Page 88 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

78 KrzysztofZiarek

One has to remember that in Cria cuervos the point of view embodied
in the figure of the adult Ana, played by Géraldine Chaplin, who also plays
Ana's mother in the scenes Ana remembers and/or imagines as a nine-
year-old in 1975, instead of stabilizing the films narrative, makes it hinge
precariously on the perspective that is not simply imagined but essentially
futural. Literally projected into the future, which will arrive only twenty
years later, this perspective is imaged in the film as intrinsically possible
rather than actual. Moreover, within the temporal frame in which the film
is set up, that future moment will never arrive; that is, it will always remain
within the film as its opening onto the future, as the imaged / imagined,
always yet to come, year 1995. The very composition of the scene, which
reframes the child Anas already "unreliable" point of view through the
not-yet-existent perspective of the adult Ana, underscores this open-ended
projection toward the future, a projection that becomes the temporal mark
of the emergence of possibility qua possibility. As the adult Ana, Chaplin
appears in a close-up against a nondescript, uniform background, address-
ing the camera directly yet, at the same time, positioned "always" at a dis-
tance, as though removed from the present moment and from presence as
such. With the exception of the projected date of 1995, the scene remains
deliberately unmarked, and its setup clearly announces the "artifice" of the
shot. Giving no hints about Anas life in 1995, the scene places the emphasis
primarily on Ana's transformed future understanding of the events of 1975,
which in turn allows the spectator to take distance to what transpires on the
screen in the "present," that is, in 1975. The scene thus functions as a mark-
er of the present s intrinsic dislocation by the coming future, since what
matters is not what the future will look like but instead the awareness that
the perception of the "present," presented on the screen, will have changed.
And this imagined future, as Saura shows, remains always "unimaginable,"
for its function is that of a moving horizon, which continuously ruptures
and reframes the present, and with it, the past. In this way the shot of
the adult Ana becomes the image of possibility itself and of temporality
as the force of rendering possible. This disjointing future, which inscribes
different possibilities into the film's "present," that is, into its 1975 scenes,
comes to frame the whole narrative. It indicates that reality in Sauras work
is the "present" that is never fully present but that unfolds instead as both
intrinsically open to and already traversed by the transformative arrival of
the future. Through this dislodging of the present—which intensifies the
ambiguity concerning the imagined / real / remembered / projected status of