Page 82 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

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questions raised by the film—for instance, the spectators never learn where
the boundaries between reality, fantasy, and fiction lie, nor can they decide
with certainty who authors the text read in voice-over—Saura makes a
statement about the nature of film: film for him functions as a temporal
space that comes to be experienced as a cinematically unfolding play of
new possibilities emerging from one image into another and often folding
back into or overlaying preceding images.
What gives Saura's films their unique tenor is the manner in which
the cultural and political interplay and contestation of representations
not only come to constitute part of the temporal experience of emergent
possibilities but also become themselves revised by various modifications
and displacements introduced through these possibilities. This is the case
because the possibilities brought cinematically into play by Saura are char-
acteristically projected toward the future and thus remain themselves in-
trinsically open to further transformation. Their emergence within the
film's composition can be either explicit, that is, these possibilities become
actually presented on the screen, as happens with the imagined scenes of
Elisa's murder, or it remains only implied as a possibility through a telling
juxtaposition of scenes or frequent use of the same actors to play differ-
ent, though related, characters; for instance, Angelica's mother and adult
Angelica played by Lina Canalejas in Cousin Angelica, Anas mother and
adult Ana played by Géraldine Chaplin in Cria cuervos, or Elisa and Elisa's
mother played again by Chaplin in Elisa, vida mia. Because of this intrin-
sic capacity for transformation and invention, the folding back on itself of
Elisa, vida mia in its last scene does not simply end the film but also opens
up a different perspective on what we have just seen. This remarkable end-
ing reinforces the way in which Saura succeeds in keeping the temporally
closed cinematic space of his film intrinsically open both to different ways
of seeing the material and to newly appearing possibilities of its further
transformation. In a way the further Elisa, vida mia unfolds, the more it
keeps being traversed and animated by new possibilities associated either
with potential or latent scenes or with implied shifts in perspective, pos-
sibilities that, even though they never materialize into specific images,
continue to trouble any interpretation of the film. As a result the film ends
up being not simply about producing multiple readings or interpreting
proliferating ambiguities but, primarily, about experiencing cinematically
the temporal unfolding of possibilities and the revisions / transformations
of reality they make possible. Crisscrossing Sauras films, these imaged,