modernity entered Spanish cinema.
And not only that, it was also thanks to his cinema that the memory of a disastrous time forgotten by obligation was recovered intact with all his fears and each one of his scars.
Already in his first works he could do everything.
If
'Los golfos
' in 1960 dared to bring the camera closer to the harshest reality in Spain against almost everyone, it was five years later with
'La caza'
when the world and its cinematographic representation split in two.
Nobody had dared until then to portray the depth of the always open wound of the Civil War
like him in a stifling, sweaty, blinding film of sheer darkness.
Just for that couple of jobs, the filmmaker would have achieved his place in heaven, which, why not, is also hell.
Carlos Saura, in 2009. José Aymá
Then, or at the same time, would come his meeting with the producer
Elías Querejeta.
Movies like
'Peppermint frappé', 'Stress-is three-three', 'The Burrow'
, '
The Garden of Earthly Delights'
and '
Anna and the Wolves
' (all in an arc that goes from 1967 to 1972) mark an era Not only of opening, but also of reformulation of almost everything: the codes of representation, the investigation of abstract grammars and the reflection at last of a world buried after decades of Francoist repression.
He changes the form and, hand in hand with him, the limits of what can be said and what must be reflected on.
It is a free cinema, despite censorship, for freedom.
It is a cinema built from memory for memory.
It is a cinema that refuses to be forgotten.
It is a cinema against the long and monotonous horror of Francoism.
His consecration and glory would come with
'La cousin Angélica',
distinguished in Cannes with the Special Jury Prize in 1973, and
'Cría Cuervos'
, deserving of the same award in the same place two years later.
Spanish cinema not only transformed its content but also its visibility.
Saura and with him all of Spain mattered to the world.
The Transition that was beginning would be and is incomprehensible without works like
'Elisa, my life'
, one of her starkest and most perfect works, and without
'Los ojos ventandado
', and without
'Mama turns one hundred years old',
and without that reformulation (another time) of the quinqui cinema that is 'Hurry up, hurry up', a precious and precise Golden Bear in Berlin.
And with everything and despite everyone, it would seem that when turning around the year 1980, Saura had only just begun.
Immediately afterwards, together with Antonio Gades and the producer Emiliano Piedra, Saura reinvents the musical with a trilogy for eternity made up of '
Bodas de sangre', 'Carmen'
and
'El amor brujo'.
The way in which cinema questions itself in a game of mirrors in which fiction and reality are confused, discussed and even refuted seems to be the clearest example of all the revolutions that will come later.
It's not just music, it's not just cinema, it's not just dance,
it's the most lucid and beautiful questioning of the limits of language itself
, any of them.
What follows is the work of an infinite Aragonese determined to reinvent himself with each step he takes.
Equally capable of a dazzling and spectacular blockbuster like
'El Dorado'
, an exemplary tragicomedy and a new reinterpretation of the Civil War like
'Ay, Carmela!
'or a hypnotic immersion inside his countryman in
'Goya en Bordeaux'
.
This at the same time that he does not renounce his passion for popular music with
'Sevillanas', 'Flamenco', 'Fados', 'Zonda', 'Jota'...
No one has been capable of so much without renouncing for a second his other passions as a painter, photographer, writer, draftsman, stage director... One could even add the passion to which he dedicated the most passion, which was none other than lover, lover of same love.
"I have been lucky in life doing what attracted me the most:
I have directed movies, theater, opera and I have drawn, photographed and painted all my life, and I hope to continue doing so..."
, Saura wrote when he found out about the last Goya which is yet to come.
Saura was eight times nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
The first time in 1960 and the last time in 1988. In between, Spain was completely transformed.
And no one like him to record the greatest revolution in our history.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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