project film school

pfs meeting 8/15/07 : cria cuervos

(directed by carlos saura)

ahhh, i am happy - last night we got together to watch cria cuervos and i fell in love with the film all over again (it was my fourth time seeing it)

overall i think everyone was blown away by ana torrent and how the film was not only a striking portrait of childhood but also managed to show you the world from a child's point of view. saura's use of repeated imagery and movement captured the limited memory of a child and made the symbolism of specific things in the film not distracting and quite manageable.

vincent canby put it best in his 1977 new york times review of the film :
"Childhood can be a most terrifying time. One must constantly observe the proscriptions of a primitive system of cause and effect that can be questioned only by the reckless or the ignorant. Squash a spider and it will rain. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. Sleep in the light of a new moon and you may never wake up. There is power in the knowledge of these things, as well as awful responsibility. One must be vigilant. One has to be alert for signs."

in a film ripe with metaphor, allegory and chicken feet - i am always amazed at how the simple moments are enough for me. for the most part i have never had the desire to really delve into the politics of the film and am still quite happy to just experience it

something else i love about the film was the use of photographs to relay information about the past and to actually represent the past. usually when photographs are used in movies it seems contrived and a little cheesy - but here the images we see add another layer to a tale that revolves around memory and visually help to define the family outside the eyes of our 9 year old protagonist.

interestingly enough there was no commentary with this criterion - but on the supplements dvd, there is a documentary about carlos saura and it begins with saura and a roomful of damaged cameras that he had "rescued", cleaned and rebuilt. watching him with all of the different cameras he had preserved was almost all the commentary on the film i needed....