Issue No. 610
Culture
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31 Oct. - 6 Nov. 2002 Issue No. 610 Culture |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Linked to life
Carlos Saura, honoured by the Cairo Film Festival, talks to Mohamed El-Assyouti about Goya, Buñuel and the trials of the auteur
By the turn of the 1950s, when Saura was making his first film Los golfos, Buñuel, Bergman, Fellini and Antonioni were already established auteurs, while the status of the director was to be consolidated further with the French nouvelle vague, he recalls. "It was a very good time to begin. We were living a golden moment of cinema as invention. The other arts, too, especially painting, witnessed similar innovation. Painting and cinema were reliving the moment of invention."
photo: Randa Shaath
The political environment in Spain presented a serious challenge to the young Saura, who had taught film at the Institute de Investigaciones y Experiencas Cinematogràficas (IIEC) since his graduation in 1957, but was forced to leave for political reasons in 1964.
"During Franco's time censorship was very severe. It was very difficult for a filmmaker to express opinions on the issues he wanted to address."
Saura, then, faced a stark choice -- either stay in Spain and make films complying with the demands of the censorship or leave. He opted for the former. Whereas his older brother, a painter, left for France, Saura proceeded with his chosen career step by step, trying to co-exist with the censorship until Franco died and censorship was abolished.
In the early years of his career his scripts were a result of collaboration with others. Later, and coinciding with the end of Fascism in Spain, Saura finally found enough courage to assume full responsibility for his scripts. His first independently written film, Cria cuervos (Raise Ravens, 1976), a title based on the popular saying "raise ravens and they will scratch out your eyes," revolves around a nine-year-old girl, Ana, who, by way of avenging her betrayed mother poisons her authoritarian father -- or did she just imagine doing it? Later, she projects herself into the future, and sees herself in 1995, a scarred, yet empowered, version of her mother (both roles played by Geraldine Chaplin). At the time critics hailed Cria's adept use of political allegories -- by now Saura's indelible mark on the industry. Of the futuristic vision in Cria Saura says: "I have always liked playing around with the notion of time. I like to forge a vision of the future; to examine and criticise something in the past and the present, then imagine how it will affect the future."
Another Saura patented concern, as exemplified in Cria and El Dorado (1987), is female subjectivity: "I like," he laughs, "to give more attention to the woman rather than the man. She is more mysterious and ambiguous, and I'm always intrigued by this ambiguity. I like to investigate it and unravel the secrets of the female subject. The man, I already know."
Authors have been the protagonists in more than a dozen of Saura's films. Are they, then, a surrogate representative of the director? The protagonist in Tango (1998) -- screened last week in the "Tributes" section of the festival -- needs to give voice to his opposition to Fascism in the face of harsh censorship. Critic Geoffrey Macnab has noted the suspicious closeness between the names Suàrez and Saura.
"In all my films there is an autobiographical personal line," says Saura. "I have never made a film that was strictly autobiographical but in all my films, and Tango in particular, I intrude in the characterisations. It is in any case impossible to separate one's personal life from the films one makes. But there is no direct relationship between Mario Suàrez, the show's director, and myself. He follows the same steps any director follows in order to present his show in the best way possible."
Tango, filmed entirely in Argentina and, to Saura's pride, including an all Argentinean cast save for Angelo the Mafioso -- "I would have felt I was betraying the subject matter if all the actors and dancers were not Argentinean" -- encountered several censorship problems. As the show within the film addressed recent social change and political turmoil some people were against including it in the film though the censors never excised anything, says Saura.
In defying censorship, Mario Suàrez, the main protagonist in Tango, underlines Borges' dictum about forgetfulness being the enemy of the future. "It is a complicated issue," Saura concedes. "Even if one wanted to forget the past it is difficult to do so because it always returns." The recent history of Argentina and Chile, Saura is keen to point out, resembles that of Spain, where democratic rule was overthrown and replaced by military dictatorship.
"Argentinian refugees who came to Spain narrated things that I experienced first hand during the reign of Franco. History repeats itself."
Saura has collaborated with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro on the visuals of five of his most recent films, Flamenco (1997), Tango (1998), Goya in Bordeaux (1999), Buñuel on King Solomon's Table (2001) and Salome (2002), and it is the Italian Storaro who is credited with contributing to a significant change in the overall look of Saura's films. The range of tonalities have moved towards the warmer end of the palette.
"Storaro introduced the use of very striking colours in a manner I had never considered before. When we started this in Flamenco I was a bit worried, but later I became used to them."
His earlier works had been largely characterised by cold, dark colours, often earth tones and greys.
"I think the use of such sombre colours is something very Spanish. I recently started to assimilate a different visual tradition, one that uses the saturated colours of other Mediterranean cultures. Thanks to Storaro this Italian palette entered my Spanish films," adds Saura.
When Storaro and Saura communicate the former insists on speaking Spanish, the latter Italian, "but we understand each other quite well," contends Saura, affirming what even the least visually literate viewer grasps. Then, pen and paper secured, the director begins to sketch visual aids to explain the technique of background lighting used on the sets in his films. Transparent (paravan-like) panels began to be used as backgrounds. By varying the lighting the colours change, evoking different surroundings, different moods. Saura characteristically films in a studio with only one camera, though occasionally a second is used. And in order to limit any intrusion on the dance Saura relies on remote control cameras, stationing the entire crew away from the dancers with only the camera moving close.
"It is difficult preparing a musical film that depends on dance. What can you really commit to paper?" Which is why before writing the script, he explains, he interviewed endless dancers and choreographers, exploring all possibilities.
So far he has made only films he likes: "I am a lover of musical/dance films. They provide an enormous creative space in terms of mise-en-scène, camera movement, editing -- all elements I want to experiment with."
In Tango self-reflexivity becomes a dominant stylistic mode. As in some Fellini and Bergman films the camera appears -- in Tango reflected in a mirror during some dance numbers, while one transition between scenes involves a dissolve that graphically matches the iris of Mario Suàrez's eye with the lens of the camera. Narratively, symmetrical patterns of repetition emerge: the situation and dialogue between Suàrez and his ex-girlfriend is repeated later between his new girlfriend, Elena, and her ex-boyfriend Angelo. As the protagonist imagines a dancing tableau, it comes to life. Typically, Saura dissolves the barriers between fantasy and reality, past, present and future, subjective and objective -- a characteristic of auteur cinema that often solicits the accusations of self- indulgence.
So how does Saura react to the commonly heard charge that the auteur simply makes the same film over and over again?
"It is something that depends on each artist. Each one is a special case: some do not mind creating one characteristic style for themselves, others try to mix and mingle every time, hybridising, innovating and negating old aspects of their art. I never ask myself how much is new or repeated in my films. I consider myself lucky because I always make the films I want to make. Even though there are common elements repeated in my films, I feel every film takes me a step further. I do not know whether this is true or not, but that's how I feel."
Sevillanas (1992) was the first time Saura used paravans to create an imaginary stage space, an experiment later developed in collaboration with Storaro. In Goya (1999) the Catalan theatre troupe La Fura dels Baus re-enacts 17 tableaux vivants based on Goya's Disasters of War series, with other works by Goya projected on sliding screens. During Franco such post-civil war themes dominated Saura's cinema, as he chose allegory and symbolism to create non-linear structures informing the conditions of contemporary Spain. Later, following the abolition of censorship, he shifted from political themes, which he believes he focused on as a moral obligation, to films that attempted a more ambitious mapping of the complexities of the human psyche.
On his cinematic treatments of very theatrical dances, Saura says: "I like to sketch my compositions. For me inspiration may come from a photograph, a painting or a musical composition. It varies and there is no systematic way of deriving the way I design a scene. Sometimes people wonder how I did this or that and some think I'm so organised, but I follow my inspiration though I am very careful with technique."
Saura's films do not, generally, end happily. In Tango, though, he concedes that he tried hard not to end on a sad note, and admits at the press-conference following the screening of the film to being very happy to have managed to close the film in the manner he did. At the same press-conference he also denied any relation between the tango dances in his film and the tango dance in the closing scene of Pasolini's Sal˜ or 120 Days of Sodom, another film criticising fascism and neo- fascism. "I like the work of Pasolini, but I am not influenced by it," he told the audience.
Saura is also an admirer of many American musicals, including West Side Story. When nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar for Carmen he met Robert Wise, director of West Side Story, who told him that he had started a new trend in the musical genre with Carmen. "I'm not convinced I did that," he says, obviously pleased.
In Goya the 82-year-old artist (Francisco Rabal) says "humans are worse than animals, because they're aware of the harm they're doing." The statement, Saura elucidates, alludes to a text by a Spanish author from the 14th-15th century who had witnessed so much violence and wars.
So when Mario Suàrez examines Goya's paintings while preparing for the show in Tango, was Saura himself contemplating his own film on Goya? The answer is unequivocal.
"No. I was not thinking about my film on Goya while making Tango."
His penultimate film, Buñuel at King Solomon's Table, could be perceived as an attempt to make explicit a link between himself and Buñuel, with whose witty humour Saura's own films are often critically compared as being too opaque and dense.
"Buñuel is somebody who opens the mind," believes Saura. He does not, though, consider himself Buñuel's disciple, while maintaining that he benefited greatly from their friendship and conversations together. And Saura, who often confronts his detractors by asserting that his cinema is neither elliptic, symbolic nor secret, insists: "My films are transparent, and almost always linked to my own life story, as I have realised over the years. In me cinema is absolutely linked to life and its complexity. Like Buñuel, I always work according to my whims and needs."
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