Page 95 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Carlos Saura 85

in its element means here to hold it open to its possibilities for being, that
is, to enable something to be, in its being, open to and futurally projected
into its unfolding possibilities.
This force of enabling, envisioned always with regard to one's futur-
ally unfolding possibilities for being, comes to be associated by Heidegger
in his later writings with a rethought notion of poiesis. In this reformula-
tion poiesis does not refer simply to its etymological sense of making, or
to artistic creation, but designates a mode of revealing, that is, the tempo-
ral play of concealment and unconcealment, in which beings come to be
both disclosed into and maintained within their array of possibilities for
being. "Such favoring is the proper essence of enabling, which not only
can achieve this or that but can also let something essentially unfold in
its provenance, that is, let it be. It is on the 'strength' of such enabling by
favoring that something is properly able to be." 11 Poiesis refers, then, to
letting beings be, which means letting them unfold in the temporality
of being proper to them, that is, always in relation to the opening sheaf
of possibilities whose emergence punctuates being and gives it an open,
futural direction. This "open region" disclosed through poiesis, though
pertaining to ordinary and familiar beings, recasts truth into an intricate
weave of concealment and unconcealment:

At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary. The essence of truth,
that is, of unconcealment, is dominated throughout by a denial. Yet this denial is not
a defect or a fault, as though truth were an unalloyed unconcealment that has rid
itself of everything concealed. If truth could accomplish this, it would no longer be
itself. This denial, in the form of a double concealment, belongs to the essence of truth as
unconcealment. Truth, in its essence, is un-truth. 12

What makes the ordinary extraordinary is precisely the admixture of con-
cealment, or un-truth, into the way in which everyday being discloses
itself. Truth never comes unalloyed, as Heidegger remarks; that is, it is
never neatly or precisely separable from what remains hidden or denied to
our seeing. Rather, truth thought as unconcealment is always mixed with
concealment, uncertainty, even undecidability.
Considered in this context, Sauras films, from Cousin Angelica and
Cria cuervos, through Carmen, Tango, or Goya in Bordeaux, can be taken
indeed as paradigmatic of the kind of unconcealment at work in Hei-
degger's notion of poiesis. For if there is "truth" in Sauras films, it is not
associated with certainty or precision but instead with the complex play