Page 98 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

88 KrzysztofZiarek

artistic creativity, but instead describes the originary poietic dimension of
the work of art, in which human being-in-the-world and its relationship
to truth and history are in play. The adjective originary refers here to arts
force of rendering possible, that is, to its ability to disclose reality as origi-
native of possibilities, whose futural direction keeps the present intrinsi-
cally open to transformation. Sauras most successful films from the 1970s
work in terms of such a poietic rhythm. In their continuous play with
displacing and reformulating cultural and personal representations, Cria
cuervos and Elisa, vida mia allow the spectator to experience poiesis as a
play of possibilities continuously emerging within the cinematic space. In
Cria cuervos Anas initiation into mortality and finitude allows the specta-
tor to see the world become, as though for the first time for a discovering
child, a space of finite existence. Sauras brilliant filmmaking achieves a
reciprocal intensification between the particulars of Ana's story and the
experience of finitude evoked by the film. In fact, it is this reciprocal
enhancement that makes the film convincing as a traversal of the continu-
ously ruptured space of finite possibilities.
Elisa, vida mia locates this space of emerging possibilities expressly
within the artwork's poiesis. The key scene, in which Elisa visits her ail-
ing, possibly dying, father in Madrid, encapsulates the way in which such
artistic poiesis traverses the undecidable boundary between seeming and
appearance. Since the scene appears fictitious in the context of the rest
of the film, seemingly made up only for the sake of the semiautobio-
graphical memoir, it raises the question of whether what appears on the
screen "appears" in the sense of "seeming" or in the sense of "coming to
be." Is the scene we are witnessing imagined or real? But this question
also makes the spectator remember that the entire film is a "fiction," a
cinematic appearance. Since among various arts, film is literally a mat-
ter of appearance and seeing, this scene raises the question that becomes
decisive for Elisa, vida mia, and perhaps also for all of Sauras works: what
are the parameters both of filmmaking and of the kind of disclosure that
film is capable of? Because of the nature of the medium, film is perhaps
best positioned to show through cinematic image what at once "is" and
"seems to be." By interweaving memory, dream, and reality, Sauras films
make evident this twofold character of appearing, as their spectator is
constantly made aware of seeing what appears on the screen as both what
comes to be and what only seems to be. Yet in Sauras case this way of film-
making is less about epistemological uncertainty, or perceptual and cogni-