Although he assured on one occasion that he would not waste time writing his memoirs, Carlos Saura betrayed himself and began writing them three years before his death (he died on February 10, 2023, at the age of 91). In his defense, he certainly wouldn’t have made it without the unexpected challenge of a pandemic. The imposed loneliness, particularly cruel to older people, confronted the filmmaker with his own mirror. Saura titled his now published memoirs “You also live with pictures (Taurus)”. He worked on it until his last days but did not complete it. His fragmented style responds to the author’s own character, to his life surrounded by dreams, since, like his brother, the painter Antonio Saura, he “had the mania for filling cork boards with a certain iconography”.
Accompanied by producer Elías Querejeta (center) and director Víctor Erice, in an undated photo. Personal archive of Carlos Saura
A tireless creator who was involved in stage and documentary projects until the end of his life, Saura enjoyed taking the local train from his home in Collado Mediano to Madrid, but with his wings clipped by the global health alarm, that was all he had left The only thing he had to do was fly around in his mind, going through albums and texts on the computer in his colorful studio, a place full of cameras, notes, postcards, drawings and photographs. A room with a view that was the heart of a home and the visual tablet of a life: “This tablet is renewed from time to time,” writes Saura in his book, “not only when a sentimental upheaval ruins years of life.” and therefore photographic memories, but because from time to time the urgent need arises to renew and update the iconography.
Saura sings with his sisters Ángeles (on guitar) and Pilar on a roof in a picture from 1962. Personal archive of Carlos Saura
In this place, where there was never a shortage of animals and children, the filmmaker began to dust off corners of his childhood and early adolescence, navigating the core of a fulfilling existence marked by the shadow of civil war but illuminated by the memories of a home with music and games through the terrible circumstances. Saura remembers how his father, who was associated with the government of the Second Republic when the siege of Madrid ceased to exist, improvised a campfire in the living room using the wood from the front doors. He grew up afraid of bombs, but was under the loving protection of his parents Fermina and Antonio. the complicity and companionship with his older brother Antonio, who was sick and bedridden for almost his entire youth, and the affection of his sisters María Pilar and Ángeles.
In one of the best passages in his book, he sums up his time in the world this way: “With the state of mind of one who recognizes that life has been kind and who would be ungrateful if he did not recognize that by now.” Although the pleasant moments exceeded the others, marked by bitterness and despair, I now find myself, 90 years behind me and in a different century in which I was born, in a position to decide on the persistence of certain images on the retina to think about. These images accompanied me to remind me that there is an answer to the big questions: Where do you come from and where are you going? I come from there, from the war. “I go there, towards death and in between everyday life.”
Mirror game with Geraldine Chaplin, his partner at the time, in a hotel in Switzerland in 1974. Personal archive of Carlos Saura
Saura showed his interest in various artistic disciplines at a young age. Photography, painting and music were part of the family warmth. But the passion for cinema was born on the streets, when the little boy in poor and troubled post-war Madrid took refuge in the screenings of neighborhood cinemas near his family’s home on Avenida de Menéndez Pelayo to watch again and again. the 1930s version of The Prisoner of Zenda.
Saura aptly recalls the first days of the war: the parades of militiamen with raised fists, the songs, the closed city windows and the innocent games in a field next to his building. Also hunger and the dead. A traumatic experience that ultimately becomes allegorical in early films such as “The Hunt” (1966), “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1970) or “Cousin Angelica”, a film selected for the Cannes Film Festival in 1974, which expresses the conflict told in memory reflects the defeated and who became the media target for the pressure cooker of the torturous dictatorship. The film caused such a stir that it ended with the dismissal of two ministers and some extreme confrontations, including a bomb at the entrance to the Balmes cinema in Barcelona and an attempted theft of several reels of film at another cinema, the Amaya in Madrid. According to Saura, who co-wrote the script with Rafael Azcona, it was a well-known phrase from Valle-Inclán that gave him the narrative key he pursued: “Things are not as we see them, but as we think of them remember.”
Long before this key event in the history of Spanish cinema, photography soon enabled him to make a living and shaped his way of documenting reality and thus filming it. It is impossible to capture Saura’s diverse cinematic legacy without the axis of his photographic eye. His filmography, more than fifty feature films and medium-length films, responds to very different times and attempts, with successes and setbacks, undeniable international successes and a final tribute a day after his death, the Goya of Honor, which served as a climax to the admiration and to awaken the influence of his work on new generations of filmmakers.
He was an avant-gardist by vocation, with an unbiased ear that engaged with popular roots and fashions, and an instinct that allowed him to move forward without fear of change and mistakes. Among his internships for the Institute of Cinematographic Research and Experiences, the embryo of the Official Film School, the short film “Sunday Afternoon”, which earned him his graduation title, stands out. As in Los golfos (1960) or Deprisa, deprisa (1981), Saura was drawn to youthful restlessness and frustration, their emotional immediacy. The film, shot in 1956, is about a maid, played by Isana Medel, who fights her insignificance in a gray society with the dream of going out every Sunday with her friends and visiting one of the dance halls that existed in the city at the time: Madrid, in particular one of the busiest, on the ground floor of the Salamanca cinema. Saura took to the streets with a 35-millimeter camera, exceptional in Spain at the time, and archived the reality of this place, as he would do two years later with the Cuenca documentaries or with his participation in the ill-fated Carta de Sanabria .
His work is also tied to collaborating with the women in his life. His first wife was the professor, author and director Adela Medrano, mother of his eldest children Carlos and Antonio; The actress Geraldine Chaplin, mother of his third child Shane, worked closely with him during a crucial period in his cinema and provided him with important intellectual and cultural knowledge. With Mercedes Pérez he had his sons Manuel, Adrián and Diego, and with his partner of the last decades, the actress Eulalia Ramón, he had Anna, his only daughter and, until the end, his father’s right eye.
Although his career spans all genres, he fluctuates between the milestones of his filmography without much interest in looking back. This wise detachment, as well as his apprentice’s curiosity about the new and unknown, gave him a generous nature, which many of the actors and staff who worked with him appreciated. The preparation of his memoirs was no exception. In the last months of his life, Saura connected the past and the future while completing Saura’s documentary The Walls Speak and Lorca’s Essays, with nearly a century’s worth of memories now collected in De Imagens Also Live.
Ángeles, sister of the filmmaker, portrayed by Carlos Saura himself in 1953. Personal archive of Carlos Saura
The painter and the filmmaker: Antonio Saura (left) and Carlos Saura, during a visit by the two brothers to the Natural History Museum in London. Personal archive of Carlos Saura
The Barcelona actress Eulàlia Ramón, Saura’s wife between 2006 and 2023, with her daughter Anna Saura Ramón together in their home in Collado (Madrid) in 1999, when the girl was five years old. Personal archive of Carlos Saura
Carlos Saura, during the filming of “Sunday Afternoon”, the internship with which he completed his film studies at the Madrid Film School in 1957. Carlos Saura’s personal archive
Carlos Saura and Luis Buñuel in 1982 in Mexico, where Saura was filming his film “Antonieta”. Personal archive of Carlos Saura
Saura, in a wheelchair, next to the great José Luis López Vázquez, during a break from filming “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, 1970. Personal archive of Carlos Saura
With Sara Montiel in 1966 at the Silver Bear dinner in Berlin for “The Hunt”. Personal archive of Carlos Saura
Credits
The photos in this report belong to the book “There is life in pictures too.” “Almost a memory” by Carlos Saura, published by Taurus-Verlag and edited by Elsa Fernández-Santos.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits