Saturday February 11, Carlos Saura was to receive a Goya of honor during the annual ceremony of Spanish cinema which is equivalent to the Césars, in tribute to the whole of a career started sixty-seven years earlier, with the short film El pequeño rio Manzanares (1956). But the quiet rebel who stood up to Francoist censorship in the 1960s and 1970s with The hunt (1966) or Cousin Angelica (1974), the universally acclaimed filmmaker for cria cuervos (1976), the passionate of dance and music, and above all of flamenco, author of blood wedding (1981), did not have the patience to wait for this trophy. Carlos Saura died on Friday February 10, in Madrid. He was 91 years old.
Crippled by three decades of fascist dictatorship, Spanish cinema only survived, until 1975, thanks to a handful of filmmakers, foremost among whom was Carlos Saura. Protected to a certain extent by an international reputation that began to grow from his first feature film, Rogue, selected at Cannes in 1960, he succeeded in constructing a body of work that depicted lives shaped by the insoluble contradictions between modernity on the move and the weight of repression – political, religious or sexual. This period of the cinema of the author of minted peppermint (which, in 1968, failed to compete for the Palme d’Or and was swept away by the cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival), culminated in the worldwide success of cria cuervos in 1976, just after the death of Francisco Franco.
Carlos Saura then reinvented himself as a protean author, devoting a large part of his projects to music and dance, adapting Garcia Lorca (blood wedding1981) or Mérimée (Carmen1983) in the form of musicals of flamenco. He then tried his hand at the historical epic as well (Eldorado, which won, in 1988, the title of the most expensive production in the history of Spanish cinema), than to the fantastic tale by making his master to film and friend, Luis Buñuel, the protagonist of Buñuel and King Solomon’s Table (2001). Carlos Saura’s films experienced decreasing success, without his stature diminishing in Spain – after the return of democracy, he maintained a calmer relationship with his native country than his successor as a great Spanish author, Pedro Almodovar – and in the film world, which has multiplied, over the years, retrospectives and tributes.
Intimate of Bunuel
Carlos Saura was born on January 4, 1932 in Huesca, in northern Aragon, the third in a family of four. His older brother, the painter Antonio Saura (1930-1998) was one of the major figures of Spanish art of the XXe century. Their father was a civil servant of the Republic, which forced the Sauras to live in Madrid between 1936 and 1938, under Francoist air and artillery bombardments. In an interview at El Paísthe filmmaker remembered, on the occasion of the presentation, in 2021, at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, of the animated short Rosa Rosaecivil war footage montage “of these bombings, of these assassinations, which make me identify with this subject. The Civil War has still not been satisfactorily treated in cinema, he added. A little maybe. Many of my films talk about it, without succeeding in it”…
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