Carlos Saura
An additional aim I seek to reach with the unit is to expose my students to highly regarded artistic expressions. With this in mind, I would like to spend a lot of energy on Carlos Saura, who is one of the best contemporary Spanish filmmakers. The fact that he has adapted two of the three literary works I am taking up, gives me the chance to see how a powerful filmmaker deals with powerful literature. Furthermore, it helps show my students that films do not just reduce culture to entertainment, but contribute to it in a different medium.
Carlos Saura directed two of the films we are going to work with in depth: Bodas de Sangre (1980) and Carmen (1983). Both films, with the addition of El Amor Brujo (1986), are part of a trilogy of flamenco dance films in which Saura examines the Andalusian folk and the gypsy tradition. In these three works, Saura strives
toward a lucidity about the familiar cultural artifacts that construct social and personal identity. For that reason the centerpiece of all three films is the figure of performance: dancers playing the part of fictional characters who are bound inextricably to fatalistic scenarios; individuals whose identity as dancers is itself the result of a willed submission to a cluster of artistic and social mythologies; finally the figure of a Spaniard as a performer of a cultural ethos to which his own identity appears irrevocably bound. (D'Lugo 1991, 193)
Another essential feature common to the three films is the idea of performance: the figure of these dancers and singers as performers of cultural products to which their identity seems to be bound.
Carlos Saura is one of the most internationally acclaimed Spanish filmmakers and one of the most prolific (almost 40 features in his near 50 years). Carlos Saura's films reflect the changes in Spanish society: from Franco's censorship to democracy with an equal and constant focus on personal and historical memories and artistic roots of Spanish cultural heritage.
Although he studied engineering, he soon became a professional photographer. As such, in his early years as a filmmaker, he was more interested in documentary films and photography than in narrative cinema. His first works were very critical toward Franquismo (Francoist society) and the Civil War.
During the last five years of Franco's dictatorship, Saura's films became more aggressive and confrontational in their criticism of Franco's society and government. In films like El jardín de las delicias (1970), Ana y los lobos (1972) and La prima Angélica (1973), he used symbolic characters and other strategies to try to avoid censorship.
After Franco's death in 1975, in the period of la Transición (the Transition) when the censorship was not a threat anymore and the country went back to be a democracy, Saura began making more personal and intimate films such as Elisa vida mía (1977). In the 80's he began to work with the producer Emiliano Piedra and with Antonio Gades and his dance company. The flamenco dance trilogy I have referred to previously is a result of this collaboration. As Marvin D'Lugo states, "although these films also sought to underscore the structures of social containment that shape Spanish identity, they are ultimately viewed outside of Spain simply as expressions of Spanish art cinema." (D'Lugo 1997, 200)
Saura wanted to explore one of the most popular and probably universal expressions of "Spanishness" to the eyes of the rest of the world: el flamenco. It seems essentially Spanish, and yet it is associated with gypsies and so, especially to the eyes of foreign artists, with what is Spain's "other" or its "outside." Providing a natural cultural tension, it easily instigates dramas. (4) While Saura's attitude toward his sources changes from film to film, what remains present in all of them is the specter of the falsifications to which the notion of Spain and Spanishness has been presented by foreigners and occasionally by some Spaniards.
In the 90s Saura made some other films related to flamenco themes such as Sevillanas (1992) and Flamenco (1994) Salomé (2002) or Iberia (2005) as well as other kinds of films: El Sur (1991), Taxi (1996) Pajarico (1997), Tango (1998), Goya en Burdeos (1999), Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón (2001), etc.
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