By Bikas Mishra • Apr 16th, 2008 • Filed under: Interview, Movies, Recently Featured, featured

Bikas Mishra in conversation with renowned Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura

In a career spanning more than half a century, Carlos Saura, has always taken cinema to newer and more exciting heights. He is one filmmaker who refused to get tied down to a particular school of filmmaking and created cinema that bears the stamp of his “auteurship”.

In 1960, the year of unparalleled significance for cinema, when Jean Luc Godard made À bout de souffle (Breathless) and Michelangelo Antonioni showed the world glimpses of industrialized world’s disillusionment with modernity through his L’ Avventura, Carlos Saura began his career.

Essentially a poet at heart and perturbed by Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, he set off on a journey that would later become one of the most memorable one in the history of cinema. Saura recalls the spirit of the times “there was a need for change. The French cinema probably needed more of a revolution in terms of film technique, while in Spain we felt the need from a political point of view.”

Saura feels that it was Italian post war neo realism that set the filmmakers thinking all over the Europe (in India Satyajit Ray got inspired by it) and that influenced everyone right from Godard to him, “Antonioni, Visconti, Fellini, it was an extra ordinary explosion of new cinema that had never been seen in Europe.”

Saura’s first film Los Golfos (The Delinquents, 1960) marks the beginning of Spanish New Wave but later he disassociated himself from the movement. He gradually emerged as a filmmaker with his own distinctive style noted for his poetic vision of reality. “I don’t believe in schools as such in cinema. My aim was to reflect life as it was, Spanish reality as it was and to express the reality of Spanish society.”

However, under the rule of dictator Francisco Franco, it wasn’t an easy task, hence Saura had to often take recourse of metaphors and allegories. Despite that a number of his films were cut and edited. Some films even got banned.
“Well obviously, I tried to make political films but not directly political for obvious reasons. It was important to be imaginative (in criticizing the state) but after the demise of Franco I felt liberated from the duty to make political cinema.”

Born to a pianist mother, Saura grew up with his painter brother Antonio. A keen interest in photography that he developed as a child later became the reason for quitting his industrial education and joining the Instituto de Investigaciones y Estudios Cinematográficos (Cinematographic Study and Research Institute). “Cinema brings together all the artistic elements I like ranging from (literary) interpretation, colour, music and storytelling. So the more you know of these elements the better (filmmaker you can become).”

Though Saura “feels more like a filmmaker”, he still nurtures a keen interest in photography and his camera accompanies him everywhere. “The camera for me is my memory. It’s the way of doing visual jogging.”

Even his films always play around with the memory that he has of Spanish civil war as a child . The memory that almost attains a life of its own in his cinema. “Each person is an entity made of memories. Even if one doesn’t want to, we’re made by the past.”

Saura shared a special relationship with great Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel so much so that he made a film “Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón (Bunuel and the table of king Solomon -2001)” to pay tribute to the master. The film wasn’t received very well probably because it’s deeply rooted in the works of Bunuel, his surrealist painter friend Salvador Dali and poet Federico Garcia Lorca. It keeps referring back to their works and eccentricities that makes it little incomprehensible for people who are not a Bunuel (and Dali and Lorca ) aficionado.

“That’s the greatest film I’ve ever made. I like the film but nobody else seems to like it. I’m sure Bunuel would have loved this film. But perhaps only he would have loved it. Everything you see in the film is actually based on conversations I had with him.”

Talking about Bunuel, Saura gets nostalgic, “When I showed La Prima Angelica (Cousin Angelica) at Cannes (1974, where it won the jury prize), it was an honor for me to hear him saying that it’s a film that he would have loved to make himself. He also said about his film Milky Way that the only other person who could have made such a film is me. Bunuel even acted in one of my films. (Llanto por un bandido (1964)”

Saura visited India last month to receive global lifetime achievement award of the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI) and it’s just a co incidence that for the first time his films are set for a commercial release here. UTV World Movies has acquired rights of his 2007 film Fados and 2005 film Iberia. Fados is a musical documentary on Portuguese music of Fado.

76 years old Saura has made 40 feature films, won 42 International awards and is busy making his next movie based on the life of eighteenth century lyricist Lorenzo da Ponte who collaborated with Mozart on his “Io, Don Giovanni” opera. He also has an Indian project on mind that will trace the journey of Flamenco (his favorite dance form, a subject of his trilogy), however, he’s yet to find a producer for it.

An extremely humble man with an extraordinary sense of humour Saura describes Goya’s one of the last paintings to sum up his journey that portrays an old man with a flowing beard with the caption “I’m still learning”. Then adds his trademark pun to it, “I’m 76, I’ve made 40 films and have 7 children, having more children is now complicated but will definitely make a couple of more films”.

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