Page 90 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

80 Krzysztof Ziarek

time, in which we are always already caught. There is an inescapable sense
of sadness associated with the song, as its lyrics talk about departure and,
throughout the film, remind Ana and spectators about her mother s passing
away. Yet at the same time this refrain about the inevitable passage of time
brings hope: even if nothing concrete, it suggests that time continuously
opens out of the present into the future. That is why "^Por que te vas?"
plays also, and one could say, most importantly, not only when Ana and her
two sisters dance together in one of the most touching and serene scenes in
the film, but especially in the closing shots, when, after their school vaca-
tions, Ana and her sisters emerge from the enclosure of the house, and thus
also out of their past, onto the sunlit, noisy, and very-much-alive streets of
Madrid, and walk to school. As they near and enter the school, the girls
merge into the crowd of other students, with the last, surprising shot giving
us a lingering panoramic view of the city. This closing shot not only gener-
alizes away from the family scenes we have been watching but also projects,
within this suddenly opened up and generalized perspective, the time that
has passed within the film onto the future as a new possibility, already sug-
gested by the shot of the adult Ana in the year 1995. The conclusion of Cria
3
cuervos does not exude any easy optimism, but it does bring into focus the
complex temporal experience presented in the film. Within her specific,
and often very painful, familial, cultural, and historical circumstances, as-
sociated with the end of the Franco era and of the family life emblematic
for it, Ana undergoes intense experiences in which she becomes acquainted
with the passing of time, with loss, and with mortality. Yet Ana's pain-
ful "existential" education, which, significantly, takes place at home and
away from school, is framed by an overall experience of the complexity, one
might even say, of the density, of time, an experience of the present that is
not only flooded with recollections of the past but also marked by a recur-
rent opening onto the future and its possibilities. It is with this intricate,
both painful and playful, experience of time as the force of possibility that
the film leaves the spectator, the experience that is reflected in Anas eyes as
she listens to the Jeanette song she clearly loves.
This coexistence of transience and futurity, of sadness and anxiety,
on the one hand, and hope, on the other, frames the development of Anas
character through the film. Even though the song suggests sadness and
invokes the passing away of her mother, Ana listens to it often, which indi-
cates that she not only does not want to flee from the sadness in her life: but
that, as she becomes increasingly aware of mortality, she delves deeper into