The Carlos Saura Challenge, Part 9: La madriguera / Honeycomb (1969)

Director: Carlos Saura
Writer: Rafael Azcona, Geraldine Chaplin, Carlos Saura
Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Per Oscarsson, Teresa del Río, Julia Peña, María Elena Flores, Emiliano Redondo.
Synopsis: Five years into their marriage, the arrival of a collection of inherited furniture puts a strain on Teresa (Chaplin) and Pedro's (Oscarsson) relationship.

Contains some spoilers from the first third of the film.

   The third of Saura's eight cinematic collaborations with Geraldine Chaplin is an odd film. Teresa (Chaplin) and Pedro (Per Oscarsson - dubbed and looking decidedly un-Spanish (in fact I've belatedly worked out that he reminds me of a permanently peeved Jon Voigt)) have been married for five years and are settled in a routine (he manages - and possibly owns - a factory, she is a lady of leisure) and a rather sterile home. The arrival of a collection of furniture from Teresa's childhood family home triggers a nightmare and subsequent sleepwalking, followed by regressive and childish behaviour. Teresa replaces their furniture (in keeping with the modern - verging on Brutalist - architecture of their house) with what has arrived (which is distinctly different in style, with dark wood and richly coloured fabrics) - the film then settles into a series of extended role play 'games' between husband and wife. 
    I didn't hear an explanation as to why Teresa was receiving the furniture now (there are no subs on the VOD, so something may have flown past me), but it seems like an inheritance. The nightmare triggered by the arrival of the furniture and childhood mementoes appears to be a recollection of being at boarding school, woken by two nuns in the middle of the night and taken to an office (I took it to be the memory of being informed of a death)...at which point Teresa sits up in bed screaming but doesn't wake up. During the subsequent sleepwalk she unpacks the first of the furniture - an armchair and a rug - and proceeds to act as if her father is sitting in the chair: she implores her father not to send her away, says that she wants to stay with him and the rest of the family, and begs him not to make her marry Pedro. Pedro - who has followed his wife during her sleepwalk - at this point sits in the chair and takes on the father's role, asking what Teresa wants to do instead of getting married ('go to college' is her reply). Later in the film when Pedro goes through some of Teresa's possessions he finds photos of her as a child (contemporaneous with her appearance in her nightmare), a child's drawing of a plane crash (with 'Mama' and 'Papa' written next to two bodies) and a funeral notice - the suggestion is that Teresa's parents died when she was a child (supported by her nightmare), but that doesn't really fit with the conversation with her father during the sleepwalk. 

    The next day Teresa has no memory of the night's events - and is visibly embarrassed when Pedro tells her some of the things she said - but becomes increasingly giggly and childish as she continues to unpack toys and mementoes (she glues her milk teeth and a keepsake loop of her infant hair onto a photo of herself as a child), and seemingly decides to use what Pedro has told her about the sleepwalk in order to force her husband to play with her (he thinks that she is sleepwalking again but the audience knows that she has deliberately woken him up). After this point the role play games blur the lines between dream and reality (the blurring of dream, performance, and reality would be something Saura would develop in much greater detail in his next film - El jardín de las delicias / The Garden of Delights (1970)) and Pedro's perception of reality is also altered. At the same time, the question of who is 'playing' whom (in the double sense of who they are actually meant to be, but also which of them is in control of the game) fluctuates. There's a caustic humour and an undercurrent of violence to many of their interactions - Pedro bites Teresa's ankle while he's pretending to be a St Bernard rescue dog (long story) but doesn't take kindly to her smacking him in the face with a mop handle as a result - and as in the later Ana y los lobos / Ana and the Wolves (1972) there is an uneasy sense of foreboding to the games.

    'Honeycomb' seems to be the title given to the film when it was released in the USA, but a literal translation of the Spanish is 'The Burrow', which makes more sense given the centrality of the house to the story - all of the scenes between Teresa and Pedro take place either inside the house (designed by Javier Carvajal and located in Somosaguas (an affluent neighbourhood in Madrid) - other examples of Carvajal's work) or in the surrounding garden. The sense of a limited and clearly defined space gives the film a theatrical feel, as do the curtains they pull across the floor-to-ceiling windows, and overall it is quite a stagey production. It also picks up the recurring motif in the Saura/Chaplin collaborations of the actress playing multiple roles or personalities (whether real or imagined) within the same film, or the idea of women performing different versions of themselves to different 'audiences' - the expressiveness of Chaplin's face (not to mention her gameness in throwing herself into various outlandish scenarios) is put to full use, but she also clearly delineates the different women she performs through gesture and body language as well. As I mentioned in relation to Peppermint frappé (1967), Chaplin's performances might be an element for me to explore in more detail at a later date - the fact that Peppermint frappé and La madriguera are often said to form a trilogy of sorts with the elusive Stress es tres-tres (1968) (unavailable in any form) makes me wonder whether she takes on multiple personalities in that one too.

    I don't know that I'd recommend La madriguera as I found the hysteria somewhat forced and Oscarsson a bit wooden (although as he was dubbed into Spanish, that may not be entirely his fault) - but it has a curiosity value given how difficult it is to get hold of (it has never been released on DVD and has appeared on VOD only in the past year).

The Carlos Saura Challenge, Part 8: Cría cuervos / Raise Ravens (1976)

Director: Carlos Saura
Writer: Carlos Saura
Cast: Ana Torrent, Geraldine Chaplin, Mónica Randall, Florinda Chico, Conchita Pérez, Maite Sánchez, Héctor Alterio, Germán Cobos, Mirta Miller, Josefina Díaz
Synopsis: An eight-year old girl (Torrent) believes that she has poisoned the authoritarian father (Alterio) whom she blames for the death of her mother (Chaplin).

    Nine months after my last CSC post (and about six weeks after I rewatched it as part of my coverage of the Leeds Film Festival), I finally reach Cría cuervos (Fiona Noble wrote a guest post on the film back in June 2013). The delay since rewatching it in November has been due to my having too much else to do (not blog related), but truth be told I've also put off writing about the film simply because I have very little to say about it. This post is therefore a case of me getting it out of the way so that I can continue with the other films, rather than a detailed analysis of what stands as one of Carlos Saura's most celebrated films outside of Spain (which I would in part connect to the fact that it is one of the few to have been widely available in subtitled form).
    Cría cuervos was the only one of Saura's films - apart from the dance films and ¡Ay, Carmela! - that I had seen before starting the challenge. I last saw it 13 or 14 years ago on VHS, at a point when I had seen very few Spanish films. In common with another recently rewatched classic - El espíritu de la colmena / The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973) - it's a film I find easier to admire than to like. Although I can appreciate why the two films are considered classics, both left me slightly baffled on first viewing - and even armed with knowledge of the broader context in which they were made, their (deliberate) opacity is something that I still struggle to engage with.
    The review I wrote for Eye for Film back in November (here) represents my overall thoughts on Cría cuervos, but there were three things that stood out for me on this second viewing of the film:

• The way that the film is structured as Ana's own stream of consciousness - with no clear distinction made between past, present, and future (the blurring aided by Geraldine Chaplin again playing more than one role) - is a continuation of the director's preoccupation with memory, and his repeated attempts to represent in a tangible form how the present is shaped by our understanding and memory of the past (as also seen in El jardín de las delicias / The Garden of Delights (1970) and La prima Angélica / Cousin Angelica (1973) - in my opinion, the latter film is Saura's most effective manifestation of this theme). 
• Saura manages to capture some great scenes of sibling interaction (including general squabbling and evidence of the gullibility of younger siblings). The children (Ana Torrent, Conchita Pérez, and Maite Sánchez) delight in music (if you didn't already have Jeanette's Porque te vas stuck in your head, you do now) and general silliness (when they dress up in Aunt Paulina's (Mónica Randall) wigs and make-up, and enact hysterical scenes of domesticity), which acts to momentarily lighten the mood in what is otherwise a sad narrative of loss and suppression. 
• Roni the guinea pig - a) a great name for a guinea pig, b) I had no memory whatsoever of Ana having a pet, but Roni is another key element in the realistic depiction of childhood in the form of the companionship that the animal gives to the solitary child (she absents herself from her sisters' games as often as she joins in).

In the next CSC post, I will probably be going backwards because La madriguera [a literal translation is 'The Burrow' but I have seen the film referred to as 'Honeycomb'] (1969) - Saura's 6th feature - has popped up as VOD on Filmotech. 

Preview: Spanish cinema at the 28th Leeds International Film Festival

El verdugo / The Executioner (Luis García Berlanga, 1964)

   The 28th Leeds International Film Festival begins this week, running between 5th - 20th November, and an unusually high number of Spanish films are screening there.
   As I mentioned in my previous post, Sobre la marxa / The Creator of the Jungle (Jordi Morató, 2014) will be showing, but there are also two Spanish retrospectives: one combining the early films of Luis García Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem with a few of their cinematic descendants (with films by Víctor Erice, Carlos Saura, and Pedro Almodóvar), and the other featuring the mayhem of Álex de la Iglesia (playing as part of the Fanomenon strand). Full details of screening times for all of the Spanish films can be found here.
   I'll be reviewing the Spanish films - and others - for Eye for Film and Take One. My intention is to put up a post here for each of the two retrospectives with a brief overview and collate the links to the relevant reviews. Sobre la marxa will get its own post because it fits with my current documentary focus, and the screening of Cría cuervos / Raise Ravens means that the Carlos Saura Challenge will restart (as I'll be reviewing the film as well, that extended post may not appear until the week after the festival).

The Carlos Saura Challenge, Part 7: Los golfos / The Delinquents (1960)

In the reflection we see Julian (Manuel Zarzo) and Ramón (Luís Marín) eyeing up a potential victim

Director: Carlos Saura
Screenplay: Carlos Saura, Mario Camus, Daniel Sueiro
Cast: Luís Marín, Oscar Cruz, Manuel Zarzo, Juanjo Losada, Ramón Rubio, Rafael Vargas, María Mayer.
Synopsis: A gang of juvenile delinquents pool their resources to pay for one of their number to be put on the bill of a bull-fighting contest.

    So, almost seven months after my last post on the matter, the Carlos Saura Challenge restarts! And I've gone all the way back to the beginning to Saura's directorial debut.

    When I started the Challenge, in February last year, Los golfos had long been unavailable in any kind of home viewing / VOD format - in fact, I don't think there has ever been a Spanish DVD release of the film - so I kicked off the Challenge with his second film instead. But towards the end of the year, while perusing those 'Best Films/DVDs/Scenes of the Year'-type articles that proliferate in December, I discovered that a DVD of the film had been released in France in the summer (although only with French subtitles). The review bemoaned the quality of the print used for the DVD (as the stills in this post can attest) - and the Spanish Establishment's general lack of interest in film preservation or restoration (although producer Enrique Cerezo has taken matters into his own hands on that front) - but concluded by saying that to have the film available in any form is a good thing and in the circumstances would have to suffice. I tracked down a copy of the DVD (which features an interview with Pere Portabella, who produced the film, so my different projects briefly connect!) but didn't rush to watch it - watching a Spanish film with French subtitles is only marginally better than watching a French film with Spanish subtitles, and both give me a headache. Then I spotted that it was going to screen in Manchester as part of Viva, and I knew that I'd have to go and see it on the big screen (with English subtitles - the first film I've watched so far in this Challenge to have them!). You can read my review of the film for Eye for Film here. As I mention in there, the quality of the print was poor, but I'm glad I saw it in that format as it's likely that I'll be viewing the rest of his films on a variety of small screens.

    I don't want to replicate what I said in my review, so I'm just going to expand on a couple of points for this post. Like Llanto por un bandido, Los golfos suffered at the hands of the censors, although unlike the later film (which jumps so abruptly in the Buñuel-starring opening sequence that I thought the DVD had skipped) the excised footage appears to have been reinstated in the version that I saw. At the time, productions had to go through 'prior censorship', the submission of their script before they could start shooting, and because the censors were not production specialists they usually focussed on the narrative form. Saura's filmmaking to date had been in documentary, and he was not overly interested in questions of narrative, but Marvin D'Lugo suggests that the director's experience of going through four major rewrites for Los golfos gave him 'a deeper understanding of the ideological function of narrative as perceived in the censors' minds' (1991: 33). I think this put him in good stead later on where, as discussed in earlier posts, the narratives become more opaque and metaphorical - meaning that the censors had less to fixate on, or less that they could concretely point to for removal. But even here some of the editing choices lead to abrupt cuts that would seem to have been deliberate on Saura's part, to disrupt the 'normal' narrative form, rather than due to external tampering.

    The other aspect that I want to highlight is the stylishness of some of the robberies - there is a slickness to them that is difficult to connect to the other Saura films I've seen to date. That said, the robbery in a truck stop parking lot reminded me of certain sections of La caza - something to do with the lighting (that blazing sun that burns with a white heat almost comes through the screen) but also the combination of sharp timing and economic movement. Although Carlos Saura didn't work with Elías Querejeta and his 'house team', including acclaimed editor Pablo G. del Amo, until La caza, there is a kernel of something here that would blossom in that film - the perception I've come across in my reading is that Saura managed to create a masterpiece with La caza because he started working with Querejeta and Co. at that point, but the flashes of brilliance in Los golfos suggest that there was already something forming.

In front of frame, Chato (Juanjo Losada) waits to give the signal to those outside, while Julian (Manuel Zarzo) is on lookout in the rear of frame. The truck driver is sitting at the table behind Chato.

Chato is looking at the parking lot where Ramón (Luís Marín - in the foreground) relays the signal to Manolo (Rafael Vargas - standing between the trucks), who in turn gives the signal to...

Paco (Ramón Rubio) who proceeds to break into the truck. Saura rapidly cuts between close-ups of each of the men, ramping up the tension.

The Carlos Saura Challenge: a recap

Image taken from here

Due to the combination of a stressful situation at work and family circumstances, I’ve been away from the blog for longer than I would have liked. 
    Rather than continuing the Carlos Saura Challenge within the set time limit of a year (which may have been unrealistic from the start, given the number of films), I’m going to continue without a set end date but with the aim of covering 1-2 films each month. Aside from filling in a gap in my own knowledge, the Challenge was meant to lead up to the release of Saura’s next film, Guernica, 33 días – however, that film has continued to have funding problems (it had already had its production delayed a year) and with the death of producer Elías Querejeta a few months ago, the film’s future does not look any less precarious. So in that sense (given that the film is still in pre-production – Saura has been directing theatre in the meantime) the time scale does not matter so much.
   Since I started the Challenge in February, a few more of Saura’s films have become available on VOD and/or I’ve tracked down a couple more on DVD, so I thought I’d amend the list from the first post: if a title in the list below has ‘VOD’ next to it that means that VOD is currently the only way to view it;  ‘+VOD’ signifies that means that it is also in circulation on DVD; nothing next to the title means DVD only (I’ve indicated if a film is completely unavailable). The majority of the DVDs seem to be currently OOP, but I have found most of mine on either ebay or amazon.es.
   All relevant posts are / will be tagged ‘Carlos Saura Challenge’ so they can be found together – film no. 10, Cría cuervos, is due to be covered next (although you can find Fiona Noble’s take on here already), but you’ll see that one of Saura’s earlier films, La madriguera, is now available on VOD, so I may go backwards first – but one or other of those films will be covered in September.
As usual any English titles in square brackets are my own translation (otherwise the title shown is the official English language title). The dates given refer to the Spanish theatrical release.

38. Guernica, 33 días / Guernica, 33 Days (in pre-production)
37. Flamenco, Flamenco (2010) +VOD
36. Io, Don Giovanni / I, Don Giovanni (2010)
35. Fados (2007)
34. Iberia (2005) VOD
33. El séptimo día / The Seventh Day (2004)
32. Salomé (2002)
31. Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón / Buñuel and King Solomon's Table (2001)
30. Goya en Burdeos / Goya in Bordeaux (1999) +VOD
29. Tango (1998)
28. Pajarico / [Little Bird] (1997)
27. Taxi (1996)
26. Flamenco (1995)
25. ¡Dispara! / Outrage (1993)
24. Sevillanas (1992) [currently unable to get a copy]
23. ¡Ay, Carmela! (1990)
22. La noche oscura / [The Dark Night] (1989)
21. El Dorado (1988) VOD
20. El amor brujo (1986)
19. Los zancos / [The Stilts] (1984)
18. Carmen (1983)
17. Antonieta (1982) [only available on R1]
16. Dulces horas / [Sweet Hours] (1982) VOD
15. Bodas de sangre / Blood Wedding (1981)
14. Deprisa, deprisa / Faster, Faster (1981) +VOD
13. Mamá cumple 100 años / [Mama Turns 100] (1979) +VOD
12. Los ojos vendados / Blindfolded Eyes (1978) VOD
11. Elisa, vida mía / Elisa, My Life (1977) +VOD
10. Cría cuervos / Raise Ravens (1976) +VOD
09. La prima Ángelica / Cousin Angelica (1974) +VOD
08. Ana y los lobos / Ana and the Wolves (1973) +VOD
07. El jardin de las delicias / The Garden of Delights (1970)
06. La madriguera / Honeycomb (1969) VOD
05. Stress-es-tres-tres / Stress is Three (1968) [unavailable]
04. Peppermint frappé (1967) +VOD
03. La caza / The Hunt (1966) +VOD
02. Llanto por un bandido / Lament for a Bandit (1964) 
01. Los golfos / The Delinquents (1962) [unavailable]

Guest post: Fiona Noble on Cría cuervos / Raise Ravens (Carlos Saura, 1976)

As indicated previously, I've paused my Carlos Saura Challenge for a few weeks while I deal with a situation at work. Fiona Noble kindly offered to write something for Nobody Knows Anybody about Cría cuervos as it is a film that features in her doctoral research. I hope to be back up and running in July, but in the meantime I leave you with Fiona's take on one of Saura's key films.

   Like La prima Angélica (already discussed on this blog), Cría cuervos revolves around the intersection of memory and childhood.  These themes are channelled primarily through the film’s central character, Ana, played by Ana Torrent.  Torrent has been read by Marsha Kinder as emblematic of the generation raised during the dictatorship, the self-proclaimed ‘children of Franco’ (1983: 57).  For Kinder, the figure of the child in films produced by this generation of directors (including, as well as Saura, José Luis Borau, Jaime de Armiñan, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón) symbolises their infantilisation by the Francoist regime.
   Regarding Torrent’s earlier appearance in Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (1973), Kinder underscores the fundamental ambivalence of the child: while her ‘luminous dark eyes confront us with a bold knowing gaze, conveying a precocious intelligence, passion and intensity that seem almost ominous’, at the same time ‘her pale oval face and slender birdlike frame create a fragility that also marks her as a victim – a delicate instrument for the registering of pain’ (1983: 59-60).  This ambivalence underscores the dualism of this generation, at once victims, who have suffered at the hands of the regime, as well as potential future aggressors, who have learned from, and are at risk of perpetuating, their traumatic experiences through the repetition of violent acts.
   These concerns surface too in Cría, insofar as protagonist Ana actively seeks to kill her father, and then her aunt by poisoning them.  While the poison is revealed to be a harmless substance (bicarbonate of soda), and thus ‘meaningful action is still only imaginable, not performed’ (Kinder 1983: 66), Ana’s desire to provoke the death of these individuals is anything but imagined.  The figure of the child thus functions as a metaphor for those who have grown up under the Franco regime, replicating their sentiments of frustration and helplessness, but also encapsulating their impulse towards violence.
   That the child is representative of a now adult generation impacts upon Cría’s temporality and chronology.  Produced in 1975, shortly before Franco’s death, the film prophetically and symbolically addresses this event through the death of the father in the opening scenes. Furthermore, the narrative moves between past and present, or rather between present and future.  The action takes place on two distinct temporal planes – the first during protagonist Ana’s childhood in 1975, and the second, twenty years later, in 1995, when an adult Ana attempts to explain her actions in the past.  The child in addition demonstrates the ability to conjure up the image of her dead mother, evidencing a fluid approach to chronology and to history.  This is further underscored by the film’s casting, given that Chaplin plays both the adult Ana and her mother María.  On the one hand, this fluid chronology, that evidences the influence of the past on the present, is tied specifically to the film’s politico-historical context.  Specifically, it highlights the extent to which the country’s forgotten traumatic past was bound to return in the aftermath of the dictator’s death.  On the other, and in more general terms, this evidences the child’s status as, in the words of Judith Halberstam, ‘always already anarchic and rebellious, out of order and out of time’ (2011: 27).
   In spite of this fluid approach to chronology, the film’s spatiality is characterised conversely by claustrophobia and restriction.  The majority of Cría’s narrative unfolds during the girls’ school holidays, creating a stifling atmosphere in which the children have little access to the world outside the walls of their home.  In support of this, the action takes place almost exclusively within the family home.  The only exception to this is the episode in which Aunt Paulina takes the children to their father’s friend’s farm.
   Furthermore, the family home is marked as a site of trauma, given that the film begins with the death of the girls’ father in his own bed.  Having previously lost their mother, Ana and her sisters are now orphans, under the tutelage of their Aunt Paulina, their mother’s sister.  Their mute grandmother, and maid Rosa, also live in the house with the three girls.  The fractured family unit, in conjunction with the claustrophobic family home, symbolise the political and cultural climate in Spain during and after the dictatorship.  Cría’s spatial restraint thus contrasts dramatically with its temporal freedom, underscoring both the limitations and possibilities of the child’s imagination.
   The film ends with the girls’ re-emergence into the outside world, the camera positioned in a high angle shot, tracking the children as they make their way along the bustling streets of Madrid to attend their first day back at school after the holidays.  The camera lingers at the city skyline, leaving the spectator wondering about the fates of these young girls, and the generation that they represent.  The unfinishedness of this conclusion echoes the liminality of the climate – in the months preceding Franco’s death – in which the film was produced.

References:
Halberstam, J. (2011) – The Queer Art of Failure, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Kinder, M. (1983) – ‘The Children of Franco in the New Spanish Cinema,’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 8.2, pp.57-76.


Bio:
Fiona Noble is currently working towards the completion of her PhD in Hispanic Studies and Film & Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, where she also completed her MLitt (in Visual Culture with Distinction) and MA (with Joint Honours in French and Hispanic Studies).  Her research centres on notions of transitory subjectivities in contemporary Spain, an issue she explores through three key figures of post-Franco Spanish cinema: the child, the performer, and the immigrant. She writes the blog spanishcinephilia.

Carlos Saura Challenge, Part 6: La prima Angélica / Cousin Angelica (1974)

Director: Carlos Saura
Screenplay: Rafael Azcona, based on a story by Carlos Saura and Elías Querjeta
Cast: José Luis López Vázquez, Lina Canalejas, Fernando Delgado, Lola Cardona, María Clara Fernández de Loayza, Josefina Díaz, Encarna Paso, Pedro Sempson, Julieta Serrano.
Synopsis: 1973. Luis Cano (López Vázquez) travels from Barcelona to fulfil his late mother's wishes to have her remains interred in the family crypt in Segovia. The trip brings him face to face with the family members he stayed with during the Civil War and leads him to confront the memories and ghosts of his childhood.

   La prima Angélica is another of Saura's films that centres on the issue of memory and shares with El jardín de las delicias not only a lead actor (José Luis López Vázquez) but also the use of him to portray a character in both adulthood and childhood. We first see Luis-as-child when Luis-as-adult pulls his car to the side of the road as he sees Segovia in the distance and he becomes lost in the memory of the first time he was at this roadside - his father's car pulls up behind him and his mother (dressed in 1930s attire) comforts Luis and tries to reassure him about his stay with her side of the family (on the right, politically) in a safer area while his parents return to Barcelona. As the Civil War develops, Barcelona becomes cut off, and Luis will see out the war apart from his parents and in the midst of a family from the 'victorious' side. His return to Segovia as an adult in his 40s shows how those war years shaped the person he became and why he now feels the need to confront the past. D'Lugo observes that the film stands as 'the first compassionate view of the vanquished' (1991: 116):

'In choosing the theme of interdicted history -the Civil War years as remembered by the child of Republican parents- Saura pursues more than just the external demons of censorship that had suppressed all but the triumphalist readings of the war. He confronts the psychological and ethical traumas that the official distortions of the history of the war years in public discourse had conveniently ignored but that had scarred and even paralysed a generation of Spaniards' (1991: 115-116).

Quintana points out that in the context of Spain today, and the contentious issue of 'historical memory', 'Luis's character gains symbolic force as the first fictional character that recovers the power of memory as an act of resurrection of the hidden and of justice to that which is silenced' (2008: 95). La prima Angélica was controversial and had its release curtailed (one Barcelona cinema that screened it was firebombed), but also became the most commercially-successful film of Saura's career at that point (Quintana 2008: 87).
    As with El jardín de las delicias the past is not simply evoked, but reenacted. Although it is perhaps more accurate to say that it is being 'relived', as these are not the theatrical stagings of the earlier film but rather Luis weaving in and out of the present and the past as the return to the family apartment envelops him in memories. Another conceit that is repeated from earlier Saura films is to have the same actors playing more than one character: Lina Canalejas plays Angélica's mother in the 1930s segments and the grown-up Angélica in the present; María Clara Fernández de Loayza plays Angélica in the 1930s and the grown-up Angélica's daughter (also called Angélica) in the present; Fernando Delgado plays both Angélica's father and later her husband (although this is one of the points where the tricks that memory can play on you are pointed out - the grown-up Angélica shows Luis a photo of her father to prove that there is no resemblance to her husband). This 'doubling' obviously aids the transition back and forth in Luis's memory onscreen, which occasionally becomes confusing as Luis loses himself in the past and the lines between the two eras become indistinct. López Vázquez is the only actor to play the same character in both eras - Luis's childhood self is distinguished by voice, body language, and facial expression: for example, his habit of tucking his chin down so that he is looking up (his eyes wide) serves not only to indicate the shy and withdrawn nature of the boy, but also to make the actor seem physically smaller. One particular sequence that I liked comes almost halfway into the film, at the point when Luis has carried out his mother's wishes and is driving back to Barcelona. He stops at the same roadside and the same memory that we saw at the start of the film plays out again. But this time, instead of being immersed in the memory, reliving it, he observes it from the other side of the road; in revisiting the sites of childhood trauma, he has acquired some of the distance required to review the past objectively. He turns his car around and heads back to Segovia to confront the past head on.

References:

D'Lugo, M. (1991) - The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Quintana, À. (2008) - 'A Poetics of Splitting: Memory and Identity in La prima Angélica (Carlos Saura, 1974)', in Burning Darkness: A Half Century of Spanish Cinema, edited by J.R. Resina, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp.83-96.

The Carlos Saura Challenge, Part 5: Ana y los lobos / Ana and the Wolves (1972)

Director: Carlos Saura
Screenplay: Rafael Azcona and Carlos Saura, based on an idea by Carlos Saura and Elías Querejeta
Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Fernando Fernán Gómez, José María Prada, José Vivó, Rafaela Aparicio, Charo Soriano, Marisa Porcel, Anny Quintas, María José Puerta, Nuria Lage, Sara Gil.
Synopsis: An English nanny, Ana (Chaplin), arrives at a house in the Spanish countryside to look after the children of one of three brothers (Fernán Gómez, Prada, Vivó) living with their mother (Aparicio). All three brothers become captivated by Ana, who finds herself living in an increasingly disturbing and dangerous situation.

Warning: contains spoilers, including the ending.

    From the first appearance of the men in the film -José (Prada) entering the newly-arrived Ana's bedroom and insisting on seeing her passport and inspecting the contents of her suitcase- there is the unsettling sense that the foreigner has wandered into something beyond her ken (her passport may show her to be much-travelled but she is still naive). Soon enough she has José showing off his collection of military uniforms to her and commanding dominance of the household, Fernando (Fernán Gómez) explaining his pursuit of a union with God (or at least levitation) in the whitewashed cave at the bottom of the garden, and Juan (Vivó), the children's father, making amorous advances and sending her erotic letters with international postmarks (by using stamps from the family's stamp collection). The men essentially represent three taboos of Spanish culture at the time - the military, religion, sex - but in a slightly more neutered form than they might have taken (José isn't in the military, he just collects uniforms, and Fernando isn't a priest). They're almost living out a kind of stunted adolescence - or rather, in still living with their mother, they have managed to avoid maturing into adults; there's something quite childlike about their enthusiasm for their respective 'interests'.
    But the doll is really the first clue that what is going on is not just harmless fantasy. The three children (Puerta, Lage, Gil) dig up a doll that has had its hair cut off before being wrapped in a shroud, tied with string and buried in the garden. Ana intuits that there is something disturbing at play (the children say that 'the wolves' have done it) and insists that Juan tells her who has 'tortured' the doll but seemingly takes no further action (or precaution) on being told that it was Fernando. It's interesting that Higginbotham refers to the film as a 'grim parable' (1988: 86) because there's something fairytale-like about it and it also carries with it the sensation that certain sequences could be being dreamt by one of the characters - the parallels between Fernando's 'vision' of the various members of the household early in the film and the set of events leading up to Ana's eviction from the house and the brutal finale (several characters including, most pertinently, Ana, are wearing the same clothes in both sequences) suggests that not everything we see actually happens. Saura has said that he saw the final sequence as imaginary ([1979] 2003: 53) (Ana is expelled from the house when Mama (Aparicio) realises how much discord she has sowed, and as she leaves the grounds she is pounced upon by the three brothers - Juan rapes her, Fernando cuts off her hair, and José handcuffs her before shooting her in the head - the film ends on a close-up of her agonised face), which explains how the family (and Ana) can be revisited in Mamá cumple 100 años / Mama Turns 100 (1979).
   Overall the film made me feel uneasy, mainly because of the extent to which Ana plays games with the brothers, teases them, and plays the coquette, seemingly unaware that she is seriously out of her depth - there is a creeping sense, heightened after the doll is found, that something terrible will occur (which it does -whether imaginary or not).

References:

Castro, A. ([1979] 2003) -'Interview with Carlos Saura', Dirigido por, 69, pp.44-50, reprinted in Carlos Saura: Interviews, edited by Linda M. Willem, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp.52-64.

Higginbotham, V. (1988) - Spanish Film Under Franco, Austin: University of Texas Press.

The Carlos Saura Challenge, Part 4: El jardín de las delicias / The Garden of Delights (1970)

Director: Carlos Saura
Screenplay: Rafael Azcona and Carlos Saura
Cast: José Luis López Vázquez, Francisco Pierrá, Luchy Soto, Lina Canalejas, Esperanza Roy, Charo Soriano.
Synopsis: Antonio Cano (López Vázquez), an important businessman, is left partially-paralysed and an amnesiac after a car crash. His family and friends try to recreate key moments in his life in order to give him an emotional jolt and aid his recuperation. He spends each day sitting in his garden, accompanied by memories and ghosts of the past.

Warning: contains spoilers.

   After the relatively straightforward linearity of Peppermint frappé (and skipping Stress-es-tres-tres and La madriguera due to their unavailability) comes El jardín de las delicias, in structural terms by far the most complex film Saura had made. The film operates in five planes, identified within the shooting script (D'Lugo 1991: 101), which we move between without transition (although Pavlović notes that Antonio's amnesia 'links all five continua' (2006: 151)) - Kovacs (1981) has labelled the planes thus: 'the recreated past', a series of scenes staged by Antonio's father (Pierrá) of key moments in his son's life, but which parallel key moments in Spanish history; 'the present day frame', Antonio being taken care of by his wife (Soto) and father, and being pushed to remember via memory tests with collections of old photos, or a staged reencounter with his mistress (Roy) who was in the car crash with him; 'evoked past', Antonio's own independent memories of the key moments in his life; 'the "oneiric" world', threatening hallucinations that Antonio suffers while sitting in the garden; 'a future plane', as Antonio starts coming back to himself, he begins to '[resist] the pattern of existence his family has thrust upon him' (D'Lugo 1991: 102). This intentionally intricate structure was to act as a kind of smokescreen, or a least a counterbalance, to the more political aspects of the film in an era when censorship by the Franco regime was becoming increasingly arbitrary. The original script was passed by the censors, with one writing in his evaluation that 'the advantage of such an intellectualised plot is that nobody can grasp the key to it, and the set-ups are so extremely limited in meaning that nobody can identify with anything' (D'Lugo 1991: 106) - although specific cuts were then made to the film by the censors (but unlike the case of Llanto por un bandido, those cut elements seem to have been reinstated in the version I watched).
    Despite the structure appearing complex when laid out as above, it is comprehensible when watched onscreen (although some confusion/disorientation is intentional - it is a point of connection between Antonio and the audience), with differing levels of theatricality being utilised in the different planes (for example, there is some wonderful over-acting by the actress hired to impersonate Antonio's late mother in the scenes from his childhood, whereas his wife Luchy is more subtle in her manipulation of 'reality' -we see that she is playing 'mood music' on a cassette player when she takes Antonio for a walk). Also, you don't have to be aware of all of the references to know that a point is being made - I didn't know that Antonio's car crash was inspired by the 1962 death (in a car crash) of Juan March, an industrialist who had helped bankroll the July 1936 military uprising against the Republic (there are enough parallels to see Saura as deliberately baiting the censors), but the moments of historical significance that parallel (and interrupt) the restaged moments of Antonio's life clearly indicate that 'Antonio's identity is inseparable from a broader historical context. [...] These national "traumas" give rise to personal ones, showing how the individual is an inscrutable product of the nation' (Pavlović 2006: 156).
    Likewise, Saura uses the institution of the family to equate with the state apparatus: the film 'insistently identifies the Francoist family as the social apparatus that replicates on the personal plane the ideology of the state, constructing the prismatic frame of reference through which the individual's consciousness of himself takes place' (D'Lugo 1991: 102). The 'ideal' family, so deified by the state, is shown to be anything but: not only are they collectively a suffocating and repressive force in Antonio's life, but we eventually find that their interest in his recuperation isn't entirely motivated by love and affection (his father needs to know the number of the Swiss bank account, and his wife wants the combination to the safe in the bedroom). [side-note: some of the events that they chose to recreate to jog Antonio's memory include childhood traumas - being locked in a dark room, aged 5, with an enormous pig that you've been told will eat your hands off, seems an horrific thing to inflict on someone twice in their lifetime]. D'Lugo suggests that the final sequence of the film, another of Antonio's hallucinations - this time of each family member in their own wheelchair on the vast lawn, is a tableau 'approximating a contemporary version of one of Bosch's panels in his "Garden of Delights"' (1991: 106), while Pavlović suggests that it 'points to the endless proliferation of cruelty in a system where both victims and victimisers are irreparably crippled' (2006: 158). But with his family in a similar state to Antonio (who having made progress, is now regressing) I read it as representing the wilful amnesia of people avoiding their own culpability, and also (as they are all facing in different directions) unable to see things from alternative viewpoints.
    The impression that we get of Antonio as he recovers what he was (before seemingly rejecting that vision and sliding back into oblivion) is that he was not a particularly likeable man (he is 'a prototypical product of dictatorial structure, an embodiment of Francoist zeitgeist' (Pavlović 2006: 156)). But when we first meet him, he is a blank slate (and as confused as we are by the events being staged in front of him) and I think that the audience remains on his side because of that initial blankness (the innocence of a child) and also because of the associated affability of López Vázquez, who is quite brilliant in the role. The film is also darkly funny (Colmeiro points to the film following in the tradition of Buñuel, Berlanga, and the esperpento of Valle-Inclán (2001: 284)) -alongside Peppermint frappé, this is the film that I have most enjoyed watching so far in the challenge.

a blank slate

References:

Colmeiro, J.F. (2001) - 'Metateatralidad y psicodrama: los escenarios de la memoria en el cine de Carlos Saura', Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, 26:1, pp.277-298.

D'Lugo, M (1991) - The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kovacs, K. (1981) - 'Loss and Recuperation in The Garden of Delights', Cine-Tracts, 4:2-3, pp.45-54. [I haven't managed to get hold of this yet but the outline of the narrational planes is quoted in D'Lugo]

Pavlović, T. (2006) - 'Allegorising the body politic: Masculinity and history in Saura's El jardín de las delicias (1970) and Almodóvar's Carne trémula (1997)', Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 3:3, pp.149-167.

The Carlos Saura Challenge, Part 3: Peppermint frappé (1967)

Director: Carlos Saura
Screenplay: Carlos Saura, Angelino Fons, and Rafael Azcona
Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, José Luis López Vázquez, Alfredo Mayo.
Synopsis: Julián's (López Vázquez) childhood friend Pablo (Mayo) returns to their hometown with his new wife, Elena (a blonde Chaplin). Julián becomes obsessed with Elena, who reminds him of a woman he saw beating a drum during the famous Holy Week ritual in Calanda (also Chaplin). Although rebuffed by Elena, Julián continues his pursuit while simultaneously remodelling his assistant, Ana (a brunette Chaplin), in her image.

Warning: contains a spoiler

    As I've mentioned previously, part of my reason for doing the challenge is that I've seen very few of Saura's films (mainly because of their lack of availability in subtitled form -none of the films I've covered so far have been subtitled), but his career also covers eras of Spanish cinema that I'm unfamiliar with, so I'm hoping that this will broaden my field of reference. What's funny about this is when, watching a film you know next to nothing about, you suddenly see a links to another (more recent) filmmaker. Peppermint frappé is dedicated to Luis Buñuel (who Saura considered a mentor) and there is a lot of Buñuelian sexual fetishising going on -apparently there are many parallels with Buñuel's El (1953), but I haven't had time to watch that film before writing this. But the director who most sprang to mind from the opening credits (Julián assiduously cutting out images from women's fashion magazines and pasting them into a scrapbook) onwards was Almodóvar. Except, of course, Pedro came along more than a decade later. Obviously Buñuel also had a strong influence on Almodóvar, but the central conceit of Peppermint frappé -a man goes slightly mad through jealousy and sexual obsession, and attempts to mould one woman into the image of another, before moving on to murder- and the way in which the women are effectively reduced to the accoutrements of femininity (false eyelashes, lipstick, lace stockings), just struck me as being particularly Almodóvarian and certainly not that far away from some of the films he has made (I had a moment of thinking that La piel que habito is set in the same locale as Peppermint frappé, but it isn't). I guess I wasn't expecting to see any connections between Saura and Almodóvar because they've always seemed to me to be very different filmmakers in both style and content, but it would appear that their common influences allow for some crossover.
    For me, the main element of interest in Peppermint frappé was seeing Geraldine Chaplin play three characters within the same narrative - the woman in Calanda (Buñuel's native town and somewhere Saura visited with him (D'Lugo 1991: 69)) who made such a powerful impression on Julián is only seen in a very brief flashback (although she is 'performed' by both Elena and Ana, in different contexts), but Elena and Ana are clearly differentiated in terms of personality, appearance, and Chaplin's performance(s). If I come back to the film later in the year, I think that would be the aspect I look at in a bit more detail - although if I get around to watching El, then that may be another angle to take.
    Peppermint frappé is said to form a trilogy of sorts with Saura's next two films - Stress-es-tres-tres / Stress is Three Three (1968) and La madriguera / Honeycomb (1969) (both of which also star Geraldine Chaplin) - but neither of them are available in any format, so the next post will jump forward to the 1970s and El jardin de las delicias / The Garden of Delights.

The woman in Calanda

Elena

Ana

The Carlos Saura Challenge, Part 2: La caza / The Hunt (1966)

Director: Carlos Saura
Screenplay: Carlos Saura and Angelino Fons
Cast: Ismael Merlo, Alfredo Mayo, José María Prada, Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, Fernando Sánchez Polack, Violeta García.
Synopsis: Old 'friends' José (Merlo), Paco (Mayo), and Luis (Prada) reunite after eight years for a day's hunting on José's country estate, with Paco's brother-in-law Enrique (Gutiérrez Caba) also enthusiastically tagging along. But as the day wears on, old tensions and fractures in their relationships become apparent and violence bubbles to the surface.

   Shot in crisp black and white (cinematography by Luis Cuadrado) and sharply edited by Pablo G del Amo (in the documentary about the latter, written about on here last year, the editor tells Saura that this is the only film that he revisits on a yearly basis), La caza marks Carlos Saura's first collaboration with producer Elías Querejeta (who had a preferred team of technical crew) and a stylistic leap on from Llanto por un bandido. The film is considered a landmark in Spanish cinema - 'together with Nueve cartas a Berta (Nine Letters to Berta, Basilio Martín Patino, 1966), [...] La caza is the most representative film of the mid-1960s cycle that came to be known as Nuevo cine español [New Spanish Cinema]' (Mira 2010: 71) - and won Saura the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1966 - his first international award.

   The film takes place in a location that had been a battlefield during the Civil War (D'Lugo 1991: 57), and 'the war' (the censors ensured that the Civil War is not explicitly mentioned) permeates the narrative and the relations between the men (the older three served together). The landscape, and the way it is presented onscreen, is a metonym for the psyches of those who survived the war: battle-scarred, with secrets and remnants of violence hidden in darker recesses. Alberto Mira notes that the use of metaphor and strong imagery 'went beyond narrative needs: the heat that drives characters to madness could be read in terms of the stifling atmosphere created in the country after the Civil War, and the butchery was easily read as a reference to the conflict itself [...]' (2010: 71). Hunting was strongly associated with the regime and there is also an intertextual reference being made with the casting of Alfredo Mayo:

'As a young man, Mayo built his career upon a series of forties films playing the role of the stalwart Nationalist hero fighting the Republican scourge. By far, the most influential of these was the role of José Churruca in Sáenz de Heredia's Raza. Not only did Mayo play the part of the nationalist patriot; his role was fashioned as a sanitized version of the Caudillo, replete with narrative parallels to Franco's own biography. Nowhere in The Hunt is there any overt reference to Mayo's former screen persona, yet implicitly, the character of Paco seems to represent a sequel to the earlier Alfredo Mayo, film-actor-as-national-hero. It is a shattering statement of the passage of time and the transformation of a bygone mythic hero into a venal and narcissistic old man.' (D'Lugo 1991: 57)

As an outsider to this clique, and crucially of a younger generation, Enrique is at one remove from the associations generated by the older men. He therefore acts as witness, and audience proxy, when bitter resentments and disappointments finally cause psychic breakdown and the men turn on each other with spectacular violence. The film ends with a freeze frame of his face, his panting still audible on the soundtrack, as he runs from the scene in horror.

    For the most part the film is realist in its depictions but the frequent extreme close-ups of sweating faces, of weapons and ammunition, and of rabbits in their death throes, give a slightly surreal edge to proceedings - almost a 'heightened' reality, or as if the camera is also feeling the effects of that relentless heat. It feels like a very modern film, not just visually but also in our access to the interiority of the characters:

'[...] Saura uses an experimental procedure which overlaps and contrasts with the realism: the interior monologues of the characters. They reveal their doubts, complex thoughts and passions that move them - the combination of their old friendship, resentment, envy - and it fills the silences, ellipses and insinuations of his dialogues until the final slaughter. Saura incorporates into cinematic introspection mechanisms that were being explored in contemporary literature (Luis Martín-Santos, Juan Goytisolo, Juan Marsé, Juan Benet, etc.).' (Sánchez-Biosca 2011: 117)

State of mind, or at least the animosity under the surface, is also signalled early on via the editing in the sequence where the men are preparing their weapons: a series of shot-reverse-shots show Paco in extreme close-up checking his sites facing right, then cuts to an extreme close-up of José doing the same but facing left (making it appear that they could be aiming at each other), the sequence of shots then repeats before a mid-distance shot establishes their actual positions in relation to each other (sitting alongside one another facing in opposite directions).

   Hopefully I will return to this film later in the year as I've barely scratched the surface in this short piece and many different angles could be taken -it is an incredibly rich text and a small mountain of material has been written on it (I've only read a fraction of it so far -I've found a book, La caza...42 años después [La caza...42 years later], which is a collection of articles about the film and looks really interesting but as it's in Spanish it'll take me a while to read). My intention with the future longer pieces is to draw groups of the films together, but obviously I can't start to think about that until I've watched more of them.

References:

Cueto, R. (ed.) (2008) - La caza...42 años después, Valencia: Ediciones de la Filmoteca.

D'Lugo, M. (1991) - The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mira, A. (2010) - The A to Z of Spanish Cinema, Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press.

Sánchez-Biosca, V. (2011) - 'La caza', in Directory of World Cinema: Spain, edited by Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano, Bristol: Intellect, pp.115-117.

The Carlos Saura Challenge, Part 1: Llanto por un bandido / Lament for a Bandit (1964)

Director: Carlos Saura
Screenplay: Carlos Saura and Mario Camus
Cast: Francisco Rabal, Lea Massari, Lino Ventura, Philippe Leroy, Manuel Zarzo, Agustín González, Fernando Sánchez Polack
Synopsis: 19th century Spain. The Spanish people have expelled the French but now have to deal with the unjust Fernando VII in their stead. Rabal plays José María, a.k.a. 'El Tempranillo', leader of a group of bandits who garner a Robin Hood-like reputation in robbing only the rich, dealing fairly with normal people, and their continuing defiance of the King.

So begins the 'Carlos Saura Challenge'. This is not his first feature-length film, but Los golfos / The Delinquents (1962) is unavailable in any format, so this is where I start. The reception of Los golfos (the script had been banned by the censors four times) had demonstrated that depicting the here-and-now in Spain was a sensitive issue, and Jean-Claude Seguin suggests that with Llanto por un bandido Saura was attempting to escape from Spanish reality:

"It was for the director to reinstate the figure of the bandit José María 'El Tempranillo' who, when in contact with a fugitive liberal, Pedro Sanchez, acquires a certain political consciousness and chooses the Constitutionalists. Behind this historical film comes a discourse on the need for ideological commitment which, in Spain, was a courageous stand." (2011: 54)

However he clearly had not travelled far enough from reality as the film was heavily cut by the censors, in particular the opening sequence where Saura pointedly uses playwright Antonio Buero Vallejo (who used symbolism in his own work to criticise the Franco government) as a town-crier, announcing a verdict/judgement to the town square while Luis Buñuel cameos as an executioner preparing to execute the condemned men by garrotting - the sequence has been cut so heavily that I thought that the DVD was skipping. It was this treatment of his work that led Saura to utilise metaphors and parables in the films that followed. (side note: here is an interesting interview with Saura about the influence of Buñuel)
Overall, aside from the impetus to be more oblique in presenting a view that might be considered politically 'problematic' by the regime, the elements that seem to me to be significant in terms of Saura's later work are: the allusion to Goya and his Duelo a garrotazos / Fight with Cudgels in the fight sequence between Rabal and Lino Ventura (below) where, buried up to their knees, they batter each other with branches; and also what is already quite a distinctive use of music (certain sequences appear to either be cut to the music, or the actions within the sequence -for example, the blows Rabal rains down on Ventura- are timed to fit the rhythm of the music, which is often diagetic, i.e. we see it being performed onscreen).

References:

Seguin, Jean-Claude (2011) - 'Carlos Saura', in Directory of World Cinema: Spain, edited by Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano, Bristol: Intellect, pp. 53-56.

The Carlos Saura Challenge

   I mentioned a while back that I was considering dedicating a month on the blog to Carlos Saura (in the style of my 'Almodóvar Month' back in August 2011), but I've decided that that's not feasible because of the number of films (38) in his filmography. So instead I'm going to set myself a 'Carlos Saura Challenge': in the next calendar year (i.e. February 2013 - January 2014) I will attempt to watch all those of his films that are available either on DVD or VOD. This should build up to the arrival of his next film - Guernica, 33 días - which goes into production this year (although there is no set release date for it yet). I think I have now tracked down as many as possible of the films (30, at the last count [not all of them are in the above photo]- it's taken more than six months and some are missing because their apparent rarity makes them too expensive, while others are only available as VOD), although there are still some omissions (indicated below -I've also noted which ones are available as VOD). As I said in a Not-Entirely-Random Viewing post last year, I'm not particularly confident writing about his dance / music films because of my ignorance of those elements, but they are an integral part of his career, so I will have to work out how to write about them as I go along. My intention is that, like Almodóvar Month, each film will have a (relatively short) individual post, with longer posts appearing at intervals (further into the year). The full list of films is below and future posts will be tagged 'Carlos Saura Challenge' so that they can be found together. As usual any English titles in square brackets are my own translation (otherwise the title shown is the official English language title). The dates given refer to the Spanish theatrical release.

38. Guernica, 33 días / Guernica, 33 Days (in pre-production)
37. Flamenco, Flamenco (2010) VOD
36. Io, Don Giovanni / I, Don Giovanni (2010)
35. Fados (2007)
34. Iberia (2005) VOD
33. El séptimo día / The Seventh Day (2004)
32. Salomé (2002)
31. Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón / Buñuel and King Solomon's Table (2001)
30. Goya en Burdeos / Goya in Bordeaux (1999)
29. Tango (1998)
28. Pajarico / [Little Bird] (1997)
27. Taxi (1996)
26. Flamenco (1995)
25. ¡Dispara! / Outrage (1993)
24. Sevillanas (1992) [unable to get a copy]
23. ¡Ay, Carmela! (1990)
22. La noche oscura / [The Dark Night] (1989)
21. El Dorado (1988) [unavailable]
20. El amor brujo (1986)
19. Los zancos / [The Stilts] (1984) [unavailable]
18. Carmen (1983)
17. Antonieta (1982) [only available on R1]
16. Dulces horas / [Sweet Hours] (1982) VOD
15. Bodas de sangre / Blood Wedding (1981)
14. Deprisa, deprisa / Faster, Faster (1981)
13. Mamá cumple 100 años / [Mama Turns 100] (1979) VOD
12. Los ojos vendados / Blindfolded Eyes (1978) VOD
11. Elisa, vida mía / Elisa, My Life (1977) VOD
10. Cría cuervos / Raise Ravens (1976) VOD
09. La prima Ángelica / Cousin Angelica (1974) VOD
08. Ana y los lobos / Ana and the Wolves (1973) VOD
07. El jardin de las delicias / The Garden of Delights (1970)
06. La madriguera / Honeycomb (1969) [not available]
05. Stress-es-tres-tres / Stress is Three (1968) [not available]
04. Peppermint frappé (1967) VOD
03. La caza / The Hunt (1966)
02. Llanto por un bandido / Lament for a Bandit (1964)
01. Los golfos / The Delinquents (1962) [unavailable]

So we'll see how I go - I may have bitten off more than I can chew as I'll find it difficult to work through that many films (while also trying to watch other ones as well, and, y'know, having a job), not to mention the fact that the majority of the DVDs I have acquired do not have English subtitles. If anyone wants to jump in with a take on any of the films, you would be more than welcome, either here or I can link to your own blogs. Cría cuervos is released on DVD in the UK in May, so maybe some folks would be interested in that? Likewise, Bodas de sangre, Carmen, and El amor brujo had DVD releases last year. The others are admittedly more difficult to get hold of (plus the subtitles issue). Let me know -either in the comments or on twitter.