Carlos Saura, a filmmaker unfairly eclipsed between Buñuel and Almodóvar

There was a time, in the middle of the last century, when Spanish cinema was written with B.B de Bardem, Berlanga and, above all, Buñuel, that consecrated atheist by the grace of God who, despite developing the greatest part of his career in France and Mexico, he never renounced his Hispanic roots.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, he was, especially for French critics, Spanish cinema.

Just as, from the eighties, Almodóvar would be, with A and already with universal approval.

Between one and the other, that meager quota that international canons grant to our cinematography was written with S, de Saura.

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Carlos Saura dies at the age of 91, the last classic director of Spanish cinema

His first feature film,

, was blessed by Luis Buñuel in 1960, when he was also presenting a film at Cannes.

The final applause and the hug to the disciple and his producer, Pere Portabella, helped to sign the inheritance.

From there started, without going any further, the filming of

in Spain.

Shortly after, Carlos Saura shone with his own light as the flagship of the "Querejeta factory" and thanks to the metaphors with which the world read his criticisms of Francoism, from the fratricidal massacre of La caza al falangista de arm en sling that he

. Fascist attacks against

.

The death of the dictator and the end of his stage with the screenwriter Rafael Azcona did not prevent Saura from staying in the spotlight with

and the catchy melody of

He did not leave, he followed his own path and did not stop exploring new territories that overflowed the labels with which the auteur cinema apostles tried to fossilize him.

His version of

, starring in 1983 by Antonio Gades, Laura del Sol and Paco de Lucía, was not just any link.

It was the consecration of a new stage that, coinciding with the irruption of Almodóvar's postmodernism, would explore the roots of folklore, and not only Spanish, from a cinema unfairly underestimated as "musical documentary".

And yet, Saura's forays into flamenco not only restored the genuine value of a popular genre discredited by the Franco regime, but also vindicated the plasticity of cinema thanks to the magical photography of Vittorio Storaro.

In the 1990s, with the baton of international representation already transferred to his colleague from La Mancha, Saura did not renounce occasional forays into fiction, combining pending issues with the civil war (

) and Francoism (

) with stylized tributes to his baturro masters Goya and Buñuel.

During one of her stays in Barcelona, ​​I asked her to accompany me to visit an exhibition of the Aragonese painter.

He carried it in his veins, he spoke on his behalf and, recently, he would return to him with a recreation of the executions of May 3 filmed with the authenticity of a documentary.

Between Buñuel's B and Almodóvar's A, Saura's S has been eclipsed.

Unfairly overshadowed, despite the efforts of her daughter Anna hers to return her, in recent years, to her rightful place.

Her reluctance to take her own work seriously has also not helped spur scholarly studies to vindicate her.

The French who once praised him no longer remember the sex-religion-army trilogy that represses the protagonist of

or the presence of Jean-Claude Carrière in the script for

, starring Isabelle Adjani and Hanna Schygulla.

With her version of

en la retina, an American Hispanist began her erudite essay with the lapidary and derisory phrase: “Not all Spanish cinema is violent”;

as if a Lorquian knife was more bloody than the

Not all of Saura's films were metaphorical, historical, or musical.

A tireless worker, he played all the sticks and, after abandoning his long-awaited biographical project on Picasso, he will not be able to take on the film that he was now preparing on Montserrat Caballé.

Saura, the filmmaker, loved music to the point of having also directed opera and never went out into the street without one of his hundreds of cameras hanging from his neck.

In his purification of what he understood by cinema, the narration had been relegated to the role of a simple extra.

Esteve Riambau is a film historian and director of the Filmoteca de Catalunya.

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