Page 86 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

76 Krzysztof Ziarek

memoir's author(s). In terms of the film's rhythm of poietically expanding
possibilities, the scenes from the family home in Madrid can be interpreted
as the imaginary / real pivot of the work, which would lead to a critical dis-
placement of the entire surrounding narrative into the realm of fiction and
creative imagination.
It is important to remember here that these repeated appearances of
new narrative and interpretive possibilities do not form any recognizable
sequences but are, instead, spread out and spaced by gaps. These pauses
rhythmically reenact the initial time lapse between the appearance and
the reemergence of the car in the opening scene. For instance, Elisa se-
cretly reads in her father's journal an account of her final breakup with
her husband, Antonio, only to have that breakup dramatized in a later
scene, in which Antonio comes to Luis's house to try to reconcile with
Elisa, and in which Elisa, as though playacting, recites the words she read
earlier in her father's text. In a structurally similar instance of the recipro-
cal echoing of scenes, Luis writes down in his journal a version of Elisas
earlier remarks from his conversation with her about her disintegrating
relationship with Antonio, in which Elisa wonders how a person with
whom one has lived for years can suddenly strike one as a total strang-
er. To complicate matters further, Elisa's remarks constitute an echo of
Luis's own unstated reflections that had led him to leave his family nearly
twenty years earlier. These episodes illustrate the intricate connections
and borrowings that characterize the relationship between Luis and Elisa,
the two authors whose personas seem to merge at one point (into that of
an androgynous author?) in a scene that could be an (imagined or real?)
recollection of Luis caressing his wife or, alternatively, a scene of incest.
Either way, it remains undecidable whether what is seen actually takes
place or is just imagined, and by whom: Luis, Elisa, Luis / Elisa? As Saura
himself puts it, "Is this Luis' story (Elisa's father) or Elisa's? Does the story
belong to a character who is double, half Luis, half Elisa, which in the
final analysis would be me, the filmmaker?" 2
These gaps and ambiguities in the narrative are both doubled and
displaced in the closing scene, which, in the last brilliant stroke, restages
the film's rhythm of emergent possibilities. In the scene the spectator gets
cinematically projected into a new "future" for the film's entire narrative:
not simply into a possible reenactment of the film's material from the
point of view of its new, or newly dis-covered, authoring persona, Elisa,
but into an as yet unmarked, barely opening up, "feminine" variation of