Page 79 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Carlos Saura 69

and reflects instead their properly cinematic, "poietic," force, that is, the
force that propels the sequence of images and underlies the overall design
of the films. This cinematic poiesis enacts and makes us "see" the temporal
unfolding of experience, where the planes of presence, recollection, and
possibility (e) merge both within and into one another.
The intricacy of this cinematic rhythm finds perhaps its most telling
manifestation in the opening three-shot sequence ofElisa, vida mia> which
begins with a complex simultaneous overlaying and disjunction between
the image and the text read in voice-over. The first shot shows a hilly Cas-
tilian landscape near Segovia, with two visible stretches of a dirt road:
one starting from the twop of a hill far away from the camera, the second
running from the top of a closer hill, and continuing toward the camera,
which rests immobile on the right side of the road. A white car emerges
at the top of the further hill, and then disappears behind the hill closer to
the camera. As the noise of the approaching car becomes audible, the car
reemerges at the top of the closer hill, moves toward the camera, and drives
past it. The engine noise dies down, and we hear a voice-over (later we learn
that it is the voice of Luis, Elisas father, played by Fernando Rey), which
starts reading from what, during the course of the film, turns out to be a
kind of an autobiographical memoir / narrative, which Luis writes about
"his" life. However, the "imagined" perspective from which he writes this
text is that of Elisa (Géraldine Chaplin), his daughter, whom he has not
seen in a long time:

I hadn't seen my father for years, nor had I really missed him. I almost never wrote
him . . . [the first shot ends; the second shot shows the car coming down a dirt road,
turning by the camera, which follows its movement toward an old farm house, as the
voice-over continues] just a few postcards to say I was fine, and that Antonio and I
sent our love. I didn't want to see him sick, struggling to recover from a recent opera-
tion. At the time, my marriage was in crisis . . . well, one of a series of crises. When I
got my sister Marias telegram, telling me of our fathers sickness and then an anxious
call from my family that revealed how serious it was, I decided to go to Madrid. Self-
ishly speaking, finally I had an excuse to get away from home [the third shot begins,
showing the car drive into the yard, follows its turn, and shows it park in front of the
house. People get out of the car; all through the shot the voice-over continues] and
calmly reflect upon my own situation. As I got further away from Antonio, I realized
I couldn't go back to the man with whom I'd spent seven years. I left, I now realize,
knowing I'd never return.