Page 96 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

86 Krzysztof Ziarek

of disclosure and concealment, which blurs and leaves as undecidable the
boundaries between reality and fiction, the disclosed and the hidden, the
explicit and the implied. For example, the "truth" of Elisa, vida mia does
not lie in the impossibility of resolving the ambiguities running through
the film, for instance, deciding the authorship of the memoir or the status
of the "incest scene" and so forth. In other words, it does not lie in a defect
or a fault of understanding but rather in Saura s ability to keep emerging
possibilities open, that is, to maintain them in play as possibilities. In
short, "truth" in Saura becomes an "open region" of cinematic possibili-
ties, which his films repeatedly traverse by interlacing temporal threads
or by juxtaposing characters (Ana's mother/Ana as an adult, Elisa/Elisa's
mother, Angelicas mother /adult Angelica, etc.). The same can certainly
be said about Cria cuervos. The film's entire cinematic texture comprises
layers of concealment and unconcealment, memory and imagination, re-
ality and the intimation of nonexistent, though possible, future frames.
This characteristic embedding and exfoliation of the past, the present,
and the future, combined with the incessant interplay of reality, memory,
and dream, constitutes the filmic rhythm in Saura. This rhythm reflects
the cinematic poiesis happening in the films and organizes their temporal
development. As Agamben suggests in The Man Without Content, such
rhythm is to be understood as the principle of presence, which opens
and maintains the work of art in its original space, that is, in the realm of
unconcealment. Approached this way, the poietic rhythm is neither calcu-
lable nor rational, without ever becoming irrational. Rather, this rhythm
is the measure and the logos, conceived as that which gives everything its
proper station in presence. However, such rhythm, as Agamben observes
following Heidegger's reconceptualization of temporality as ekstasis, is not
a sequential flow of instants but an ekstasis in a more original dimension
of temporality:

There is a stop, an interruption in the incessant flow of instants that, coming from
the future, sinks into the past, and this interruption, this stop, is precisely what gives
and reveals the particular status, the mode of presence proper to the work of art or
the landscape we have before our tycs. We are as though held, arrested before some-
thing, but this being arrested is also a being-outside, an ekstasis in a more original
dimension. 13
Rhythm designates thus a reserve that gives and at the same time hides its
gift, namely, being as temporality. This reserve is, in Greek, epoche: a way