Page 89 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Carlos Saura 79

all the scenes in Cria cuervos—Saura pushes the film toward a dramatized
state of playful undecidability.
Far from being negative, however, this natural dislocation comes to
signify both the force with which the new possibilities emerge and the
potential they have to alter what is being seen as the "present" on the
screen. The scene with the adult Ana speaking to the camera clearly func-
tions as a marker of future qua possibility. The scene illustrates that in 1995
Ana will have come to question her own childhood judgment about her
parents' marriage and thus also to cast doubt on her own perceptions in
1975, which may have colored all the scenes, especially the ones in which
Ana remembers (or imagines) her parents, since her mother is already dead
when the film begins and her father dies in the opening scene. This is why
this scene, coming as it were from the nonexisting future, does not help
clarify the status of any of the scenes that make up the film, as the specta-
tor becomes even more unsure as to what extent the events on the screen
actually happen(ed), were imagined, or simply distorted by Anas idealized
perception of her mother. While the spectator s understanding is being
purposely questioned, put to the test, and repeatedly reframed during the
film, the reminders of Anas possibly different future perspective on the
events of her childhood never allow the viewer to forget the transformative
force of the coming future. One could even say that it is indeed this sense
of the coming change and of the transformative character of existence
that suffuses the entire film, whose atmosphere would otherwise be almost
claustrophobic, heavily determined by closed spaces of the house and its
garden, and compounded by the dark interiors in the many scenes that
take place at night.

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"^Por que te vas?": Finitude and Futurity
The projection of the adult Ana into 1995 makes Cria cuervos appear
as though it were projected from the future back into 1975. The effect of
this temporal distancing, however, is not so much to suggest that the film
can be read as basically a series of recollections of real or imagined events,
often complexly embedded within other recollections, as to underscore the
passing, insubstantial, essentially temporal character of existence. It seems
no accident that the main musical motif associated with Ana is Jeanette s
song ",;Por que te vas?" because not only is the song about passing and going
away, but it is also as simple, banal, and catchy as the everyday passing of