Just as in Argentine football we talk about Maradona and Messi, in Spanish cinema later sandwich the first surname that comes to mind is Saura. The Aragonese, born in Huesca, who turned 91 on January 4, died today, Friday February 10, of respiratory failure, leaving behind more than a handful of huge successes, such as Crow farm, Carmen, Ana and the wolves OR Cousin Angelica.
And also one of eight films to receive an Academy Award nomination in the category of Best Production Spoken in a Language Other than English, which was Tangowhich toured our country and participated in 1999. Another title of his which reached the Oscar, for Spain, but did not win either, was Mom is 100 years old.
When that 1979 film was released in Argentine theaters, there was a military dictatorship in Argentina and censorship at the Film Institute, which was headed by the disastrous Néstor Paulino Tato. One of the co-stars was Norman Briski, who went into exile, and the one who was banished. Legend has it that when the film’s distributor, Lavalle, presented the copy to be qualified, he interrupted his appearance so they would not object to the screening of the film. And then he premiered it with Briski on screen.
Multifaceted, Carlos Saura Atarés was also a photographer, theater and opera director, writer and screenwriter. And he lived the censorship directly in his land. His childhood was spent in the midst of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the consequences of the Franco regime forced him to resort to symbols and allegories, in order not to be censored.
His mother, who was a pianist, instilled in him a passion for music. And it will be his older brother, Antonio, a painter, who will influence his artistic aspiration and the composition of the images.
At a very young age, Saura began writing and directing 16mm short films, as well as photography, which he will never abandon. It was when he moved to Madrid to pursue a career in Industrial Engineering, but his vocation for photography, cinema and journalism led him to abandon those studies and enroll in the Institute of Research and Film Studies.
How well he did.
Everyone will remember a title, according to their subjectivity and taste. There will be those who will prefer the trilogy he made with the bailaor Antonio Gades, born in 1981 after seeing a performance by Gades from Blood wedding, and he proposed to take her to the cinema. It was so successful that it sparked a renaissance and the export (and exploitation) of flamenco around the world.
His second collaboration with Gades was, perhaps, the best: Carmen (1983), based on the play by Bizet, which earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and the only BAFTA (from the British Academy) it would receive. The trilogy would close with The wizard of love (1986).
It’s that Saura had both her imagination in the images and music in her veins.
But Saura started with the gulfs, which he shot in 1959, in which he created a kind of Spanish neorealism, focusing his story on juvenile delinquency in the poor neighborhoods of Madrid, from a sociological point of view. That first cinema had something documentary and very lyrical about it.
His talent will soon go beyond the borders of his land, winning the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for Hunting (1966), and from Peppermint Frappe (1967). She has also won the Special Jury Prizes at Cannes for Cousin Angelica (1974), and from Crow farm (1976). The aforementioned Mom is 100 years old (1979) won the Special Jury Prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival.
With Hunting (1965) surprises again, analyzing the wounds caused by the civil war among the participants in a hunting trip. Shot mostly outdoors, the photographic work has already demonstrated his aesthetic concerns.
The theme of memory and sexual impulses will be recurrent in a large part of his filmography, as happens in Crow farm, with the role of Ana Torrent, and which played Héctor Alterio. The song Why are you leaving It was also a total success at the time, and has been revised by Attaque 77 until now.
Many consider Elise, my life (1977) as his masterpiece. In 1990 she directed Oh Carmela!, adaptation of the play by José Sanchis Sinisterra. For this film, in which he once again faces the Civil War, he works with screenwriter Rafael Azcona, and obtains 13 statuettes at the Goya Awards, from the Spanish Film Academy.
The following year he arrives in Buenos Aires to shoot The Southversion of the story by Jorge Luis Borges.
it had also rolled The golden (1987), an overly ambitious film with a blockbuster, about the figure of Lope de Aguirre, the Spanish explorer in South America. AND The dark night (1989), which evoked the prison suffered by San Juan de la Cruz, and what was to be one of his most popular productions, Yes Carmella (1990).
It was since 1991 when he returned to music, with Sevillian (1991), and then Flemish (1994) and the cited Tangoin which Miguel Angel Solá, Juan Carlos Copes, Cecilia Narova, Julio Bocca and Mia Maestro starred, with the splendid photography of Vittorio Storaro.
Mario Suárez (Solá) is a tango artist, left by his wife (Narova), and starts preparing a film about tango. He reached the Oscar nomination, which he would lose in the hands of Roberto Benigni and his award-winning Life is Beautiful.
With Goya in Bordeaux (1999) was able to enter the world of painting, e Buñuel and King Solomon’s Table (2001) was a tribute to someone he considered one of his masters.
Saura was the companion of Geraldine Chaplin, who directed, for more than a decade, from 1967 to 1979. With the daughter of Charles Chaplin they had a son, Shane. In total, she Saura had 7 children and was married twice.
This Saturday, at the Goya awards gala, he would receive the Goya de Honor for Spanish cinema for his entire career. In a recent interview, he clarified that he didn’t make films “to please anyone or to receive recognition”, but because he liked him. The last thing he directed was the walls speaka documentary released a few days ago.
And at his young 91 years, he was in pre-production Bach, about the brilliant composer. A project that will have remained unfinished, but it is not something that can be said of his career.
Source: Clarin
