Page 87 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Carlos Saura 77

the rhythm of possibilities that, as the spectator can sense, open again
into the future, signaled by the car's repeated advance toward the camera
lens. Beyond the details of the stories of Elisa's family, her marriage, and
her rapprochement with Luis, what has the most impact on the specta-
tor is this visually and textually generative rhythm, which structures the
ways in which the image and the text appear to cross-engender each other
throughout the film, as though thematizing not only the relationship be-
tween film and literature but also between the script and its cinematic
realisation. In short, the specificity of the cinematic rhythm in Elisa, vida
mia lies in its capacity to envelop the spectator in the future-directed
energy of arising possibilities. This temporal force comes to be instan-
tiated cinematically by Saura through a characteristic interactivation of
movement (both of the camera and within the shots), sound, color, and
voice-over.
This idiomatic experience of time in Saura can be understood and
recapitulated through the prism of the opening scene in Elisa, vida mia,
especially through its generative interplay of movement, spatial and tem-
poral gaps, and sound. Like the car in this crucial scene, time is shown by
Saura to be "always already" underway, and without a specifiable begin-
ning, so that spectators find themselves projected into a cinematic experi-
ence marked not only by a literally visible absence of origin but also by
recurrent gaps and characteristic temporal loops, in which events that
had already transpired can be traversed again, either explicitly, as in the
closing shot of the film, or, more often, implicitly, as in Cria cuervos,
when the appearance of the adult Ana speaking about the past from the
imaginary future moment in 1995 (the film's action takes place in 1975,
the year in which it was made), instantly reframes and opens to specula-
tion both the scenes that we have already seen and those that follow in
the remainder of the film. Shots that appear to have unfolded as present
events in front of the spectators all of a sudden become destabilized in
their ontological status: they all now seem to be Anas recollections of the
experiences she had as a nine-year-old girl, experiences that further blur
the already fragile boundaries between memories, actual occurrences,
and imagination. Scenes already seen thus seem to come alive again and,
without having to appear for the second time on the screen, as happens
in Elisa, vida mia, become filled with new possibilities, ambiguities, and
gaps, which make judgment about their status as real, remembered, or
imagined even more difficult.