Page 83 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Carlos Saura 73

implied, or virtual possibilities fashion their distinctive cinematic rhythm,
which invisibly overlays and modulates the sequence of images that actu-
ally make up the films. This rhythm, at work already in Cousin Angelica,
but fully in evidence in Cria cuervos and Elisa, vida mia> and later in
Carmen and Tango, enacts a particular experience of temporality, one in
which past, present, and future—whether real, remembered, or imag-
ined—keep interacting in ways that hold them intrinsically open to new,
often unexpected, possibilities that (might) emerge within the cinematic
images and transmute them.

The Rhythm of Emergent Possibilities
This temporal rhythm of emergent possibilities is signaled brilliantly
in the beginning of Elisa, vida mia. The opening shot of the road and the
moving car literally images movement and traversal, suggesting the start of
a cinematic journey, of an experience taken in its etymological sense of tra-
versing a danger and heading toward an unknown future. In this case the
experience involves a temporal disclosure of disjunctive possibilities that
reenergize and reframe the cinematic material we are seeing. The film pres-
ents the everyday, and therefore often disregarded, experience of how one
finds oneself always already moving in time, which continuously reopens
the present onto the future. This sensation of being already underway is
underscored by the fact that the road in the opening shot appears on the
screen as though without an origin, emerging seemingly "out of nowhere'
at the top of a hill that "screens" the direction from which the road is
coming. This absence of origin becomes reinforced through another visual
rupture in the road introduced by the second hill, positioned closer to
the camera. This second rupture also produces the repetition of the car s
emergence after a brief visual lacuna, this time much closer to the camera
and moving almost directly toward it. The imaged absence of origin and
the gaps and lacunae in the road, literally exposed and brought onto the
screen for us by the cars movement, become the constitutive elements of
the specific temporality of experience in Sauras film. The initial shot is
composed as two segments of the cars movement: the first, without origin,
has "always already" begun, but it is possible to see it only when the car ap-
pears at the top of the more remote hill; the second segment is introduced,
after a gap of several seconds, by the growing sound of the car s engine,
which we hear before the car actually reemerges onto the top of the closer