Portrait Of Carlos Saura

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• published: 21 Jan 2016
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During his almost 50 years as a filmmaker, Carlos Saura has been witness to all kinds of convulsions in Spanish cinema and its sociopolitical context. His films, born under the attentive gaze of Franco’s authority and censorship, navigated the transition to democracy with an equal and constant focus on urgent contemporary realities on one hand, and the personal and historical memories and artistic roots of Spanish cultural heritage on the other. A prolific creator (he has made almost 40 features) with a pronounced stylistic and thematic identity, Saura has a strong authorial presence, but the trajectory of his career is closely linked to the work of an interesting group of collaborators. He initially studied engineering but soon gave in to his passion for photography and filmmaking and enrolled in Madrid’s Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas (IIEC), where he would later teach future filmmakers Basilio Martín Patino and Victor Erice, among others. It was here that Saura formulated his filmic ideal. Interested in Italian neorealism, though disenchanted with its excessive sentimentality, Saura found a broad sense of realism, open to surrealist textures, in the films of Luis Buñuel, and would later strive for this in his own filmmaking. This approach was nurtured by Spain’s artistic heritage, and filtered through its early 20th-century culture (poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, composer Manuel de Falla). If Saura’s work in the Sixties and Seventies is distinguished by its vitality, drive, and sociopolitical relevance, it has to be said that since the mid-Eighties his films have shown signs of increasing fatigue. In the latter half of his career there’s a clear effort to maintain a certain balance between folk-culture research, social portraits, and the study of their origins, but Saura’s preoccupations and methods now seem outmoded; his later films are pale shadows of his earlier, socially engaged work. It might be said that the center of gravity in his work has shifted from a concern with Spain’s historical national memory in the films of the Sixties and Seventies to a discourse that is more closed off and self-referential, with a tendency to reinterpret earlier subjects from the films of the Eighties and Nineties. Saura was unquestionably Spanish Cinema’s standard-bearer at a time when there was a clear need for films to react against the artistic and social amnesia of the late Franco era. Since then, he has moved more to the margins, making way for subsequent generations of filmmakers, those who have continued to write the history of Spanish cinema. REFERENCE : http://www.filmcomment.com/article/living-memory-carlos-saura/