Page 85 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Carlos Saura 75

In the opening shot, the second appearance of the car, closer to the
camera, is the first and framing instantiation of this intensifying transfor-
mative rhythm, which in this specific case literally makes possible another
"look" ât the car. Accordingly, the possibilities enacted in the film keep
increasing the complexity of the narrative, as their expanding or shifting
horizons accumulate and interact, complicating, rather than facilitating,
the choice between presented and/or implied versions of events. For in-
stance, by the end of the film, the authorship of the memoir is no longer
decidable: while the initial scene points to Luis as the author, it also casts
the narrative in Elisas voice, scripted by her father. The ending shows Elisa
taking over the authorship, as she not only becomes liberated from her in-
scription within patriarchal representations of women (and, literally, with-
in her father's writing) and acquires her own voice, but also reauthor(ize)s
and modifies "her" (fathers?) narrative. Thus, the authorship in question
could be in fact a joint one, Luiss and Elisas; or, in an alternative possibil-
ity, the film could be a reflection on the fluidity of authorship, on multiple
borrowings and cannibalizations, as Saura refers to them, that circulate
between Luis and Elisa and that characterize artistic creation as such.
Whatever these expanding possibilities of the authorship implied
by the film, they end up pointing beyond the screen narrative to Sauras
own authoring of the film as one more, and all encompassing, possibility,
brought into play more and more suggestively as the film continues to un-
fold. Thus, one more indication at issue in Elisa, vida mia is not just find-
ing out or deciding who finally "authors" the text, and, by extension, the
film; rather, what organizes and animates the film is the reciprocal traversal
of scenes and perspectives, as well as their being simultaneously traversed
by new possibilities that keep materializing as alternatives to the already
presented scenes. To keep these possibilities active as possibilities, Saura
incorporates in the middle of the film scenes in which Elisa is seen with
her bedridden father, apparently in their old family home in Madrid, the
only scenes that correspond to the version of events recounted in the frag-
ments of Luiss/Elisa s narrative read in voice-over. Most likely, these scenes
belong among the imagined scenes in the film, as their fictional status is
further emphasized by their correspondence to the text of the "created"
memoir and differentiated from the events unfolding on the screen. Yet the
status of these enigmatic scenes remains ultimately undecidable, for it is
possible that they could be the only "real" scenes in the film, which would
make all the other scenes "merely" different possibilities imagined by the