2023-09-11 20:24:35
The death of Carlos Saura, just one day before the Goya Awards gala recognized that he was one of the great authors of Spanish cinema, returned the author to mainstream public consideration. Spanish cinema arrived glaringly late to the tribute and it had had plenty of time because the filmmaker had not only managed to reach the age of 91 but had done so in the still full exercise of his creativity with a documentary, ‘The walls speak’, released a few days before his death, that same February 2023. A film that pointed out, through the painted walls, from Altamira to the last graffiti artists, the importance that the image had for him. Not in vain he was the younger brother of the painter Antonio Saura and, as he used to remember, because of their interests, they chose paths that could easily have been interchangeable, one with their dark dramas and their photographs, the other with his canvases little given to polychromes. Both marked by the pessimism of his admired countryman, Francisco de Goya.
Now, and to highlight the fact that his creative passion has remained intact until the end, over seven decades, the book appears ‘One also lives by images’ (Taurus), name given to what is presented as an ‘almost’ memoir. An almost that reveals that the project, although very advanced, was not completed. Started in 2020 when the director, forced by the pandemic, was confined to his house with a garden in the Guadarrama mountain range, Saura worked on it until shortly before his death and there are some aspects – a chapter dedicated to director of photography Vittorio Storaro that he barely sketched – that will no longer be written. A stroke and a fall suffered at the end of 2022 prevented him from doing so. The set is a series of fragmentary flashes that work like confession intimate (with little gossip) and how testimony from a time in which the struggle of Spanish creators and artists to escape the constriction of the dictatorship and seek modernization was like breaking stones, if not something more dangerous.
Saura evokes himself as a “shy and sensitive child”, the son of a republican lawyer and a pianist who left his vocation for family care, to whom the civil war left definitive marks on his character. A good part of these memories is marked by that experience. According to the director, this is due to his somewhat sullen character, which kept him away from social events and caused him to be called proud, distant and inaccessible: “Understanding life in solitude has brought me great pleasures and some misunderstandings.” […] because of my lack of interest in promotion and promotion […] which sometimes is laziness and reluctance.”
Buñuel’s imagination
His seven children, with four different women, and a particular attention to them, walk through the book, barely outlined. Anna, the last and only girl: “Watching Anna grow and become a woman has been one of the most gratifying experiences that life has given me,” but also the fundamental friendships that inspired and accompanied her. Above all is his countryman Luis Bunuel, whose name the filmmaker heard for the first time when he was 12 years old and whom he met at the Cannes festival in 1960, when the young director was presenting his first film ‘The gulfs’. “Now that another generation, the current one, has the opportunity to see Buñuel’s work, I would tell the younger ones to see his films not as a cultural milestone, but as an honest, vital, powerful and sensitive man who knew how to rescue from the wasteland old and new ideas, that confronted clichés, that used imagination as the powerful weapon that it is, giving them flights to heights that are difficult to reach,” he writes.
More intimate was his treatment with Charles Chaplinfather of Geraldine –“a complex, insecure woman”-, whom Saura always called Gerardawho was his partner from 1967 to 1979, and mother of his son Shane. His fascination with the director of ‘Modern Times’ does not prevent him from recognizing that he is “an egomaniac and obsessive, intelligent and willful worker”, while he listens absorbedly to an 80-year-old Charlot reading or rather interpreting the script for ‘The Freak’, a project that Chaplin would never film. Nor should we forget the friendship that he maintained with Antonio Gades which materialized in a musical choreographic trilogy, in which one of the director’s great loves would emerge, flamenco. Saura tried to learn to dance in his youth, but the dancer La Quica dissuaded him after seeing his first attempts: “It’s better that you dedicate yourself to something else.”
His metaphorical films
Regarding his first stage as a filmmaker, when he became one of the spokespersons for the New Spanish Cinemawith titles like ‘The Hunt’, ‘Peppermint Frappé’, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, ‘Cousin Angelica’ o ‘Ana and the wolves’ that triggered key metaphors and images to understand the discontent and concerns of the new generations, Saura ran into censorship several times. Those were the most intellectual and cosmopolitan years that corresponded to his relationship with Geraldine Chaplin. His last partners, Mercedes Pérez and in the last 30 years Eulalia Ramon, They also marked later, more passionate and vital stages.
In the last pages of these memoirs, the director notes a moment of plenitude very close to an ending that he presumes. Thinking that death is an everyday occurrence makes him value the moment: “I breathe and my lungs fill with healthy fresh air. I am alive, I am clean. I know because I breathe and because everything seems in order inside my body. What else do you want?”.
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