Page 81 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Carlos Saura 71

and opened up to future possibilities and modifications. This deliberate
way of filming constitutes an unmistakable challenge to the purportedly
stable and "essential" nature of reality, on which a regime like Franco's
based its self-representation and which Saura continues to tacitly call into
question, even though the film does not include any explicit political al-
lusions. As Saura leads his audience to unlearn its ways of seeing and
hearing reality by becoming actively engaged with the questions and am-
biguities that the film proceeds to open up all the way through its ending,
however, one comes to realize that the interpretive task entailed by the
film, tîiough integral to it, does not constitute its focus. Rather, the film
centers on the very interplay between possibility and actuality, reality and
fiction, as different or alternative possibilities of events and points of view
emerge in its course.
The films focus on emergent possibilities is made clear by its struc-
ture, which not only does not resolve the ambiguities introduced in the
beginning but instead opens them up to new possibilities, raising them
anew as (still unanswered) questions. Where the films emphasis lies is
illustrated pointedly by its ending, in which the initial scene is doubled
and, at the same time, both slightly modified and presented from a new
perspective: while the final scene repeats the opening image with a nearly
identical text, this time the text is read by Elisa. The differences in the
text between the beginning and the end, though few, are also significant.
The sister s name is now Isabel (and this is indeed how Elisa refers to her
sister throughout the film), and Elisa s marriage to Antonio is said to have
lasted nine, rather than seven, years as suggested in the opening voice-over.
These differences, or discrepancies, illustrate the change of the voice from
Luis to Elisa, though it remains unclear whether Elisa "corrects" Luis in
order for the memoir to reflect her life more "accurately" or reinvents her
fathers story. Most important, the final scene reveals Elisa as the author
of the memoir/narrative, indicating a new possibility for the status of the
reality depicted by the film: it suddenly becomes possible that the entire
film is just a series of images showing different possibilities that Elisa is
working out as variants for the text of the "memoir" she is writing. The
ending makes it evident that the film is never simply about interpreting
the ambiguities and finding answers for the visual puzzles it presents but,
rather, about undergoing a complex temporal experience of newly arising
possibilities, whose rhythm of emergence makes up the films structure.
Through the pronounced undecidability and open-ended character of the