“When I shot Los golfos in 1959, I thought it was going to be my first and last film because of the censorial and economic difficulties I encountered”. But Los golfos was by no means the last film by Carlos Saura (Huesca, 1932-Madrid, 2023) who died today at the age of 91. It was the first success in a long filmography, which garnered awards at the Cannes, Berlin and San Sebastián festivals, which caught the attention of Hollywood and served to modernize Spanish cinema.
Sixty years after Los golfos, with fifty feature films behind him and a highly recognized career as a photographer and writer, Saura, who was going to receive the Goya de Honor tomorrow, has passed away. That Goya de Honor was the sector’s tribute to the intense and fruitful career of the filmmaker, whose cinema dealt with issues as disparate as violence, war or music.
Los golfos, a film about young people who make a living committing petty robberies in the suburbs of Madrid at the end of the fifties, was selected to compete in the official section at Cannes. It was a great start that, in addition, brought Saura a friendship, that of Luis Buñel, whom he met at that festival. The young director thus began a career that would be consolidated five years later with his third film, La caza.
With La caza, the story of three friends who face each other in a field, the former scene of a Civil War battle, Saura won the Silver Bear for best director at the 1966 Berlin festival and became an international benchmark. of Spanish cinema. Getting there was not easy because the film had some problems with censorship: “We presented the script with the title Rabbit Hunt. But that rabbit thing has erotic connotations and they told me they agreed with the hunting thing, but they didn’t with the rabbit”, recalled the director in an interview with La Vanguardia in the 1990s.
He always had run-ins with censorship, but that did not stop him from shooting several more films in the sixties: Peppermint frappé, which also won the best director award at the 1968 Berlin Festival; Stress is three, three (1968) and The Burrow (1969) all of them starring his then partner, Geraldine Chaplin.
Chaplin, with whom he had a son, Shane, was Saura’s second stable partner, who previously lived with the director Adela Medrano, with whom he had two children, Carlos and Antonio. He later married Mercedes Pérez. As a result of that relationship, Manuel, Adrián and Diego were born. In 2006 he married the actress Eulalia Ramón. His last daughter, Anna Saura, was born from that relationship.
The seventies elevated the director thanks to titles such as Ana and the wolves (1972), Cousin Angélica (1973), Cría cuervos (1975) and Mamá cumples cien años (1979). Ana y los lobos addressed sexual repression in Franco’s Spain through the eyes of an English governess. Y Mamá cumplee centen años was a kind of sequel, but in a comedy key, with Rafaela Aparicio at the helm of a cast in which, once again, Chaplin shone. Geraldine was also the protagonist of Cría cuervos, the film that discovered a child actress, Ana Torrent, and that popularized Jeanette’s song Why are you leaving? The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Globe nomination.
In his early works, Saura went through violence through the aftermath of the Civil War, a topic that he recovered in 1990 with the celebrated ¡Ay, Carmela! Starting in the eighties, the director took up this theme again in films such as Shoot!, Taxi or The Seventh Day. “The subject of violence has always interested me,” the director explained in 2004 in an interview with La Vanguardia, coinciding with the premiere of El séptimo día, a film that narrates the crimes in Puerto Hurraco. Saura was aware that his films could disturb the public: “I always remember when I took my first film, Los golfos, to Cannes, back in 1960. A couple of ladies left the screening saying: ‘What a country of savages!’
However, the filmmaker always defended that the violence in his films was not gratuitous, “because my way of treating it has never been to indulge myself with slow cameras and similar resources.” But that violence was also in Shoot! (1993), the story of a rape starring Antonio Banderas and Francesca Neri, a film in which Saura “wanted to portray the issue of rape and also how an event can alter a person’s life and put them straight into a spiral of violence”.
“The wonder of Goya resides in something very Spanish: that mixture of violence and sensitivity,” he said years later, in 1999, on the occasion of the premiere of Goya, a biopic of the painter, played by Paco Rabal, in which Saura “respecting the essential biographical data,” he imagined “situations that may or may not have occurred. Because historical cinema was another of the veins that the director turned to, who shot one of the most ambitious and expensive films of the 1980s. El Dorado (1988), which narrates Lope de Aguirre’s expedition in search of the City of Gold, was filmed in Costa Rica and marked the discovery of the young actress Inés Sastre.
The other great vein for Saura was that of musical cinema. A cinema unlike anything that had been done up to now. A wonderful cinema that started with Sevillanas (1991), a documentary where image and cante become the same art and in which all the greats of the genre are present: Rocío Jurado, Paco de Lucía, Manolo Sanlúcar, Camarón de la Isla , Lola Flores, Manuel Pareja Obregón, Paco Toronjo, Merche Esmeralda, Manuela Carrasco, Los Romeros de la Puebla…
The direct continued to explore this field with Flamenco (1995), considered one of the best documentaries in the history of Spanish cinema, Tango (1998), shot in Argentina, Fados (2007) or Jota de Saura (2016). “It amuses me to make musicals, to have at your disposal the best artists in the world of a specialty, and in this case, all those in Argentina,” Saura said in 2014 when he returned to Buenos Aires to film Zonda, Argentine folklore. In recent years he had fallen in love with Mexico and had worked in that country where he shot El rey de todo el mundo (2021), a film where the bolero plays a leading role.
Saura loved cinema, music, photography, literature… Saura loved art and was at the foot of the canyon until the last moment. Last week he premiered a documentary, The Walls Speak, which covers the history of painting from cave drawings to the most modern manifestations of urban art. Also his penultimate work, 33 days (2022), a documentary on the work of Picasso, is a tribute to that art that he loved and contributed to creating one of the most international and unforgettable filmmakers in Spanish cinema.