Carlos Saura

Carlos Saura Atarés (Huesca, January 4, 1932-Collado Mediano, Madrid, February 10, 2023) was a renowned Spanish filmmaker, photographer and writer.

Biography

Born in Huesca on January 4, 1932, just finished high school, he began to become fond of photography. He abandoned his studies in industrial engineering to enter the Institute of Cinematographic Research and Experiences in Madrid, where he obtained a diploma in Film Directing.

Career

First films

After making the short film La tarde del domingo (1957), he made the documentary Cuenca (1958), awarded at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, to which He followed his first feature film, Los golfos (1960), En la caza (1965), with a very tough subject in which he analyzed the injuries caused by the civil war in the terrible story of a game hunting between characters representing different vital positions. The outdoor set design, in an arid landscape and the highly contrasted photography by Luis Cuadrado, made this work a reference for later cinema and it achieved great international success, winning the award for best direction at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Meeting with Querejeta

After these first works, his collaboration with the producer Elías Querejeta was consolidated in 1967, with whom he had half-produced La caza, with the film Peppermint frappé, beginning the most outstanding period of his career. Peppermint frappé is once again a psychological inquiry into the effects of Franco's repression after the civil war, the erotic inhibitions and other shortcomings of his generation. The outcome is as violent as The Hunt, but now it appears located in the space of memory or the most primal instincts of the characters.

Themes and shapes, polishing this abstract style, developed in collaboration with Querejeta, who tried to x-ray the ills of Spanish society by circumventing censorship, continued in Stress, it's three, three (1968), The Burrow (1969), The Garden of Earthly Delights (1970) and Ana and the Wolves (1972).

Ana and the Wolves offers the closed world of a mansion belonging to an aristocratic Spanish family. Rafaela Aparicio, the matriarch of this closed world, will reprise this character in Mama Cumplea Cien Años (1979), a continuation of Ana and the Wolves. A foreign governess arrives at the manor house to educate the girls of Juan, the man of the house. The frustrated sexual drives of the three men in the family appear after the arrival of this beautiful young woman whose freer ways and her sincerity provoke irrepressible desires in the subconscious of the men. Ana uncovers the concern of the closed and conservative environment of this family, thus revealing the features that so define the society of her time.

The consolidation of the "Saura myth": Cousin Angelica and Cría cuervos

The film that marked its international consolidation was Cousin Angélica (1973), which received the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival; in it, the past (1936) and the present (1973) merge and this is shown by the confusion of historical time that occurs in the film shots, even within the same sequence. This is how the theme of the presence of wounds from the past in the present is revealed, a classic matter of psychoanalysis. The fusion of time also has other frustrating consequences, such as the contrast between the childhood love of Luis and Angélica, who has perhaps been his only love, and the adult relationship of Luis with an already married Angélica in a situation that makes recovery impossible. of that affective relationship. This is not the first film to explore the memory and intrusion of the past into the present, which was already well drawn in previous works, such as The Garden of Earthly Delights (1970).

María Clara Fernández de Loaysa, in her role as Angélica girl, establishes a relationship with the figure of José Luis López Vázquez, whose character followed the trail of the one she played in The Garden of Earthly Delights, where he appeared in a wheelchair, thereby symbolizing the psychic paralysis of that generation. In this case, she represents the love frustration for her cousin, in the double role of child and adult, represented by the same actor.

Cría cuervos (1975), also a Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, once again exploits the theme of memory, contrasting the look of the girl Ana Torrent in fierce contrast to the authoritarian characters.

Latest films with Querejeta

Elisa, my life (1977) was probably his masterpiece. Based on a very ambitious concept of the interrelation of cinema and literature, the film constantly dialogues with the peculiar elements of cinema: images, sound, music and texts. As for images, there is a deep relationship between writing texts and visual writing. The diary written by the character played by Fernando Rey is the source, or point of view of the enunciation, of what we see, but everything is complicated by being his daughter, played by Geraldine Chaplin, who reads that diary while dying her. Therefore, it is necessary to be very alert to know the origin of the visual narration, which could be produced by the reading of the daughter, the writing of the father or the enunciating voice of a narrator external to the voices of the characters, something like a Saura-narrator. All this interwoven with references to The Great Theater of the World by Calderón de la Barca, El Criticón by Baltasar Gracián and the myth of Pygmalion that we hear in the version of the Opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau (Pygmalion, 1748). All this is ruled by Erik Satie's Gnosienne I, which takes us to the spaces of memory.

With the arrival of democracy in Spain, Saura became one of the most prominent filmmakers of the Transition. Los ojos vendados (1978) is a plea against torture and injustices in Latin America. The following year he tackled his first comedy with his review of the family in Ana and the wolves in a comic key and with an air of the end of Francoism in Mama cumple centen años . It was a complete critical and public success, awarded at several festivals and selected for the Oscar for best foreign film.

In 1980 he changed register and, abandoning the intellectual, reflective and polysemic look with which he tried to dissect the consequences of the civil war and Francoism, he returned to popular cinema, which deals with contemporary problems such as youth marginalization, with Hurry up, hurry up, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

The musical trilogy with Antonio Gades

In 1981 he began the collaboration with Antonio Gades and with the producer Emiliano Piedra. After seeing his theatrical ballet Blood Wedding Saura suggested that he take it to the movies, thus initiating a genuine musical genre far removed from Anglo-Saxon molds. The musical received unexpected international success after screening at Cannes. With the film Blood Wedding (1981) he invented a new genre of dance film and thereby contributes to the extraordinary dissemination that Spanish dance has experienced in the world in recent years. Again with Antonio Gades and Emiliano Piedra, he prepared an adaptation of Bizet's opera Carmen which became an international success in 1983, awarded at Cannes and selected for an Oscar. With El amor brujo , inspired by Falla's work of the same name, his most ambitious musical to date, he closed a trilogy dedicated to contemporary Spanish musicals.

Variety and eclecticism: a director's thematic ambition

After Dulces horas, his last collaboration with Elías Querejeta, in 1982 Saura shot his first Latin American film: Antoinette, the story of a woman during the Mexican revolution. In 1984 Saura filmed Los stilts with Piedra.

In 1985 he went to the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez to finance an ambitious film about Lope de Aguirre's expedition in search of El Dorado. Filming takes place in Costa Rica during 1987, and the film becomes the most expensive in the history of Spanish cinema up to that time.

In 1989 he premiered The Dark Night, an intimate film about the prison term suffered by Saint John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic and poet of the XVI. In 1990 she shot ¡Ay, Carmela!, an adaptation of the play by José Sanchis Sinisterra. For this film, which once again reviews the Civil War, she once again worked with the screenwriter Rafael Azcona, and in the V edition of the Goya Awards, she obtained 13 statuettes.

In 1991 he moved to Buenos Aires to shoot El Sur, a version of Borges' short story. With Sevillanas she paid homage to the most significant of the genre, this time through a series of independent paintings.

The following year, he took charge of the official film of the Barcelona Olympic Games, Marathon.

In 1993 he filmed Shoot!, an adaptation of a short story by the Italian writer Scerbanenco. In January 1994, she began filming Flamenco , which is probably the most important audiovisual document on this art, despite the disappearance of Camarón, who did intervene in Sevillanas . It is no longer a series of unconnected paintings, but a set shot with pinpoint precision where Vittorio Storaro collaborated as cinematographer.

In June 1997, Saura moved to Argentina to shoot Tango; This film, after multiple controversies, competes for the Oscars under the Argentine flag: the film is the most awarded film of the year in Argentina, and Saura received the Cóndor Award from the Argentine Critics Association for best director of the year. His novel Lonely Bird appeared. In April 1998 the film Pajarico was released.

In 1999 he premiered Goya in Bordeaux , an approach to the figure of the Aragonese painter Francisco de Goya, where he produced possibly the best photographic work of his work, in close collaboration with Vittorio Storaro. He published his novel That light . In 2000 he was distinguished with the Prize for Best Artistic Contribution and the Jury Prize of the Montreal Festival for Goya in Bordeaux .

Saura in 2002

In 2001 Buñuel and King Solomon's Table is a tribute to his declared teacher, Luis Buñuel, and to the atmosphere of the Student Residence of Spain in the 1920s. with the collaboration of Agustín Sánchez Vidal, who won the Espejo de España Essay Award in 1988 for his work Buñuel, Lorca, Dalí: the endless enigma, and who after this experience as a storyteller devoted himself with success to the fiction novel.

Latest works

Carlos Saura in 2008.

He began the new century directing three musical films based on identical aesthetic assumptions: Salomé (2002), staging of the well-known biblical tragedy by the Aída Gómez company; Iberia (2005), a tribute to the homonymous suite by the composer Isaac Albéniz; and Fados (2007), in co-production with Portugal, about fado, the Portuguese musical expression par excellence. In these films, Saura reiterated the same conventions of the previous musicals of the 90s, beginning with the use of light as a dramatic element, as well as the use of minimalist furniture, consequently obtaining musicals of great sobriety and visual beauty, but already without the novelty of those.

His latest films include El séptimo día (2004), a film inspired by the crime in Puerto Hurraco, a massacre that occurred in deep Extremadura that shocked Spain in 1990, with a script by Ray Loriga and Above all, Io, Don Giovanni (2009), one of his most ambitious works, a blockbuster around the figure of Lorenzo da Ponte; In between, Saura made the short documentary Sinfonía de Aragón (2008) for the 2008 Zaragoza International Exhibition, a masterful audiovisual exercise in which the protagonist is Aragón. In 2016, he premiered the film Jota de Saura, an anthropological tour of the jota, with nineteen music and dance paintings and the participation of Miguel Ángel Berna as a choreographer and dancer, Sara Baras, Ara Malikian, Juan Manuel Cañizares, Nacho del Río and Carlos nunez. Jota de Saura was produced by Movistar Plus+ and Tresmonstruos Media.

In 2017, the filmmaker Félix Viscarret premiered the documentary Saura(s), not the first of the documentaries dedicated to the filmmaker, but the most ambitious and incisive of these, where the peculiar personality of the filmmaker, insofar as he puts his artistic work before everything else (family matters included). The documentary was nominated for the Goya Awards that year in the category of best documentary film.

In 2021 he shot the short film entitled Goya 3 de mayo, an innovative project promoted by Aragón TV, in which he will recreate in film language the canvas of Francisco de Goya, The executions of the May 3. That same year she had as a project a series on the poet Federico García Lorca.

For 2022, he had planned to shoot a biopic about Pablo Picasso.

On February 3, 2023, he premiered his latest film “Las Paredes Hablan”, a production by María del Puy, Malvalanda, editing by Vanessa Marimbert and script by José G. Morillas. A search for the ties that unite the first graphic and pictorial manifestations of Humanity, which defined us as a species, and the most modern art, particularly urban art and graffiti. An unprecedented and courageous proposal along the lines of a Saura interested in memory and the drives that have moved Human Beings since their inception.

Death

He died at his home in Collado Mediano (Madrid) on February 10, 2023, at the age of ninety-one, due to respiratory failure, one day before receiving the honorary Goya Award.

Personal life

He had two sons with director Adela Medrano, Carlos (1958) and Antonio Saura Medrano (1960). He lived with Geraldine Chaplin for more than a decade and from this relationship in 1974 his son Shane was born. In 1978 he began his relationship with Mercedes Pérez (1960), with whom he married in 1982 and with whom he had three children, Manuel (1981), Adrián (1984) and Diego (1987). In 2006 he married the actress Eulalia Ramón, with whom he had a daughter named Anna (1994).

He was the brother of the painter Antonio Saura.

Filmography

Short Films

• Flamenco (1955). Documentary
• The small river Manzanares (1956). Documentary
• Symphony of Aragon (2008). Documentary for the International Exhibition of Zaragoza 2008
• Goya 3 May (2021). Fiction
• Rosa Rosae. The Civil War (2021). Documentary

Medium-length films

• Sunday afternoon (1957). Fiction
• Cuenca (1958). Documentary

Feature films

• The Gulfs (1960)
• I cry for a bandit (1964)
• The Hunt (1966)
• Peppermint frappé (1967)
• Stress is three, three (1968)
• The madness (1969)
• The garden of delights (1970)
• Ana and the wolves (1973)
• The Angelica cousin (1974)
• Raven breed (1976)
• Elisa, my life (1977)
• Eyes blindfolded (1978)
• Mom is a hundred years old (1979)
• Hurry, hurry (1981)
• Blood balls (1981). Musical
• Sweet hours (1982)
• Antonieta (1982)
• Carmen (1983). Musical
• The stilts (1984)
• Witch love (1986). Musical
• El Dorado (1988)
• Dark night (1989)
• Oh, Carmela! (1990)
• Shoot! (1993)
• Taxi (1996)
• Pajarico (1997)
• Tango (1998). Musical
• Goya in Bordeaux (1999)
• Buñuel and the table of King Solomon (2001)
• Salome (2002). Musical
• The seventh day (2004)
• Io, Don Giovanni (2009). Musical
• The King of the World (2021). Musical

Documentaries

• Sevillanas (1992)
• Marathon (1992)
• Flamenco (1995)
• Iberia (2005)
• Fados (2007)
• Flamenco, Flamenco (2010)
• Zonda, Argentine folklore (2015)
• Jota de Saura (2016)
• Renzo Piano, an Architect for Santander (2018)
• The walls speak (2022)

Opera Conducting

• 1991: Carmen (Georges Bizet), for the Sttutgart Opera
• 2004: Carmen (Georges Bizet)
• 2007: Carmen (Georges Bizet)
• 2010: Carmen (Georges Bizet)
• 2019: Don Giovanni (W.A.Mozart), for Friends of La Coruña opera. Coro Gaos.

Theatrical direction

• 2013: The Great Theatre of the World (Pedro Calderón de la Barca)
• 2018-2021: The colonel has no one to write (Gabriel García Márquez)
• 2019-2021: The party of the goat (Mario Vargas Llosa)
• 2020: The Great Theatre of the World (Mexico)

Literary and photographic work

Along with his cinematographic work, he was also a writer with broad thematic horizons and notable stylistic research. His novel Pajarico solitario (1997), later made into a film under the title Pajarico , is an autobiographical narrative. With the greatest literary ambition is Elisa, my life (2004), with which Saura carried out the opposite operation: novelizing a previously made film, this time his film of the same title dated 1977.

Novels

• Lonely Pajarico (1997)
• That light! (1998)
• Elisa, my life (2004)
• Absences (2017)

Scripts (edited in book form)

• Raven breed
• Elisa, my life
• That light!
• Goya in Bordeaux
• Buñuel and the table of King Solomon

Books on photography

• The Rastro (2003)
• Flamenco (2004)
• The painted photographs of Carlos Saura (2005)
• Saura x Saura (2009)
• Spain 50 years (2016)
• Photobolsillo(2018)

Exhibitions (selection)

Saura in 2017.

• Other looks of Carlos Saura. Itinerant exhibition curated by Asier Mensuro that was inaugurated at the SEMINCI de Valladolid (2009) and which was later seen in León (2009-2010), La Coruña (2010), Madrid (2010), Zaragoza (2010) and Gijón (2010-2011). It reflects on the recurring themes in the work of Saura, showing how they develop in the different disciplines in which they work as cinema, photography, drawing, performing arts or literature.
• Light of Carlos Saura (Avilés, 2011). Curated by Asier Mensuro. It is the first exhibition with which the International Cultural Centre Oscar Niemeyer opens. In it, Carlos Saura reflects through installations, projections and various interactive pieces on one of the themes that dominates with the greatest mastery: The light; analyzing it in all possible aspects: The absence of light and primary fears, the biological eye and mechanical instruments such as the dark, photographic or cinematographic camera, thanks to which we can capture the light. Light in painting, architecture or photography. Also included are pieces on the characteristic of light such as the color, the shadow it produces or the reflection. Finally, it includes a great homage to light: The sun.

Bibliography about his exhibitions and work

• Carlos Saura, photographer: years of youth (1949-1962), photography exhibition. Edition of Agustín Sánchez Vidal. Gutenberg Galaxy; Barcelona, 2000.
• Other looks of Carlos Saura. Edition of Asier Mensuro, Jorge Gorostiza and Roberto Cueto. Caja España Obra Social y Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales (SECC); Madrid, 2009.
• Light of Carlos Saura. Workbook of the exhibition. International Cultural Centre Oscar Niemeyer; Avilés, 2011.
• GAVILÁN SÁNCHEZ, Juan Antonio and LAMARCA ROSALES, Manuel (2002). Conversations with Spanish filmmakers. Publications Service of the University of Córdoba, ISBN 9788478016112.

Awards and distinctions

In November 1992, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences. Likewise, he has been awarded important decorations by the French governments (in August 1993 he was awarded the Order of Arts and Letters of France) and Italian (Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic), as well as the most important awards granted by the Spanish State. In March 1994 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Zaragoza. In 2014 he honoris causa by the Complutense University of Madrid. On February 15, 2023, he was posthumously awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X el Sabio.