Page 80 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

70 Krzysztof Ziarek

Even though the spectators remain unclear about many important ele-
ments of the story inaugurated in the initial shots—details that are ex-
plained later and often become more complex as the film continues to
unfold—by the time of the synchronized endings of the third shot and
of the first voice-over, they have registered, albeit confusedly, the critical
disjunction between the overlaid text and images: the text about Elisa
visiting her sick father in Madrid and the image of Elisa arriving with her
sister s family to celebrate their father's birthday in his secluded house in
the countryside near Segovia. At the same time, the film has introduced
another disjunction /doubling, namely the one between the father, Luis,
and the daughter, Elisa, as the voice(s) supposedly commenting on the
images unfolding on the screen. The relation between image and text and
the doubling /identification of Luis / Elisa, playfully underscored by the
sound echoes between their names, become the mobile frames of the film,
shifting, changing, and modifying one another as they become enriched
and developed through the subsequent scenes.
This hermeneutic confusion created by the initial sequence, and the
interpretive task assigned to the spectators, which, as Marvin D'Lugo sug-
gests, "demands that its audience actively choose a position of 'reading
that story, which is to say, that we elect a way of looking at the world
defined within and in relation to the on-screen fiction," 1 constitutes one
of the crucial aspects of the film. Interpretive choices arise immediately
from the opening of the film: what is the relation of the image to the text?
Is the image what "really" happens in the film and the text simply an
autobiographical narrative being written by Luis, though from the point
of view of Elisa? Or is Elisa in fact the author of the memoir and just
imagines her father writing it from her perspective? This possibility seems
also in play, though it is not on a par with the alternative suggested by the
film's overall development, namely, that Luis passes on his "authorship" to
Elisa, enticing her to take on "her own" voice. Though initially created by
Luis, "Elisa's" voice indeed becomes, in the last scene of the film, appro-
priated and made her own by Elisa, as the subtle changes introduced into
the repeated initial voice-over, now read by Elisa herself, suggest. Saura
clearly wants to involve his audience in a hermeneutic exercise, in which
it becomes obvious that, as Luis remarks in the film, "everything is but
representation." This observation simply verbalizes what the filmic tex-
ture continuously instantiates in Elisa, vida mia> namely the constructed
nature of the (represented) reality, which is repeatedly challenged, revised,