Carlos Saura

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DarkImbecile
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Carlos Saura

#1 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue Dec 27, 2022 8:33 pm

Carlos Saura Atarés (1932 - 2023)

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“I can't separate cinema from my life. The two things are interrelated and enrich or impoverish each other.”

Filmography
Los golfos / The Delinquents (1960)
Llanto por un bandido (1964)
La caza / The Hunt (1966)
Peppermint Frappé (1967)
Stress-es tres-tres / Stress is Three (1968)
La madriguera / Honeycomb (1969)
El jardín de las delicias / The Garden of Delights (1970)
Anna y los lobos / Anna and the Wolves (1973)
La prima Angélica / Cousin Angelica (1974)
Cría Cuervos (1976)
Elisa, visa mía / Elisa, My Life (1977)
Los ojos vendados (1978)
Mamá cumple 100 años / Mama Turns 100 (1979)
Deprisa, Deprisa (1981)
Bodas de sangre / Blood Wedding (1981)
Dulces horas / Sweet Hours (1982)
Antonieta (1982)
Carmen (1983)
Los zancos (1984)
El amor brujo (1986)
El Dorado (1988)
La noche oscura / The Dark Night of the Soul (1989)
Oh, Carmela! (1990)
Sevillanas (1992)
¡Dispara! / Outrage (1993)
Marathon (1993)
Flamenco (1995)
Taxi (1996)
Pajarico (1997)
Tango (1998)
Goya en Burdeos / Goya in Bordeaux (1999)
Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón (2001)
Salomé (2002)
El 7º día (2004)
Iberia (2005)
Fados (2007)
Sinfonía de Aragón (2008)
Io, Don Giovanni (2009)
Flamenco Flamenco (2010)
Argentina (2015)
Renzo Piano: An Architect for Santander (2018)
El rey de todo el mundo / The King of All the World (2021)
Las paredes hablan (2022)

Shorts
"El pequeño río Manzanares" (1956)
"La tarde del domingo" (1957)
"Cuenca" (1958)
"Oragina" (1991) [segment, The King of Ads]
"Rosa rose: La guerra civil" (2021)
"Goya: 3 de mayo" (2021)

Television
Cuentos de Borges — S01E01 — "El sur" (1993)

Books
Vanished Spain by Carlos Saura (2016)
Carlos Saura: Interviews by Linda M. Willem (2003)
The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing by Marvin D'Lugo (1991)

Web Resources
1999 interview with Stephen Garrett, IndieWire
"Living Memory", Film Comment (2007)
2011 interview with Giles Tremlett, The Guardian
2012 interview with James Woodall, The Arts Desk
2012 interview with Oskar Lindblom, Volt Café
2019 interview with Heather Galloway, The Olive Press
2021 interview with John Hopewell, Variety

Forum Resources
Eclipse Series 6: Carlos Saura's Flamenco Trilogy
403 Cría cuervos
900 100 Years of Olympic Films

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Re: Carlos Saura

#2 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue Dec 27, 2022 8:34 pm

DarkImbecile wrote:
Thu Dec 01, 2022 5:40 pm
Stress is Three / Stress-es tres-tres (Saura) — My first Saura and a more or less random choice from the Criterion Channel's 1968 offerings, this turned out to be a slow-burning study of a married couple and the husband's best friend and business partner traveling across Spain and simmering with sexual insecurity, bourgeois anxiety, and a generally ominous post-World War/mid-Vietnam War malaise. Saura litters his more effective Western European variation on a Knife in the Water scenario with portentous recurring imagery of pinned insects and religious iconography spotlighting violent martyrdom, while dialogue and news broadcasts emphasize overpopulation and dwindling, hoarded resources; the political position of these well-off people within Franco's Spain bubbles to the surface when the husband floats a decidedly fascistic solution to population growth, while his wife doesn't object except to wish that the deaths of millions wouldn't impact them personally. On a formal front, the extremely limited use of non-diegetic sound and distortions of the image make them highly effective when they are deployed, and otherwise Saura's images are crisp and clear. Reminiscent of Antonioni and the previously mentioned Polanski, this film's particular brand of unease, cultural specificity, and barely contained violence made it one of the most intriguing discoveries of the decade for me — the ambiguous but potentially chilling dialogue and falsely cheery musical note on which the film ends continues to turn over in my mind. Strongly recommended, will definitely make my list.
I was intrigued enough by this that I'm continuing to work through what the Criterion Channel has of Saura's 1960s and 1970s filmography, and wanted a place to gather my thoughts on him. More to come soon!

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knives
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Re: Carlos Saura

#3 Post by knives » Tue Dec 27, 2022 8:54 pm

Great to see this thread. I’m a bit agnostic on most of Saura’s work, but his dance films are some of the very best movies I’ve ever seen. In particular Zonda has stayed with me as a uniquely evocative way of showing the concrete purposes of dance.

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Re: Carlos Saura

#4 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue Dec 27, 2022 10:26 pm

La caza / The Hunt (1966) — "Carcasses are the best mementos..."

Midway through Carlos Saura's international breakthrough, Ismael Merlo's José is desperate to cajole his old friend Paco (Alfredo Mayo) into lending him half a million pesos to cover his business losses and the costs of abandoning his family for a younger woman; during the hottest part of midday, Jose sends the other two members of their rabbit-hunting party, Luis and the much younger Enrique, off into town for supplies, then takes Paco to one of the caves dotting the hills on Jose's land. Undoing a padlock, he leads Paco into the tight, dank space, promising to show him something hidden, something he's never shown anyone else: a skeletal corpse, a macabre, rotting remnant of the Civil War that ended three decades before with Spain a fascist dictatorship. Repulsed, Paco flees; later, after he's rejected Jose's pleas for financial help, Paco hears from the melancholy alcoholic Luis that Jose shows everyone the corpse in the cave. Like the arid hills on which the men hunt disease-ridden rabbits, Saura's Franco-era Spain is a land of grotesque secrets that everyone already knows, and one where violence past and present is always just beneath the surface.

La caza is the relatively straightforward story of three bourgeois older men who came up together during the war years as rightist militiamen and have risen to the point where women, money, and booze are as much of a threat to their masculine vitality as aging itself; similarly, their seething bitterness toward each other threatens to displace any brotherly bonhomie that might have once bound them together. The daylong hunting trip gradually exposes them for the petty, dishonest, venal, amoral people they are before exploding into violence, and the slowly ratcheting tension and slow revelation of character and motive makes that payoff quite satisfying. It is also quite authentically gruesome, so strong warning for those sensitive to animal violence.

As in Stress-es tres-tres, Saura characterizes via implication through close attention to detail and dialogue; to take just one example, the way his characters handle weapons — from modern rifles to old inherited shotguns and German Lugers — says as much about their past as any verbal exchange. Also like the 1968 film, there are recitations of literature — Luis reads from an apocalyptic sci-fi novel and later quotes Hemingway (in German) on moral and immoral behavior before pinning a beetle to a mannequin and emptying his rifle into it —and multiple shots of insects (I'll be curious to see whether this last bit of imagery, which seems very pointed in both features I've seen, recurs in any of his other films). He also includes some commentary by way of visual jokes: at one point the camera slowly tracks over the dozing, sweat-dappled bodies of two of the men, and shortly after does the same through Enrique's binoculars over a magazine centerfold as he acts out a little twice-removed voyeurism.

I continue to be pretty entranced by Saura's intense, dense imagery packed with meaning and the raw relationships between his troubled characters. My understanding is that his thematic concerns from this era — politics, class, mid-century anxiety about modernity, and the specificities of Spanish history and masculinity — don't extend as deeply into his more modern work, but I'm already very invested in seeing them develop and change over the decades.
knives wrote:
Tue Dec 27, 2022 8:54 pm
Great to see this thread. I’m a bit agnostic on most of Saura’s work, but his dance films are some of the very best movies I’ve ever seen. In particular Zonda has stayed with me as a uniquely evocative way of showing the concrete purposes of dance.
I'm excited to get to these, because there's very little sign of this preoccupation (outside of a playacted performance in Stress-es tres-tres) in the work I've seen thus far!

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Re: Carlos Saura

#5 Post by mteller » Wed Jan 04, 2023 12:59 am

Big fan of his performance films, need to catch up with more of his narrative work. My rankings:

1. Carmen
2. Flamenco, Flamenco
3. Peppermint Frappé
4. El amor brujo
5. Flamenco
6. Deprisa, deprisa
7. Blood Wedding
8. La prima Angelica
9. Cria cuervos
10. Elisa, vida mia
11. Ana y los lobos
12. Tango
13. Sevillanas

14. Iberia
15. Jota de Saura
16. Argentina (Zonda)
17. Goya in Bordeaux

18. Salomé
19. Taxi
20. Fados
21. Antonieta

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Aunt Peg
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Re: Carlos Saura

#6 Post by Aunt Peg » Wed Jan 04, 2023 3:33 am

After nearly 50 years of film viewing I've seen 30 films from Carlos Saura. A complete Blu Ray box set off all his work would be most welcome.

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Re: Carlos Saura

#7 Post by L.A. » Wed Jan 04, 2023 9:10 am

Noticed that Flamenco Trilogy Blu-ray came out in Spain last month with a 64-page book. English subtitles listed.

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Re: Carlos Saura

#8 Post by DarkImbecile » Sat Jan 07, 2023 4:20 pm

Peppermint Frappé (1967) — "We all have our obsessions..."

It's extremely appropriate that Saura dedicates what is easily both the most perverse and technically accomplished of his '60s features I've seen so far to his friend and countryman Luis Buñuel. Peppermint Frappé sees Saura investigating a more lurid kind of psychosexual tension — if the following year's Stress-es tres tres is a loose riff on Knife in the Water, this is Saura imagining a version of Vertigo where Scottie's unhealthy obsessive tips over the line into outright sociopathy... and perhaps finds a kindred spirit.

In the first of their several collaborations with Saura, prolific Spanish actor José Luis López Vázquez and Saura's muse and eventual lover Geraldine Chaplin are both excellent, giving at first restrained (even masked) performances that only reveal their full complexity as the film progresses. López Vázquez plays the reserved, quiet doctor, Julian, who first hints at his meticulous intensity and then fully succumbs to the unstoppable force of his obsessive and possessive nature. Chaplin, meanwhile, gives a remarkable double (or is it triple?) performance as Julian's childhood friend's new vivacious blonde wife, Elena, who Julian seems convinced is a woman he fell in love with at a religious festival in Calanda years before; she also plays Ana, the mousy, passive, and brunette nurse at his medical practice.

Things start getting more twisted as Julian's interest in Elena is rebuffed and he notices Ana's resemblance to the object of his fixation, bringing the shy young woman into his personal life even as he manipulates her into adopting Elena's appearance, exploiting her romantic interest in him to create a facsimile of the woman of his dreams. When his advances on Elena finally provoke a response he can't tolerate, Julian's obsession crosses the line from creepily insistent to cold-bloodedly violent, and also draws out a different side of Ana.

While the plot and a key visual motif are riffs on Hitchcock — the titular drink is a very particular shade of green — several stylistic and thematic elements are more indebted to Buñuel, particularly Julian's daydreamed visions of Elena's wedding playacted by children or of a girl on a pogo stick as he hears the newlyweds making love in his own bed above him. Other moments also evince a Buñuelian touch, as when Julian shows Elena a monument with a handprint embedded in it and describes a legend of Satan chasing a maiden and turning her into a cross of stone with his touch.

Saura touches on a few of his recurring thematic interests from this era: the fascination and revulsion elicited by death and dead animals, as a long-dead family pet is exhumed for laughs; a somewhat blasphemous treatment of religious iconography; and voyeurism — this time through a keyhole and a camera lens. When Julian is developing pictures of Elena, her ghostly silhouette gradually emerges from empty whiteness — just as the black and white flashbacks of his lost love in Calanda showcase a woman enveloped in white robes — and Saura lingers meaningfully on Julian's examination of her literal negative image, even as he inadvertently(?) works to create one figuratively in Ana.

In addition to more obviously serving as a tribute to Hitchcock and Buñuel, Saura also throws in some fun nods to Brigette Bardot and The Young Girls of Rochefort; these overt cinematic references are also evoked by the showiness of his camera work — there are three sequences that beautifully build tension and reveal character through long takes that swirl deliriously around characters in motion. Both the most fun and my favorite of his works so far.

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Re: Carlos Saura

#9 Post by DarkImbecile » Wed Feb 01, 2023 7:14 pm

Honeycomb / La madriguera (1969) — "...and they lived happily ever after."

Geraldine Chaplin's only screenwriting credit, Honeycomb starts off as an exploration of seemingly inexplicable regression into games of childlike playacting — first by Chaplin's Teresa, then gradually by her older husband, Per Oscarsson's Pedro — before morphing into more psychologically probing and ultimately dangerous ways of acting out traumas and anxieties past, present, and future. That sense of dislocation in time and space only heightens as they begin to role-play their way through increasingly uncomfortable scenarios that dig deeper and deeper into their relationships with family and friends, respective self-images, and finally their marriage.

Saura always seems to be working with a very specific sense of place, and this film is no exception: the couple are established in a brutalist mid-century nightmare of a house, all cold concrete walls, sharp angles, and extremely contemporary furnishings... at least until the arrival of Teresa's family's antique furniture, which seem to trigger her episodes of infantilization. As their descent into their games continues, so does the jarring contrast between the antique furnishing being brought from the basement and the house containing it, suggesting an irreconcilable contrast between her past and his future.

Amidst the increasingly stark self-criticism occurring as they role-play scenarios as disparate as delivering a child, punishing a disobedient dog, and infidelity, there's also some class criticism when they adopt the personas of their own household servants complaining about Teresa and Pedro and speculating on their priorities and commitment to each other. As they edge toward more sensitive and consequential territory in their games, the two seem unable to entirely extricate themselves from this dynamic they've initiated, pushing inexorably toward truths that can't be dismissed as make-believe.

The macabre imagery that is clearly a recurring theme in Saura's filmography is prominently seeded throughout: a smiling childhood photo becomes a disturbing artifact after Teresa glues her baby teeth and lock of hair to it; a forbidden book of anatomical and medical illustrations features in one of her early games; and a crayon picture of her parents killed in a plane crash hints at her traumatic background. Similarly, insects and animals make more striking appearances here, as Teresa gifts Pedro an ant farm whose teeming mounds of larvae and workers he's surprised to find himself drawn to; later, he dreams of pouring crawfish over Teresa's body as she writhes and moans underneath them. Alongside these images inviting interpretation, there's also a strong whiff of necrophilia on a particular outfit Pedro requests Teresa to wear in bed, and potentially dark undertones to her own arousal when he playacts as her father spanking her with a ruler for bad grades.

This isn't as tight and technically accomplished as some of his other works from this decade, but the nerves Saura touches here are raw enough to make this an involving psychosexual chamber piece, and one that continues to probe his previously established thematic interests and visual motifs.

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Re: Carlos Saura

#10 Post by DarkImbecile » Sat Feb 04, 2023 3:23 pm

The Garden of Delights / El jardín de las delicias (1970) — "...and so the fruit is only as good as the tree which bears it..."

Carlos Saura's second darkly comic masterpiece begins with throbbing mechanical and electrical noises as the camera drifts through a broken down space cluttered with rusting machinery and random piles of detritus — a space that mirrors the disused shambles of its protagonist's mind and, perhaps, the filmmaker's view of the Spanish civic and political sphere in the twilight of Franco's dictatorship. My favorite of Saura's films thus far, The Garden of Delights is laugh-out-loud comedy layered atop masterful satire, his most technically accomplished and visually dynamic film while also the most openly political provocation of his first decade of features.

Quick aside before I get into the narrative: I enjoyed watching this without knowing any of the plot dynamics — being utterly baffled during the escalating hilarity of the opening sequence was quite fun — but I also suspect understanding the basic dynamic going in doesn't undercut enjoyment of the many delightful moments beyond that.

José Luis López Vázquez— so great in Peppermint Frappé and even better here navigating all the constraints on his performance — plays Antonio, a wealthy industrialist responsible for an enormously profitable expansion of the family company, but who now has suffered severe brain damage after a car accident and is largely non-verbal and confined to a wheelchair. Impatient with his rehabilitation and desperate to access some of the millions Antonio has stashed in Swiss banks, Antonio's family tries to spur along the recovery of his memory by recreating important moments from his past, but instead mostly just further confuse and traumatize him with squealing pigs, bad wigs, riots in churches, and recreations of his mother's death.

As Antonio experiences these playacted farces alongside actual recollection, waking dreams and nightmares, and the absurdity of his family's actual treatment of him and each other, Saura so effectively blurs the liminal spaces between reality and memory, recreation and fantasy, past and present that it's difficult to tell until well into a given scene how firmly rooted in reality what we're seeing might be. Possible recreations of gauzy childhood interactions with a beloved aunt suddenly drift into incestuous fantasies and prosaic interactions with one family member turn menacing when they suddenly adopt the persona of another, while perversities like Antonio refusing to eat until his maid flashes him become everyday occurrences and seeming fantasies like the appearance of his mistress become all too real when his wife can't tolerate her presence and attacks her.

Littered with references to the Civil War and the end of Republican Spain, the film seems almost dangerously pointed in some of its political criticism: one of the major setpieces is a recreation of Antonio's first communion, which his father makes a point of noting as "the happiest day of your life" and dating as April 14, 1931 — the day the short-lived Second Spanish Republic was established, ending the monarchy, weakening the church, and developing a constitutional order that Franco's victory eight years later would dismantle. Like Honeycomb, the prominent motif of regression into childhood here seems critical of Spain's stunted political and social development during the decades of dictatorship and simultaneously a genuine yearning for the preceding era, while not blind to the flaws of the country's past as well. A photo display of the family's history prominently features one image of soldiers on horseback attacking a crowd with their factory's smokestack in the background, and one of Antonio's delirious imaginings features opposing groups of children arrayed behind red and yellow shields hurling metal balls at each other with bloody results.

In addition to Saura's typically roving camera and clever setups, the sound design here is a prominent feature: air raid sirens and sounds of warfare intrude on the communion scene, some of Antonio's deliriums are signaled by the subtle hiss and pop of an unattended record player, and the sounds of birds, horses, and pigs prominently appear whether they're real or imagined. Speaking of one of Saura's most prominent reoccurring preoccupations, animal imagery features prominently as well: Antonio's parents threaten that a huge pig will eat his hands, he's visibly revolted by a rabbit being killed in the kitchen during one of his wandering attempts to escape the purgatorial family estate, and excitement fades to resignation as he clutches a mangled pigeon after an attempt to hunt.

As mentioned, this is a very funny film — "I'm so happy to see your old self coming back, my son!" Antonio's father exclaims when he verbally abuses a servant — culminating in a great scene in a rowboat between Antonio and his wife, but it's the macabre metaphor of the final image that will stick with me — an indictment not only of these specific characters and the class they represent, but of a nation crippled by unresolved traumas and resigned to a frustrated silence.

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Re: Carlos Saura

#11 Post by vsski » Sat Mar 18, 2023 12:10 am

Does anyone know why so few of Saura’s 60s and 70s movies have been published on English friendly Blu Rays?

Is it an issue of high def masters, licensing fees or simply the fact that they aren’t deemed commercially viable?

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Re: Carlos Saura

#12 Post by feihong » Sat Mar 18, 2023 2:06 am

vsski wrote:
Sat Mar 18, 2023 12:10 am
Does anyone know why so few of Saura’s 60s and 70s movies have been published on English friendly Blu Rays?

Is it an issue of high def masters, licensing fees or simply the fact that they aren’t deemed commercially viable?
I've wondered about this, too. There's a whole bunch of Saura films that have come out on blu ray in Spain. A company called Currency HV is selling a boxset of The Hunt, Peppermint Frappe, The Garden of Delights, Ana and the Wolves, Mama Turns 100, My Cousin Angelica, Elisa Vida Mia, Cria Cuervos, El Dorado, and Deprisa Deprisa. There's another set from the same company of Spanish Civil War cinema which has Ay Carmela! on it, there's a blu ray set of the Flamenco trilogy, and another company, Premium Cine, has a the blu ray of Tango I've been waiting for forever. But I haven't seen any of these, and I can't find any reviews. It looks like there's a blu ray of Flamenco Flamenco, and another of Jota. A company called Studio Research has a blu ray of Los Golfos with removable English subtitles, but a customer on Amazon.es says the quality of this disc isn't very good.

One reviewer on Amazon.es says that the transfers look "crisp" on the big boxset of 10 Saura films, and that some of the films offer English subtitles. I'm tempted to check out the set. 10 films for $50 is potentially a pretty good deal if the transfers are good. It looks from previous releases as if at least Peppermint Frappe and Ana and the Wolves on the 10-disc set have subtitles. The Flamenco Trilogy set has English subtitles for all the films. Tango, The Hunt, Elisa Vida Mia, El dorado, Deprisa Deprisa, Mama Turns 100, The Garden of Delights and Ay Carmela! seem not to have English subs––though I'm pretty sure most of the these have English languag .srt files on the internet somewhere.

It sounds from customer reviews as if some of the films have been restored, and others not?

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vsski
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Re: Carlos Saura

#13 Post by vsski » Sat Mar 18, 2023 2:18 am

Thanks feihong - your information is similar to what I have found. Some sources I saw say the movies do not have subs other say a few of the ones in the big box do, but I have not found a definitive list. Many of them are sold individually but all I found was without subs.
And as to quality, I really haven’t seen much other than a few Amazon reviews.
I know the BFI many years ago issued 2 or 3 of his films, but I have always been surprised about the lack of titles outside the dance related movies.

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Re: Carlos Saura

#14 Post by jheez » Sat Mar 18, 2023 2:41 am

The flamenco trilogy blu-ray set quality is good and the English subs are more than fine. I was pleased and would recommend that one. Don't expect the newest, highest quality scans, but they're good overall.

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Re: Carlos Saura

#15 Post by DarkImbecile » Sat Aug 05, 2023 12:58 am

Ana and the Wolves / Ana y los lobos (1973) — "...I saw the hole growing smaller, and little by the little the sky disappear..."

A beautiful, worldly woman trudges through the arid countryside toward a large mansion, carrying with her books and music on cassette tapes and modern clothes. Upon entering the villa to take a position caring for three young children, Ana discovers a cloistered, deeply eccentric family trapped in their own nightmares. An infirm and hysterical matriarch trapped in a more glorious and prosperous past dotes on her three sons: José, the small-statured authoritarian who lovingly collects military paraphernalia and uniforms and is the self-declared paterfamilias of the house; Juan, the leering, perverted chauvinist who preys on the servants and immediately sets to work writing anonymous pornographic letters to Ana; and Fernando, a quiet, serious man whose outward displays of piety barely conceal his more dangerous compulsions.

At first at least somewhat confused by these men and their peculiarities, Ana begins to casually toy with them as carelessly as she twirls her hair around her finger, sometimes betraying what seems to be real interest in each of their respective obsessions: she spends time with Fernando in the cave where he postures at devoting himself to silent prayer; with José cleaning and posing with his uniforms, medals, masks, and guns; and mockingly teasing the increasingly intrusive Juan while possibly enjoying his inappropriate behavior. But Ana, believing herself to have sufficient control of these forces, fails to grasp how dangerous her situation truly is — once each of these men insist on possessing her and their obsessions begin to disrupt the stability of the household, Ana's refusal to submit results
SpoilerShow
first in her banishment and then, in a truly shocking and unnerving conclusion, her violation, desecration, and execution.
The brutally effective allegory here is as blunt as a hammer to the temple and fits with Saura's recurrent obsession in the 1960s and 1970s with critiquing Spanish society under fascist rule, but it still seems to be misread by many: the Criterion Channel's summary asserts that the film "lays bare the psychological trauma of life under an authoritarian regime", which I think misses the mark. The brothers certainly represent the pillars of fascism (masculine-insecurity-driven authoritarianism, corrosive chauvinism, self-serving religion) birthed and enabled by a weak, backwards-looking state, but Ana stands in for the best of pre-war Spanish civil society: modern, educated, independent, assertively feminine. Those regressive elements endeavored to control and contain a culture that didn't need them but also indulged them, perhaps believing them so toothless and outdated as to be harmless to engage. When attempts at control failed, ruthless, horrific violence began, and that modern and educated 20th century society was unprepared to defend itself. It seems to me that Saura isn't describing contemporary Spanish society as much as illustrating how that society came to be, and calling out a warning to others that haven't yet indulged their most toxic elements to a fatal extent. Saura's most notable imagery — particularly the child's doll found bound with rope, hair cut off, buried in a shallow grave of mud — pointedly evokes the worst of the war years; that it is Saura's partner — the typically luminous Geraldine Chaplin — who is subjected to horrors
SpoilerShow
clearly meant to evoke the torture, rape, and murder of the civil war and the subsequent political cleansing of Spain
only heightens the shock of those final moments.

Sacrificing some of the more character-based ambiguities I've enjoyed in Saura's other films to more cleanly drive home the metaphor, Ana may be less textured and technically ambitious than his prior features, but it retains the wry humor so present in those other works. My favorite example is how the matriarch's wailing concern over Fernando's fasting quickly transitions to concern that her own food might get cold — "and I hate reheated meat!" I also very much enjoyed Ana's exposure to the boxes of childhood mementos illustrating some of the rotten roots of the men of the house: José was forced to dress as a girl "until his first communion, of course"; the orally obsessed Fernando made to keep a pin-cushioned thimble on his thumb to stop him from sucking it; and Juan's indulgence in "disgusting" behavior with Cousin Angelica (perhaps a bit of foreshadowing of Saura's subsequent feature).

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Re: Carlos Saura

#16 Post by criterionoop » Sat Aug 05, 2023 12:45 pm

DarkImbecile wrote:
Sat Aug 05, 2023 12:58 am
but Ana stands in for the best of pre-war Spanish civil society: modern, educated, independent, assertively feminine. Those regressive elements endeavored to control and contain a culture that didn't need them but also indulged them, perhaps believing them so toothless and outdated as to be harmless to engage. When attempts at control failed, ruthless, horrific violence began, and that modern and educated 20th century society was unprepared to defend itself. It seems to me that Saura isn't describing contemporary Spanish society as much as illustrating how that society came to be, and calling out a warning to others that haven't yet indulged their most toxic elements to a fatal extent. Saura's most notable imagery — particularly the child's doll found bound with rope, hair cut off, buried in a shallow grave of mud — pointedly evokes the worst of the war years; that it is Saura's partner — the typically luminous Geraldine Chaplin — who is subjected to horrors
I agree with most of this assessment, except for the allegory of Ana. Often, Geraldine Chaplin's characters are used in a variety of ways based on whether she is dubbed or uses her own voice. When using her own voice (you can tell she is a native English speaker speaking Spanish), she is often coded as a foreigner trying to influence the hermetically sealed environment (aka Spain under Franco). So I wouldn't say she represents pre-war Spain. She represents foreign influence trying to explore/integrate into a Francoist environment.

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Re: Carlos Saura

#17 Post by DarkImbecile » Sun Aug 06, 2023 11:07 pm

I see your point, but I took it as an indicator of her character’s cosmopolitan and international bent — which also echoes the movement among foreign leftists to defend the Spanish republic during the war — in contrast to the more provincial, insular brothers. I’m not sure reading her character as allegorically representing foreigners in postwar Francoist Spain makes as much sense, not least due to the extremity of their response. For me, anyway, seeing her as representing the local and international resistance to the fascist takeover tracks better with the specifics of her ultimate fate.

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