Page 93 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Carlos Saura 83

cinematic style, especially the intricate mesh of temporal threads that
weave together reality, memory, and dreams, film critics, as well as Saura
himself in his interviews, refer to its "poetic" character. In these remarks
the term poetic, though most often taken for granted and left undefined,
appears to refer to the density and dreamlike logic of the temporal rela-
tions, which render memory, reality, and imagination fluid and permeable
in many of Sauras signature films. This ostensible link between the notion
of the poetic and the complex temporal design of the films points, indeed,
to their structuring rhythm, which can be characterized as a type of "cine-
matic poiesis," found at work most explicitly in Cria cuervos and Elisa, vida
mia. What makes possible calling Sauras filmmaking "cinematic poiesis" is
precisely its reliance on the generative and transformative rhythm of possi-
bilities, which come to be disclosed by means of complexly embedded per-
spectives and temporal planes. To explicate in more detail this cinematic
poiesis in terms of its force of the possible, I turn in the remainder of this
chapter to Heideggers rethinking of poiesis as a temporal play of conceal-
ment and unconcealment, in which relations unfold in terms of the force
of emergent new possibilities.
To begin with, it is easy to note the connections between the tempo-
ral rhythm of Sauras films and Heidegger's discussion of Dasein in Being
and Time in terms of being-toward-death, in which finitude, possibility,
and transformation are woven into a complex temporal manner of being-
in-the-world. Heidegger characterizes death as "that utmost possibility
[Möglichkeit] which lies ahead of every factical potentiality-for-Being of
Dasein [Seinkönnen des Daseins], and, as such, enters more or less un-
disguisedly into every potentiality-for-Being of which Dasein factically
takes hold." 4 As the utmost possibility, death renders existence into be-
ing-toward-death, where all possibilities that unfold within the projected
opening toward the utmost possibility (death) become marked by fini-
tude. Thus, human existence is projected always ahead of itself and be-
comes a traversal of and a deciding between emerging possibilities, all of
which come to be permeated with the sense of finitude: "In Dasein there
is always something still outstanding, which, as a potentiality-for-Being
for Dasein itself, has not yet become actual/ It is essential to the basic
constitution of Dasein that there is constantly something still to be settled.
Such a lack of totality signifies that there is something still outstanding in
one's potentiality-for-Being." 5 In this projection Dasein is raised away into
the possible, "into the possible in its possibly being made possible, namely