Cría Cuervos
About the Film Shot in the summer of 1975 as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco lay dying, Cría Cuervos (in English: Raise Ravens) premiered in Madrid’s Conde Duque Theatre on January 26th, 1976. This was forty years after the Spanish Civil War had begun, flanked by two decisive events: the assassination of Carrero Blanco in 1973, Franco’s nominated successor, and the first democratic elections in 1978. Its poignancy comes from its situation in such a precarious time frame, both chosen in the film and in the fragile political reality, and its meditation on memory in such a breathless era. Up until Cría Cuervos, Saura’s films had been critiques of the Franco regime; however, they were focused on explicit violence, as in La Caza, where the hunting party, in all its violence and gore, served as a metaphor for the Civil War. Cría Cuervos is a clear, enigmatic critique of the regime, yet much more melancholy than Saura’s previous works, and it passed the Francoist censors uncut. Saura’s position at the time meant he was safe from fascist censorship. There would undoubtedly have been negative publicity in the censors banning the works of such a high profile filmmaker. Cría Cuervos went on to secure a place among the most acclaimed of Saura’s films and in Spanish film history. The screenplay was written by Carlos Saura himself and was produced by his long-time producer Elías Querejera. Cría Cuervos went on to win the Jury’s Grand Prize at Cannes. It is not difficult to understand why. It is set in a large, gloomy house that seems to be insulated against the chaotic life of Madrid outside. The house itself casts long shadows, as the story of eight-year-old Ana, played by the actress Ana Torrent, unfolds. After the gruesome and psychosomatic death of her mother, played by Geraldine Chaplin, Ana finds her father dead in bed with a married lover. Her cold Aunt Paulina arrives to look after orphaned Ana and her two sisters, creating an all-female household including Rosa, their housekeeper, and the girls’ mute and immobile abuela, in a wheelchair. As the narrative of the film ensues, the dead parents consistently intrude on the present, the new life being created, and the grieving process. Ana herself, as an adult also interjects, in a nuanced and experimental style of storytelling. This perspective doesn’t actually resolve any of the film’s mysteries, especially considering that the adult Ana even confesses that she can no longer recall or comprehend many of her childhood experiences except for a few with total clarity. Her childhood, and specifically that one summer, is then shrouded in obscurity. We have decided events - the trip to the countryside, the distribution of the poison, the death of a childhood pet - but it is the lack of clarity, of truth in what really occurs, that makes this film so haunting.
Carlos Saura Saura was born into a bourgeois family, yet one that had been on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War. He was born in Huesca in 1932, in the Aragon region of Spain, which was also the land of his hero Buñuel. He dropped out of college, where he was majoring in industrial engineering, to study photography and film. Saura eventually taught at the newly established official school of film after earning his degree. He quickly became one of the most popular professors there and eventually saw its closure in the late 1960s. In his lifetime Saura directed about 30 films with Elias Querejera, who worked as his main producer. Saura’s brother, Antonio, was one of Spain’s best abstract painters. Saura also worked closely with Paco de Lucia in his projects regarding flamenco, specifically in the film Carmen. Some of his most famous and popular films include La Caza, El Jardín de las Delicias, Cría Cuervos, Bodas de Sangre, and Goya en Burdeos. Saura has been acclaimed by many film critics, notably foreign, as the only filmmaker in Spain to have ever achieved a full-fledged career. It has been said that he created the most sustained career in a national cinema plagued by “exile and unfulfilled promise.” Saura has three distinct thematic stages. There is the early stage of Saura’s social realism, then an era of social criticism, and finally his exploration of music, dance, theater, and art in film. The arc of his thematic stages makes sense - Saura lived and directed through Francoism, the Democratic Transition, and full-fledged Spanish democracy. After his first phase of social realism, he became deeply interested in exploring the psychological - what he called “ghosts inside the head.” This exploration of “ghosts in the head” clearly culminates into Cría Cuervos, which holds many influences from Saura’s own life, such as Maria’s abandonment of her dream to be concert pianist, as Saura’s own mother was a skilled concert pianist. The film was the sixth-biggest grosser of the year, and attracted an audience of well over a million - yet many leftist film critics attacked Saura for focusing on the leisured bourgeoisie family and neglecting the working class. Yet, Spanish audiences found a profound connection to the historical allegory, relating the collective concerns of their own country, a nation at a unique moment - truly at a crossroads, as well the hyper-individualized experience of one’s own life during those strange years, represented in the most prolific way in the melancholic, beautiful and, above all, heart-wrenching art-house film.
THE CHARACTERS
Ana, our eight-year-old protagonist, is the lens through which Saura examines trauma on the personal scale and the collective, historical scale. Played by Ana Torrent, her piercing eyes that often break the 4th wall have become iconic. Ana, processing the grief of her mother’s death, newly orphaned, believes she has killed her father and attempts to kill her aunt, enacting revenge against them for her mother’s death.
Adult Ana and María are both played by the indefatigable Geraldine Chaplin. The use of the same actress to play Ana as an adult, who appears in a sort of interview reflecting on the summer she lost both of her parents, and Ana’s mother is a highly powerful and suggestive choice. Ana’s mother and adult Ana serve as a retrospective presence and forward-looking one in the film, suggesting Ana’s fate will be her mother’s.
Aunt Paulina is an intruder in the house to Ana, and all affection or tenderness she shows to the girls is unsettling, underscored with suspicion. Monica Randall plays the uptight sister called upon to care for the three newly orphaned girls. She is strict and austere towards them and towards Rosa, with whom she has a quick temper. The only act of violence in the film is carried out by her.
Abuela, mute and nameless, is a meditation on maternal lineage. She has no depth of character outside of her presence. The function of Josefina Díaz’s character within the film’s fabric seems to simply be to serve as a physical marker of Spain’s past. Her sole concern and interest, perhaps even her only means of escape, is listening to Imperio Argentina and gazing for hours at the old photos pinned on the wall.
Rosa, played by Florinda Chico, has an interesting role within the film. She is without a backstory but serves to elucidate some truths about Anselmo and María’s relationship. She tells Ana of her mother’s suffering and teaches her about sex in strange, yet lighthearted anecdotes. She is more maternal than Paulina, yet we later learn was another object of Anselmo’s womanizing.
Irene, older than Ana and Maite, played by Conchita Pérez, is actually a complex character. At the surface level, she is presented as a typical older sister, still demure like Ana and Maite, and indulgent in pop culture with her magazines. But in a more profound way, Irene takes on a very tragic position among the three sisters. Significantly her disturbing dream is what is chosen to conclude the film, to be the last word. Anselmo symbolically serves as the patriarchal military power of Spain, its corruption, its moral decay, and its bourgeoise embodiment. Anselmo is irredeemable - he is never seen acting as a father towards his children. His cruelty and indifference towards María are understood to have killed her. Héctor Alterio’s character is given little screen time, yet deep significance.
Maite, played by Mayte Sanchez, has the least emotional weight of the three orphaned sisters. She is very much an accessory to their games, and dances along with them, pretending to be “the maid” when Irene and Ana reenact their parents’ marriage. She retains an innocence her two older sisters seem to have lost in the trauma of their parent’s death. Her most iconic and disturbing line is delivered with great impact: “My mother died before I was born.”
“No puedo respirar…”
The interplay of fantasy and reality: Saura’s most memorable scene The most memorable scene of the film is the very first; it embodies Saura’s brilliance and potency. The camera dwells on a darkened house. The thin white curtains and the gleaming silverware catch a source of light and are the only visible elements. Ana, in her white nightdress, descends a dark and lengthy staircase, continuing the contrast of the translucent and pale with the deep darks of the home. As she descends the staircase, barely as tall as the banister, the camera fixates on her small, pale face. Her deep eyes are intense and piercing as we hear the urgently whispered words: “I love you more than anything in the world…” and the desperate “I can’t breathe…” Ana’s gaze shifts and she recoils when the light in the bedroom, behind the closed door, comes on suddenly. She recoils with a quickness, as though she was burned by the light touching her bare feet. The innocence of the child’s small frame descending the staircase fades in the wake of a “My God!” A half-dressed woman flees the room, giving Ana only a brief glance. She drops her purse, the contents spilling out, and the light comes on, exposing both her and Ana. There is a real sorrow in her face, but one that does not offer empathy or compassion towards the small girl who has not moved. Ana is not offered a comforting word, but rather there is a shame, as well as the real loss of a lover present in the demeanor of the woman who flees, who is later identified, given a name, and assigned her place in Ana’s past memories. The urgent words “I can’t breathe-” carry over, and there is a sort of breathlessness as Ana enters the silent room. Her father is in bed, his naked torso exposed, arm thrown behind his head among the crumpled white sheets. His bare chest echoes the exposed bralette of the woman who fled, confirming what was suspected. Without making a sound, touching Anselmo, or revealing any kind of emotion, Ana takes a glass sitting at the other end of the room to the kitchen. She leaves the room where her father lays dead, and carries it to the sink to wash it, her movements appearing ritualistic as she cleans the glass and places it among the other cleaned glasses, rearranging them in a compulsory manner. She then opens a refrigerator, revealing chicken feet among a host of greens and milk and it is in this moment her mother enters the shot. María scolds her for being in the kitchen, to which Ana replies she can’t sleep, and sends her off to bed, with tender, motherly affection. Ana closes the
fridge and moves back out into the darkness of the quiet house. The lightness, the vibrancy of the whites and light blues in the kitchen starkly contrast the darkness of the same staircase, which Ana ascends with an energy that was not present before. She moves from the washed out light of the kitchen space and back into the nearly pitch-black interior of her own home. At this point, it has not been revealed to the audience that Ana’s mother - the woman in the kitchen - is dead. In the first brilliant eight minutes of Cría Cuervos, reality and fantasy are interplayed. What is real and unreal is given no clear distinction. Saura achieves this remarkably in the simplicity of the shooting style. The events that ensue in those opening eight minutes are given equal importance. We are not alerted to the difference between the very real death of a patriarch and the grief-induced fantasizing of a small child. Anselmo’s death proves to be very real, and the basis on which the events and revelations of the film unfold. The calm, commonplace appearance of María is dreamed up, simply a fantasy or a hallucination from the mind of a little girl processing her mother’s death. Ultimately, what is real, what the consequences of Saura’s created reality are, is diluted. It is in this that we learn that Ana’s psyche is frozen, frozen in her traumatic loss. In the first scene we are introduced to the interplay of the real and the fantastical, Ana’s own motivations, the loss of both of her parents, the character of her father, the disturbing atmosphere of the bourgeois house, and the impact of her mother’s death. When we later realize that Ana believes that she poisoned and killed her father, the scene carries a new, unsettling weight. Her behavior, her lack of emotion, her coldness and the calculation taken to orchestrate what she (falsely) did becomes another layer of disturbing. The contrast of darkness and light remains striking. There is a lightness assigned to Ana’s invented sequence of events - to the imagined poisoning of her father, to the imagined interaction with her mother in the kitchen. Yet Anselmo’s death, which she hears actually occur and then sees his corpse, is shrouded in the profoundly dark bourgeoisie home. Ana’s world is introduced to us in a highly deliberate pacing. We are introduced slowly, yet thrown into the complexities of the house. As well as following Ana, we are also processing, digesting, and comprehending what unfolds. This style of filming carries throughout the entirety of Cría Cuervos, continuing to place the audience of the film within both the fabric of Ana’s fantastical world and in the harsh realism of the patriarchal home.
DIEGETIC AND NON-DIEGETIC SOUND
Diegetic and non-diegetic sound is employed in Cría Cuervos in the unnervingly still and quiet of the house, the unbearably noisy streets of Madrid, and the music Ana plays within the world of the film that also serves as its soundtrack. In one of the most startling scenes of the film, Ana fantasizes of her suicide. The diegetic sound of the overwhelming stimulus gives cadence to the traffic, the mechanical noise around Ana that seems to affect her deeply. Life outside of the bourgeois house should be a repose or a consolation, a means of escape from the oppressive patriarchal house. Yet the outside world itself is overwhelming, referential to the new era unfolding in Madrid as well as the chaos of the uncertain political system. It is while Ana is outside in the noise, pushing her mute abuela in her wheelchair that she begins grimace, as though the unbearable on-screen sounds of the traffic is what prompts her. She then imagines herself standing atop of a building, looking down at the family’s garden space, then finally jumping from the top of the building. An eight-year-old child, fantasizing about her own death, set against the background of Madrid’s noise pollution is a clear statement. Beyond this, the sharp contrast of Imperio Argentina’s “Ay Maricruz” and the wall of family photos with the little girls’ dress up game while they listen to Jeanette, Spain’s new wave of canción melódica, creates a clear contrast between the modern and traditional. The grandmother - perhaps symbolic of an ever-present, silent, dormant Spanish past, quite literally lives within another era, signified by the noise that builds up the walls of that world. Finally, Jeanette’s “Porque te vas” can be considered both diegetic and non-diegetic sound; it is both the soundtrack of the film and the soundtrack of Ana’s interior world. The lyrics: “I cry like a child / because you’re leaving” and the refrain itself are wholly referential of Ana, still being a child, witnessing everyone “leave” or, in harsher terms, witnessing everyone die. She constantly finds solace and identification in this song, and it seems to be her only record. We encounter it first as the girls dance together to the song, seemingly oblivious to its sad, hopeless lyrics. We encounter it again after Aunt Paulina hits Ana, who sits, mouthing the words. Ana then says to herself “I hope she dies” and resolves to poison her aunt. Finally, the song leaves the realm of the diegetic and moves into the realm of the non-diegetic. It serves as the soundtrack for the girls’ return to school, for their exit from the home and into the world. We see them walking along the sidewalk and joining their peers at school as it plays. The song represents Ana’s rebellion, her era, and her loneliness, lost love, and abandonment.
EMOTIONAL RANGE
Cría Cuervos has an emotional range that is subtle, rather than expansive. Rather than a range of explosive emotions, the film in its palette, the skill of its actors, and the tensions of its setting is grounded in a melancholy that forms the emotional landscape. It explores grief in many manifestations: grief that turns violent, grief that is desperately sorrowful, and grief that becomes manic. The subtly of the film along with Ana’s emotional brevity end up making the scenes that do contain great emotional outbursts even more impactful. The most heartbreaking scene occurs after Ana imagines her mother tucking her in to bed, and telling her the story of the Little Almond. Upon falling asleep, then waking up with a start and realizing her mother isn’t there, we witness Ana crying, calling out “Mama!” to a mother who does not come. Prior to this, Ana’s face had been stoic, and she had been silent, lacking in words as she lacked in facial expression.
THEMES, MOTIFS, SYMBOLS
The gun Ana holds a gun better than she holds a fork or a sewing needle. It seems more natural in her grasp than her babydoll. The gun precludes the height of the film’s plot - it is after receiving a slap across the face from Aunt Paulina for pointing the loaded gun and her and the admiral, that Ana retreats into her room. While listening to Jeanette, she decides that she wants her Aunt Paulina to die. She resolves to enact her imaginary and fantastical violence against Paulina, deciding to use her only other weapon - her poison. The gun is a significant object, specifically of ownership, for Ana. Her claim over the gun is that it was given to her by her father. While the admiral feigns some concern, and certainly seems surprised, Paulina immediately fears for her life upon seeing Ana standing before her. Ana repeats: “it’s mine” and “Daddy gave it to me.” In this, the inheritance of violence as a means, the use of weaponry, is something that is a part of Ana’s, and Spain’s, lineage. The young girl’s exposure and her consistent and constant use of violence to enact revenge is a gesture towards a society that had just experienced decades of large scale violence. The fear present here is in the future generation of Spain’s militaristic tendencies, that the climate they were raised in will affect how they solve problems, how they carry out their lives, and carry out the future of Spain itself.
Poison Given to Ana under the pretense that it was a strong and dangerous poison, the bicarbonate of soda that she stashes traces back to María. It is significant that the poison is mixed in with milk each time Ana uses it, creating a connotation between what Ana perceives to be a weapon given to her by her mother with milk - something associated with nourishment and maternal love. In Ana’s use of the “poison” on her father, the body of the family structure is revealed as something that is innately sick and compromised. The poison follows the essential motif of the real and the unreal. While Ana never really poisons anyone, her intention to and her following through with the indulgent fantasy of removing people she dislikes from her life, signals a deep, deep moral sickness. The childlike inability to recognize the poison is not real is undermined by a loss of innocence that may be irretrievable.
Death Ana pointedly looks at the chicken feet in the family refrigerator after cleaning the glass she believes contained the poison that killed her father. The feet of the dead chicken demonstrates how pervasive death is, and how centrally it is positioned in her family and in her life at that moment. Death is the central theme of Cría Cuervos: the forms it takes, the metaphorical and real death, the processing of death, and death as it is understood by Ana are all part of the project undertaken by Saura. Ana witnesses both of her parents’ deaths, as well as Roni’s, and we do not see her cry. She surveys her mother in pain and her dead father in bed with the same sort of expression, distancing her from the range of emotions we associate with grief. When she buries Roni, the cross drawn on the box and his name written in her childish handwriting are painful to see. Her fantasy of suicide, as well as her assumption that her abuela must want to die point to the fact that this child who has seen so much death at such an early age will only continue to see it. It becomes the frame of reference through which Ana understands the world.
Games Throughout the film, Ana, Maite, and Irene play a series of games. They play hide and seek, and when one is found, they drop down dead. They also play a game in which they dress up as “the maid” and a military father and a stay at home mother. They use their Aunt Paulina’s makeup and their mother and father’s clothing to dress up. Eerily, the girls mimic the fights of their parents perfectly. When Aunt Paulina enters their room while this is going on, inquiring as to what they’re doing, Irene nervously tells her “Estamos jugando.” In the scene, Irene, dressed as Anselmo in military uniform and mustache, gaslights Ana, dressed as her mother. This demonstrates that the girls clearly knew and understood the dynamic of their parents’ relationship. The motif of games grounds the very real and serious nature of the film in a childlike playfulness. It does this while still maintaining a painful echo of what they have endured. They die and recreate María and Anselmo’s fights in their games, and the only time we see them feeling joy and glee while together is while they listen to the Jeanette record and dance happily over the sad lyrics.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Carlos Saura, in tracking his three stages of directing, is clearly a filmmaker of his own era. His concern for the time he was living within, and his insistency to parse out the complexities of that time are what make him so eminent as an artistic and cultural figure. The anxieties of the summer of Franco’s slow death translate perceptibly in the film. Remarking on Spain’s dictator, Carlos Saura said in an interview about Cría Cuervos: “Franco took so long to die that we all had time to buy champagne and store it in the fridge. When he finally died you could hear the corks popping.” Saura’s family was affiliated with the losing side of the Spanish Civil War; his father was a senior tax official in the republican government he has early memories of the bloody conflict: “I remember it starting. I recall the bombardments and deaths, and always going to new schools.” In the film, Ana recalls that her own childhood was “filled with fear of the unknown.” With the atmosphere while Franco was on his deathbed was rapidly shifting, the unknown of course became daunting. Saura has said that Cría Cuervos specifically, rather than serving as his own conscious attack on the long withstanding regime, the film was to examine how things were changing. Access to the truth about the death of Anselmo is obscured for the audience for the majority of the film, as well as access to the truth surrounding the circumstances of María’s death. The concern with what is true, what is an affecting reality and what is a constructed mythology is important to Saura. In the asme interview, he stated, “My generation was the one which started talking about it again. We want to know what had happened and searched out the banned history books. Remember, under Franco we lived in a world where the police would raid your home and ask whether you read Kafka.” Ana’s perceived ability to will people to death is in itself very fascist. “Talking about it again” for Saura means representing within his work the pervasive decay of authority and the military in the symbol of home, the old photos, the empty pool, and the death of the patriarch. However, Saura does not only examine the mood of Spain, its fears of the unknown, in that one summer. Saura is also foreword looking, and he is deeply concerned with the children of Spain and their future. In the late stage of Franco’s regime, and the uncertainty of what will happen politically, Ana serves as a symbol of the instability of personhood that comes with national trauma. In the same way María and the traumatic memory of her death haunt Ana, the traumatic memory of the Civil War remains omnipresent. Saura seems to urge in this film that Spaniards memories’ need to be opened up; that the ghosts in the head must be looked at. The essential question that remains from watching Cría Cuervos then must be: how does a nation confront its ghosts?
Franco took so long to die that we all had time to buy champagne and store it in the fridge. When he finally died you could hear the corks popping.” - Saura
Analysis The film deals with insurmountable death and the traumatic memory of the Spanish Civil War. Why, then, did Saura choose to center the narrative of the film on a cast made up almost entirely of women, and specifically choose a young girl, only eight years old, to be his protagonist? While the film is relatively devoid of men, and certainly passes the Bechdel Test, the presence of patriarchal constraints is eminent. Saura chooses to dwell on an aspect radically different from his previous works. In examining women and children in this meditation on memory, Saura shifts the focus of affect. Rather than manifest violence as in La Caza, he chose something much more profoundly psychic. In his focus on the lives of three orphaned girls, placing their mother and grandmother in the periphery, Saura’s Cría Cuervos becomes very concerned with the intergenerational, matrilineal legacy of female suffering. The three orphaned girls are left without any familial guidance or loving emotional support, only an all female household, in the wake of Anselmo’s death. This is a dramatic and clear diversion from the world of Palacio’s La Gran Familia. Without a patriarchal figurehead, the female household disrupts the norms of the Francoist affirmed family structure and allows Saura to examine the psychic through through this lens. Although Ana did not carry out the murder of her father in reality, the fact that she was motivated to do so points to a deep sickness in the family structure that produced her. Ana attempts as well to “poison” and points a loaded pistol at her Aunt Paulina. She offers death to her abuela, who she believes wants to die. Her comprehension of death is presented as firmly and deeply cemented in her being. Her empowerment to will or offer death onto others is rooted in what she believes to be her first murder of her father. Ana’s anger and her desire for revenge against her mother’s death is what drives the film forward. Ana as an adult explains: “The only thing I remembered perfectly is that then my father seemed responsible for the sadness that weighted on my mother in the last years of her life. I was convinced that he, and he alone, had produced her illness.” Ana’s mother’s death is portrayed as psychosomatic by Saura. We see her pleading to Anselmo to love her, alternating between this and emphasizing that she is sick. She exclaims that she wants to die. Ana occupies this scene in the periphery the periphery of her own memory and the memory of the moment in real time. In the flashback to that devastating scene in which María cries out again and again to Anselmo “¡Quiereme!” and “¡Me quiero morir!” death is shown to be deeply rooted in the psyche of that house. Ana witnessing the devastating exchange confirms in the child’s mind that her father made her mother want to die, and her death, after her insistence of her sickness and her father’s constant denial, confirms for Ana that her father ultimately killed her. The title of the film is taken from the beginning of the Spanish phrase: “Cría curves y te sacarán los ojos…” or “Raise ravens, and they will pluck out your eyes.” The raven, Ana, is shown to have been reared by the Francoist family and the result is a young girl ready and willing to pluck out the eyes of those she wishes were not around. In Ana’s belief in her power to kill, Saura so masterfully blurs the line between reality and unreality here again - emphasizing that what may not logically be true holds a firm reality for Ana, as with most children. Carlos Saura himself said that as a child when his parents “…were punishing me I would sometimes think,
‘Let them die!’” He uses Cría Cuervos to warn against the outcome of the Franocist years, of brutal repression and fascism that seems into the home, into home life, and into familial relationships. Saura says he dreamed up the character of Ana after reading an American detective novel. He described her parricide in saying: “She wants to kill but she is a child, so she doesn’t really know what that means,” he says. “She just thinks it would be better the people she didn’t like were dead.” If Saura considers memory - especially traumatic memory, which is clearly the case for Ana, to be haunting - as in the language “ghosts in the head” then the memoryscape of Ana’s grief is populated by ghosts of real or unreal memory. Ana’s grief for her mother is manifested into the projection of a physical form she receives tenderness, motherly guidance, affection, as well as stories from. Ana’s mother becomes an uncanny projection of Ana herself - the choice to make Ana’s character the same actress who plays her mother becomes so eerie and prophetic. It is perhaps one of the most fascinating and impactful casting choices in film. They seem to have an incredibly strong bond in the film and share the same melancholic tendencies, neuroticism, and depth of feeling. Memory - and the sharpness of it - is articulated in Ana’s own description of the weekend in the country the girls spend with their aunt and the family friends: “Not all my memories from that period are sad. Among my fondest memories, few can compare to that weekend. I can’t really think why that particular trip remained so vividly engrained in my mind. I don’t know, but I felt free, new, different. I remember I was wearing jeans with flowers on the pockets, a floral blouse with red buttons, and a navy blue cardigan. Aunt Paulina drove. Irene got to sit in the front because she was the oldest. Maite and I sat in the back.” The film shows this sort of binary of processing experience, of compartmentalizing those experiences into memories. Most people can recall incredibly simplistic and perhaps even mundane moments that do remain vividly engrained in their minds. And, the older Ana, as a narrator who appears as though she is sitting for an interview points to the vividness of details she can recall - a point of clarity in the chaotic emotional world of “that period” - the summer of both her parents’ deaths. Other than the interviews with adult Ana, the film is given structure by the characters literally and tangibly looking back on the past. Aunt Paulina is tempted and gives in to an affair with a married friend, the poised and adult Ana gives nothing away about the future of women, only that she will fulfill who her mother was. The mute abuela can only contemplate old photographs. The women of Cría Cuervos and of Spain are shown to be in cyclical repetition that is psychic, traumatic, and social. The dialogue itself is sparse as the characters are unwilling or unable to communicate with each other, and often have Ana talking to herself exclusively. Saura suggests with this film that personal or political traumatic memory is everpresent, and while it may be repressed will return as ghosts. In this is the brilliance of Cría Cuervos - it is all at once retrospective and forward-looking, concerned with the deep wounds of the nation, and how they are felt on every personal scale. My three questions for Saura would be: Why present Ana as an adult, as though she is sitting for an interview, reflecting on that period of her life? If a country is unable to reconcile its past with its present, what do you believe that consequences of that will be? Do you believe memory in art, be it film or literature or paintings, should be represented in terms of what is real and what is remembered or simply value the memory for what it is, even if it is fictitious?
Film File 2 Carly Roberts Doctor Nordlund Spanish Film History due May 8th, 2019
Sources: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1880loss-beyond-words-one-scene-from-cr-a-cuervos https://www.criterion.com/films/519-cr-a-cuervos https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jun/09/ cria-cuervos-raise-ravens-review https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jun/24/ carlos-saura-raise-ravens-franco-spain