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Cria
Cuervos Program Notes
The
Past is Not the Past by Paul Julian Smith
Cria
Cuevos …, Carlos Saura’s
political and psychological masterpiece, was shot in the summer
of 1975, as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco lay dying, and
premiered in Madrid’s Conde Duque Theatre, on January 26, 1976,
forty years after the civil war began. Saura could thus hardly
have chosen a more momentous time for his meditation on history
and memory. The film is flanked by two decisive events: the
assassination of Franco’s nominated successor, Carrero Blanco
in 1973, and the first democratic elections in 1978.
Born
to a bourgeois family, but one that had been on the losing side
in the war, and trained in the regime’s official film school,
Saura had made ten features and attained a unique position by
the time of Cria cuervos’s release. Acclaimed by Spanish
critics as the only filmmaker in their country ever to have
achieved a fully fledged career, he had already created the
most sustained, independent, and consistent oeuvre in a national
cinema plagued by exile and unfulfilled promised. Saura’s films
up until then had been implicit critiques of the Francoist regime,
often focusing on men and violence, such as in The Hunt
(1965), where a bloody hunting party stood in for the
civil war. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Saura had had bitter conflicts
with state censors from the beginning. As late as 1973, successive
versions of the script for Ana and the Wolves were
simply turned down. Cria cuervos was the first film
over which Saura exercised complete artistic control, taking
a triple credit for story, script and direction.
But
although Saura was justly praised for a uniquely personal voice,
especially in his complex fusion of fantasy and reality, his
auteur status owed a great deal to the contributions of others.
Saura’s longtime producer, Elias Querejeta, has helped shape
his career, grooming him for the international festivals, where
juries were eager to reward a gifted ainti-Francoist filmmaker
(Cria cuervos won the Jury’s grand Prize at Cannes).
And, crucially, Geraldine Chaplin, Saura’s partner and a collaborator
from 1967 to 1979, provided support that was both creative and
financial. Economically secure and feted by foreigners, Saura
was by now relatively immune to Francoist censors, who feared
the negative publicity that would come from banning his high-profile
films. Unlike other oppositional projects of the time, Cria
cuervos, a clear, albeit enigmatic, critique of the regime,
would be passed uncut.
After
and early flirtation with neorealism (his first feature, 1960’s
Los golfos, had treated teenage hooligans), Saura’s
special interest became more psychological than social, what
he called the “ghosts inside the head.” Cousin Angelica
(1974), the film that preceded Cria cuervos, had
been an exploration of the inner demons of a middle-aged man
who was still fixated on his childhood love for a young girl
during the civil war. Saura expressed this trauma through the
risky device of having the adult actor double as the child.
Such tricky casting is vital also to Cria cuervos,
with the twist that it is not a man but a woman who seeks release
from the prison of the past. The Proustian search for lost time
was thus replayed in a feminine key.
Set
almost entirely in a large, gloomy house walled upagainst the
chaotic life of Madrid outside, Cria cuervos tells
the story of eight-year-old Ana, played by Ana Torrent, fresh
from Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973),
a worthy companion piece to this, her second featured. After
the harrowing death of her mother (played by the compellingly
neurotic Chaplin), Ana finds her philandering father dead in
bed with a married lover. Frosty Aunty Paulina arrives to look
after the young girl and her two sisters. The all-female household
is completed by the children’s grandmother, mute and immobile
in a wheelchair, and the feisty, fleshy housekeeper, Rosa (veteran
character actress Florinda Chico), who fills Ana in on the mysteries
of sex.
But
this relatively simple premise tells us little about the experience
of watching the film. For a Cria cuervos’s apparently
uneventful narrative unfolds, the dead parents continue to intrude
unpredictably in the present, as does the adult Ana, also played
by Chaplin, who speaks from the then distant 1995. Disconcertingly,
Chaplin’s own British-accented voice is retained in her role
as the mother, but as the grown daughter she is dubbed by a
native Spanish actress. This retrospective perspective does
not, however, resolve the film’s many mysteries: the adult Ana
confesses she can no longer recall or comprehend much of what
the child experiences.
The
interpretation of reality and fantasy is brilliantly played
out in the opening sequence. We begin with a very slow pan around
a darkened room. A little light filters through pale curtains.
In her prim, white nightdress, the child Ana descends a lengthy
staircase. As the camera holds tight on Torrent’s pale, impassive
face, urgently whispered adult words (“I love you,” “I can’t
breathe”) are barely heard from behind a closed door. A half-dressed
woman, her bra visible beneath an open blue jacket, flees the
house, exchanging only a troubled look with the child. On entering
the now silent room, Ana finds her father in bed, his naked
torso exposed. Expressionless, she takes a glass to the kitchen,
where she proceeds to wash it in the sink. As she opens the
fridge (we glimpse enigmatic chicken feet inside), her mother
comes into the shot behind her and addresses her tenderly. It
is only later that we learn the mother is dead.
Here
reality and fantasy seem to swap places. The bizarre death of
Ana’s father who will prove to be a Fascist military man, is
real (later the girls are forced to kiss his uniformed corpse).
The apparently banal appearances of the mother at the fridge,
on the other had, is in fact fantasized by the grieving child.
Through a deceptively simple shooting style (Chaplin’s character
just wanders into the frame), Saura shows the intimacy with
which the living and the dead can cohabit, most especially when,
as is so often the case in his cinema, fragile psyches are frozen
in time by trauma.
As
many critics have noted, this trauma is linked to repression.
The historical and social references in the film are inextricable
from the psychic structure it explores. Thus the private room
of extramarital sex is, in the very next sequence, crowded with
the very public dignitaries of the regime, who have come to
view their colleague’s corpse. In the opening credits, family
snapshot of Ana (eyes dark and vacant, even at the seaside)
give way to professional portraits of her father astride a horse.
The little rituals of everyday life (housekeeper Rosa combing
Ana’s hair or folding sheets with her) veer unexpectedly into
much larger matters. As Ana and her sister Irene help to tidy
the house, Irene asks Rosa when the war has ended (Rosa guesses
correctly that it was 1939), and the girls brandish the guns
they say their father has left them (Ana will take aim at the
hated aunt). There could be no clearer or more disquieting sign
of the legacy of violence that is bequeathed from one generation
to another, from guilty or forgetful adults to uncomprehending
children. This bad education is the meaning of Saura’s enigmatic
title, which cites the Spanish proverb “Raise ravens and they’ll
peck out your eyes.”
The
house itself, claustrophobic in spite of its ample size and
extensive garden, is a transparent metaphor for the regime,
which even at the late date of Cria cuervos was still
frantically putting up barriers to life beyond its bunker. It
is no accident that the venetian blinds on the window seem to
mimic prison bars. Wealthy but decadent, like the leisured middle
classes who supported Franco, the house even boasts an empty
swimming pool, a symbol of sensual pleasures lost or unfulfilled.
But the deadly quiet of the family home is insistently interrupted
by jarringly noisy shots of the street outside, with its lurid
posters for consumer goods and oppressively heavy traffic. Saura
seems to be suggesting that memories, whether personal or political,
may be repressed, but, like the inescapable sounds of the city,
they will return as ghosts, haunting all Spaniards as they do
the characters in Cria cuervos.
While
Saura’s earlier films, influenced by his then screenwriter Rafael
Azcona, sometimes display an unnerving misogyny (Ana and
the Wolves culminates in the rape and murder of Chaplin’s
character), in Cria cuervos the psyche tat serves to
represent this troubled nation is female. Indeed, the film has
been praised by feminist critics for its subtle account of female
socialization: the ways girls come to accept, reject, or negotiate
the roles imposed on them. The daughters thus submit to having
their hair combed but flatly refuse to eat decorously. Little
Ana holds a pistol better than she does a fork or a needle.
Her silent, rebellious looks are often addressed directly to
the camera, an implicit challenge to the audience. When the
sisters play dress-up, it is to expertly re-create the bitter
arguments of their dead parents. With their painted-on mustache
and borrowed lipstick, the young actors reveal that both masculine
and feminine roles are merely a masquerade.
The
pressures of patriarchy, felt even in a house without men, are
sometimes wished away, as in the charming scene where the girls
dance together. Elsewhere, the interrupted interaction of mothers
and daughters is movingly explored. Ana fantasizes that her
dead mother is tenderly telling her the story of Little Almond.
But she awakes distressed to discover that she is alone once
more. The persistence of memory can be both a blessing and a
curse.
At
a historical moment when a Spanish woman still needed permission
from her husband to open a bank account or apply for a passport,
Cria cuervos’s adult characters, daughters of the dictatorship,
have it no easier than the girls. Ana’s mother, fearful of failure,
gave up a promising career as a concert pianist, only to be
trapped in a loveless marriage. The girl’s mute grandmother,
who is losing her memory as well as her speech, can do nothing
but contemplate images of her married past. Ana’s single aunt
is unlucky in love, tempted by an affair with a married friend.
But if the position of women is intolerable in 1975, it is not
clear that it will be better in 1995. The poised, adult Ana,
who regularly addresses the camera, gives nothing away. And
if she is played by the same actress as her mother, then surely
it is because she is condemned to repeat her mother’s mistakes.
In publicity shots for Cria cuervos, Torrent and Chaplin
pose side by side, their deep, dark eyes and translucently pale
skin made to rhyme. There could be no clearer suggestion that
Saura’s women are locked in a repetition compulsion that is
at once psychic and social.
Beyond
the film’s laconic dialogue (characters are unwilling or unable
to communicate with each other), it is Cria cuervos’s cinematography
that suggests such subtleties. From the very first scene, Saura
aligns us with the little girl’s point of view, using subjective
shots as she contemplates her dead father. In Ana’s dialogues
with her dead mother, Saura employs simple shot/reverse shot,
failing to cue us that theses scenes are fantasy and encouraging
us to participate in the couple’s imaginary conversation. In
real-life sequences, however, interaction with chilly adults
tends to be shown in a long shot that distances us and the children
play listlessly in their secluded garden. When Ana fantasizes
that she is jumping from this uncanny position, the camera wheels
wildly round, re-creating the perspective of her imagined suicide.
But
if Saura deftly engages the viewer in what one critic has called
a “practice of looking,” he also implicates us in a practice
of listening. Three pieces of music are compulsively repeated
in Cria cuervos: a muted classical piano piece by the
Catalan composer Federico Mompou, which was once played by the
mother; “Hay, Maricurz!” a traditional copla performed by Imperio
Argentina (an early supporter of the regime), here played for
the grandmother; and “Porque te vas” (Because You’re Leaving),
a pop song of the period sung by the chirpy Jeanette, the only
record Ana seems to own. The conflict between tradition and
modernity suggested in Cria cuervos’s costumes (the
girl’s casual denim contrasts with the adults’ formal attire)
is replayed here at the level of sound. But in spite of its
jauntry rhythm, the juvenile pop song that expresses Ana’s rebellion
is in fact an ode to lost love and abandoned hopes: for the
singer, even the sun shining on a city window is a sign that
her lover must soon leave. The present may thus prove to be
as depressing as the past.
Surprisingly,
such subtle techniques and melancholic messages did not harm
Cria cuervos at the box office. This unrepentantly
art-house film was the sixth–biggest grosser of the year, attracting
a domestic audience of well over one million. While leftist
critics attacked Saura for focusing on the leisured bourgeoisie
and neglecting the working class, Spanish audiences clearly
had no problem decoding Cria cuervos’s historical allegory
and relating its individual, even idiosyncratic, vision to their
wider collective concerns at a unique moment when the nation
was at a crossroads.
As
Saura shows with Cria cuervos, in 1976, Spaniards looked
back in fear and forward with uncertainty. Thirty years later,
we now know that Spain ’s transition to democracy, dismissed
by some as a “pact of forgetting,” would be an unqualified success.
Saura’s remarkably prolific career, on the other hand, has been
more uneven since Cria cuervos than he might have hoped,
with such successes as dance movies in the 1980’s (Blood
Wedding 1981; Carmen 1983) counterbalanced by
failed historical epics (El Dorado 1988) and social
realist dramas (Taxi 1996).
Although
Saura’s demanding style of filmmaking may have fallen out of
fashion in Spain, his achievement remains indisputable today.
In 2002, Pedro Almodovar cast Saura’s exmuse Geraldine Chaplin
as the highly strung ballet teacher in Talk to Her,
a role not so distant from the neurotic pianist she played in
Cria cuervos. He was paying proper homage to the director
who was for many years the best known in Spanish cinema. Still
as moving and compelling as when it was made, Cria cuervos
seems now not diminished but enhanced by its growing distance
in time, benefiting from a retrospective perspective that, appropriately
enough, is subtly explored within the film itself.
Paul
Julian Smith is a professor of Spanish at the University of
Cambridge. He is the author of fourteen books on Spanish and
Latin American cinema, television, and culture, including, most
recently, Spanish
Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet and Television
in Spain: From Franco to Almodovar. He is a regular contributor
to Sight & Sound.
Cria
Cuervos Discussion Questions:
Death has numerous meanings for the three little girls in Cria
Cuervos. To Maite and Irene, death seems to be somewhat
simplistic - it may happen, and when it does it is simply a
mystery. To Ana, however, it is a constant preoccupation. Discuss
the multiple perceptions of death to her and to the others as
they are revealed in the course of the film.
Geraldine
Chaplin has said that, in spite of their marginalized position
in Franco's society, Spanish women were incredibly strong. It
was a matriarchal society in which the women ruled everything
of importance. "Men wore the trousers: women decided which
trousers they wore." Do you agree or disagree with her
view?
Irene
speaks the final words in Cria Cuervos as she tells
Ana of the dream she had the previous night. What meaning can
this dream have for her and why do you think that Saura chose
these words to close his film?
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