During his lifetime, Carlos Saura loved dance and music with almost as much passion as cinema. Died on February 10 at the venerable age of 91, the immense Spanish filmmaker, awarded at Cannes, in Berlin and nominated three times for the Oscars, leaves a legacy of a generous, sensual, willingly political, and also very personal work. He was in some ways the cinematic memory of Spain.
Among his emblematic works, we can point out minted peppermint, Cousin Angelica, Cria CuervosAnd Flamenco. Without forgetting his trilogy celebrating this Andalusian dance: blood wedding, Carmen And Sorcerer’s Love.
Born in 1932 into a family with very liberal convictions, Carlos Saura took an early interest in art, especially photography and music. In love with culture, his mother, a concert pianist, and his father, a lawyer employed by the Ministry of the Interior, encouraged him in this direction. Alas, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, the young Carlos Saura is sent to his maternal grandmother who, together with aunts, imposes narrow conservative values on the child.
Never mind, Carlos Saura finished his studies in directing in Madrid in 1957. After two short films and a documentary, he directed his first feature film in 1960: Rogueon the direct link between juvenile delinquency and poverty (he revisited the same theme in 1981 in Live fast! award-winning in Berlin).
In 1966, he achieved his first international success with The huntrecipient of the Silver Bear in Berlin, and starring three Phalangist veterans.
Thus, Carlos Saura’s cinema is immediately rich in sociopolitical notations. However, very early on, the style of the filmmaker is colored with lyricism. This becomes apparent in the remarkable minted peppermintalso crowned in Berlin, and dealing with the unhealthy obsession of a guy for a woman who rejects him.
Released in 1968, this unusual film marks the meeting between the filmmaker and actress Geraldine Chaplin, with whom he will have a son. Both collaborate again in 1972 in the pitiless Anna and the Wolvesin which a governess, foreign and free-thinking, is smothered in the conservative but hypocritical household that hired her – a household constituting a thinly veiled metaphor for the Franco regime (a brilliant sequel, Mom is a hundred years oldappeared in 1979 and was nominated for the Oscar for best international film).
In 1976, Carlos Saura and Geraldine Chaplin filmed Cria CuervosGrand Prix at Cannes and an authentic masterpiece in which a child joins her deceased mother in dreams.
The dancing period
Previously, Carlos Saura directed in 1974 Cousin Angelique, Special Jury Prize at Cannes. A work inspired by his unhappy young years spent in the bosom of the maternal clan, Cousin Angelique permanently scandalized for its underlying criticism of the regime. The film cements, in addition to a vision of the insidious violence of Spanish society at the time, Carlos Saura’s fascination with the theme of the family.
In 1981 a major professional turning point occurred with the success of wizarding love, bewitching film taking as much from the filmed spectacle, from the documentary as from the fiction. With the help of renowned dancer and choreographer Antonio Gades, Carlos Saura adapted a piece by Federico Garcia-Lorca. The result is a unique cinematographic experiment that the filmmaker does not take long to want to reproduce.
The splendid Carmen (1983), based on Bizet’s opera, and wizarding love (1986), these last two installments starring a burning Laura del Sol. This trilogy is the filmmaker’s tribute to flamenco.
In this regard, Carlos Saura told Le Devoir in 2010: “Flamenco has been with me for so long! I have forgotten since when, but it goes back to childhood…”.
Carlos Saura’s passion for music and dance will lead to many other films including Sevillanas (1992), Flamenco (1995) and its “continuation” flamenco, flamenco (2010), Tango (1998), Salome (2002), Fado (2010)…
Of memory and history
These musical projects did not prevent him from designing two ambitious historical frescoes: Eldorado (1988), a sumptuous and meticulous return to Aguirre’s legendary quest, and Goya in Bordeaux (1999), or the reminiscences of the famous exiled Spanish painter, from his love to his troubles with the Inquisition (note that the filmmaker’s brother, Antonio Saura, is a recognized painter).
It will also be pointed out Antonieta (1982), with Isabelle Adjani and Hanna Schygulla, in which a psychiatrist is interested in cases of female suicides at various times, and The seventh day (2004), in which two neighboring families harbor old grudges over the years. In both films: memory and the weight of history. Rare foray into the thriller, night cab (1996) denounces racism and intolerance towards the LGBTQ+ community, as well as the rise of neo-Nazi groups.
Prolific, with nearly fifty films on the clock, Carlos Saura had just released a last one: the walls speak. Long shunned in his native country, he was finally elevated to the rank of national pride during the 1990s.
On the announcement of his death, the Spanish Prime Minister, Socialist Pedro Sanchez, declared: “Carlos Saura is leaving us, a fundamental figure in Spanish culture […] We say goodbye to the director of the imagination, but his cinema remains. »