EXPOSED REPRESSIONS

A conversation with Carlos Saura

I once tweeted about Carlos Saura’s masterpiece Cría Cuervos. An allegorical surrealist film where reality and fantasy swap places. The tweet was censored by Twitter citing the reason that it contained ‘sensitive content’ (a photo of Florinda Chico and a text about art and censorship). I paradoxically posted it because of the message it carries: Carlos Saura created a metaphorical language that cut across the state censor during the Franco dictatorship. After this incident, I went to visit Carlos Saura in Madrid to talk about dreams, memories and censorship.

How do you use dreams as an artistic tool?

It’s complicated, huh? What I believe is that, one of the important things in life, is that reality is much more complex than it is normally thought of. Reality is not just a document; it is not the act of taking a camera and registering what is happening or making a story about it.

Somewhere in an interview, you said symbols are what matter. Can you elaborate on that?

I don’t think I ever said that, or not exactly like that. I am always afraid of these very concrete and definite statements. What I would like to say – continuing with what I have said before – is that the human being is way more complex than the way it is presented in many films. There are film directors or writers who have worked with much more imaginative worlds, that is what I am interested in. Within that we have memories, experiences, ideas of what would have been, dreams, nightmares, so many different things that compose what a human being is made of.  It is way more complex than what we think. Something very important is memory. Sometimes when we work, write or make a film about memories, based on personal memories, usually what we do is to modify those memories. We use memories to make something else, to reach another conclusion. Because they would never be accurate & faithful, it would be impossible for them to be accurate. What one is, what one remembers or experienced as a child, has nothing to do with the reconstruction of that world from an adult point-of-view. It is impossible.

But maybe a metaphorical language is a better way to talk about it because symbols are very concrete. So to create this metaphorical language, if we should call it that, why is that important to use in a film? Why are metaphors important as an artistic tool?

Well, in my films, it is important because it allows me to create very open situations, not that immediate realism of “boy-in-love-with-girl” – you know what I mean? One can overflow that and in some way play with memories, problems, feelings and ideas. That way, you have a very large field to work within.

I will give you an example: in one of my films, I think it is translated as La Prima Angélica yes, La Cousine Angélique. I posed myself a problem: when one thinks back about how things were, or goes back to a childhood memory, first one has an immediate reference, usually a photograph. You look at a photograph of you as a child and first you have to recognise yourself there. You recognise yourself because they have told you so, I mean it could be someone else, but let’s assume you believe that person is you. What were you thinking back then? Imagine you have a great memory of a beautiful landscape: your father is there, your mother as well and there are some cows. How do you see that image now? You see it as an adult, but not as a child.  This is what is important. I mean, it is a lie that one thinks like a child, it is impossible to think like a child. We do not know how children were thinking. There is a very mysterious game there. The adult then has to recover something that happened many years ago and try to interpret it. And it can be written but maybe it never really happened that way. A lot of people talk about their childhood as “oh what a wonderful and happy time” but they don’t have enough facts or information to confirm that.

For example, when I made Cría Cuervos one of the reasons for making that film was that I have always believed that childhood is not necessarily the happiest time in a person’s life. There is a whole fiction around “oh it was beautiful”; an imaginary idea about how great it was. Maybe because as a child you don’t really have problems but children can suffer tremendously, they suffer from lack of connection with adults, lack of understanding of the world around them, they do not know what is happening around them and they are not being told what is really happening.  And it is interesting, because there is always this idea that childhood is a human being’s most beautiful time. I do not agree. I do not think there are many differences between one stage and the other. Of course, there are some people who have it worse or live through a war, but that is a whole different thing.

Why is childhood or this memory and recalling of memories, why is it important in a film?

That is what we live of. A person is only made up of what he or she has lived. What makes us different is the difference between our past experiences. Besides that, we are all very similar. We are what we have lived and that’s it. You can decide, however, to work with it or not. You can work in an imaginative way with other things, for example, science fiction, fantasy or horror. There are many ways of working with imagination. I am interested in concrete memories only to a certain degree; I am way more interested in the manipulation of those memories. This is where imagination comes into play. How can you get to something else from a memory you have? I find that more interesting. There are however, some memories I have from the war, for example, that can be seen in some of my films. Very specific images that are fixed in my memory and I have tried to reconstruct in some of the films.

Many of your films were born under the attentive gaze of the dictatorship and during the war era and censorship as well. How did censorship affect your art methods?

I have said this many times. In the Spanish culture and tradition, for example, the Golden Age, with all the great writers, imagination was always an important resource. Metaphorical language was always present in Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Quevedo, etc. They worked in adverse or difficult situations, so they managed to tell the things they wanted to tell by going around. This happened not only in Spain but also everywhere in the world. Sometimes one cannot tell things directly, it is not convenient or one is not interested in it. That is where one can find metaphor, tell what needs to be told but not literally, finding a way of talking around it. There was a very free imagination during that time. I think surrealism existed in Spain even before it existed in France. If you read Cervantes, when (Don Quixote) is fighting the “merinos”, it is a symbolic, imaginative thing. The Quixote is full of metaphorical symbolic elements and yet, in some way, it describes and talks about its time. It may not be a direct critique of its time but one can find very different elements of it. With Quevedo, it is very clear. I think it is not important to narrate or describe everything just as it is, but to use those realistic elements in order to create something else.  But this is not something I came up with. One can find this in most literature, the great stories, the great epics, and the Greek myths.

I am a photographer and one of the most interesting things about photography, after it emerged in the nineteenth Century, is that it contributed to a radical transformation of painting.  Impressionism emerged as a reaction to the immediate reality of photography.  Painting had to be used in a different way, because painting a face – a realist image – was not necessary when a photographic camera could represent it more accurately. If one wanted the reality of a face, of one’s mother, father or cat, why paint it anymore? There was an important conceptual change in life in general. Impressionism was born, it leads to Cubism, the vanguards, American painting. It all happened because painting needed to be done in a different way, one could not paint in the same way anymore. Well, one can always do so, but it is a bit pointless. The human being has never had such an immediate reference of the past as he does now through photography.  Before the invention of photography, we had paintings, drawings, all a bit imaginative or interpretative. Now, we know exactly how our father and mother looked like. When we travel, we take a photograph in India or wherever we are. What for? To help us remember. It is very interesting how photography has changed the concept of things. The essential difference between films and photography is that in photography, as soon as you click the shutter, you are capturing the past. That moment will never happen again, in the history of humanity. It is an image of the past that has not been saved until now and now you have it.

I consider film more like a mirror. You look at yourself in it and you are not the same you were last time you looked. It is moving and it does not stop. In film, something is being told, maybe in a subtle way, like a dream but it is in constant movement. Photography has the cruel trait of stopping time.

This is the reason why film is great in order to tell stories, open imaginative stories. Unfortunately, it is misused most of the time but that is a problem of market, money, interests, etc. I am confident that as of now, there are thousands of young and not-so-young filmmakers, who can, with a video camera and 3 or 4 actors, make a great film. But where are these films? Where are they being made? That is another problem: exposure. Who tells us a film is good or bad? It happens with music, with everything. Someone can tell us a song is great, but there are as many other ones we don’t know that could be better. Film has always been like that. A balance between what you make and people seeing it, otherwise it is pointless.