Page 91 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Carlos Saura 81

the emotions associated with transience and loss. Although it is true that
Ana tries to control and even manipulate death (for instance, in the scene
when shegplays with her sisters and commands them to die, only to quickly
resurrect them), as she not only has poisoned her father but also attempts to
poison her aunt, who becomes the girls' guardian after their fathers death,
the film can be taken to illustrate Ana s becoming familiar with death and
then growing to accept not only the death of her parents but mortality as
such. Her entranced listening to "<;Por que te vas?" implies a gradual open-
ing up to the experience of times passage and, by implication, to finitude.
During the course of the film, and especially when she is listening to the
song, Ana learns to remain in time and thus to become more accepting
of the transience of existence. Through Anas growing familiarity with the
sadness accompanying the passing of time, the film leads the spectators,
as it becomes evident in the scene with the adult Ana, to the recognition
of the impermanence and fragility of life. Yet what is most important in
Saura is that, together with this acceptance comes also the recognition of
the possibilities that open up from the present into the future.
Sauras films do not simply recognize these possibilities as intrinsic
to time, that is, as futural, surprising, or transformative. The cinematic
rhythms of Sauras works, as well as their narratives and composition, are
in fact premised on the force of such possibilities. Approached in these
terms, Elisa, vida mia appears to be constructed as one long temporal
loop, as, quite literally, another film take, made possible by the direction
of the films development. What the film dramatizes in this way is noth-
ing other than the very rhythm of filmmaking: a take, then another one,
which brings with it a new possibility of seeing/filming the material. But
rather than exhausting or completing the first take through the second,
or the third, and so forth, the temporal loops in Sauras films keep reveal-
ing the possibility of yet another loop, thus inscribing incompleteness and
openness into the very nature of the film material. In a similar vein Cria
cuervos ends with Anas recognition and acceptance of the death of her par-
ents, which also becomes emblematic of her recognition of finitude. But
this acknowledgment of finitude, without diminishing any of its painful
sadness, brings also the awareness of an opening future and thus of new
possibilities, which the ending of the film begins to disclose cinematically
for the spectator when the camera gets literally released from the enclosed
spaces of the house: first onto the street and subsequently onto the pan-
orama of Madrid, as the previously intense focus of the camera and of the