CRÍA CUERVOS
(1976)
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Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
4:30 PM*
Sunday 04 May
3:45 PM
Tuesday 06 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
1:15 PM
Friday 09 May
4:25 PM*
Saturday 10 May
*denotes session will include an introduction
Rating: M
Duration: 107 minutes
Country: Spain
Language: Spanish with English subtitles
Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Ana Torrent, Mónica Randall, Héctor Alterio
Director: Carlos Saura
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4:30 PM*
Sunday 04 May
3:45 PM
Tuesday 06 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
1:15 PM
Friday 09 May
4:25 PM*
Saturday 10 May
*denotes session will include an introduction
Rating: M
Duration: 107 minutes
Country: Spain
Language: Spanish with English subtitles
Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Ana Torrent, Mónica Randall, Héctor Alterio
Director: Carlos Saura
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
2K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
Winner of the Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival, 1976.
“Still as moving and compelling as when it was made, Cría cuervos seems now not diminished but enhanced by its growing distance in time, benefiting from a retrospective perspective that, appropriately enough, is subtly explored within the film itself.” Paul Julian Smith
Carlos Saura became Spain’s most prominent filmmaker from his debut feature Los Golfos (1960). His breakthrough into international art house prominence came with Cría Cuervos in 1976 a compelling, enigmatic, Bergmanesque exploration of childhood fantasies. Shot in the summer of 1975, as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco lay dying, it premiered forty years after the civil war began. Saura could thus hardly have chosen a more momentous time for his meditation on history and memory.
Set almost entirely in a large, gloomy house walled up against the chaotic life of Madrid outside, Cría Cuervos tells the story of eight-year-old Ana, played by Ana Torrent, previously seen in Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). The historical and social references in the film are inextricable from the psychic structures it explores.
Introduced by Geoff Gardner at Ritz Cinemas and by Will Cox at Lido Cinemas
Winner of the Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival, 1976.
“Still as moving and compelling as when it was made, Cría cuervos seems now not diminished but enhanced by its growing distance in time, benefiting from a retrospective perspective that, appropriately enough, is subtly explored within the film itself.” Paul Julian Smith
Carlos Saura became Spain’s most prominent filmmaker from his debut feature Los Golfos (1960). His breakthrough into international art house prominence came with Cría Cuervos in 1976 a compelling, enigmatic, Bergmanesque exploration of childhood fantasies. Shot in the summer of 1975, as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco lay dying, it premiered forty years after the civil war began. Saura could thus hardly have chosen a more momentous time for his meditation on history and memory.
Set almost entirely in a large, gloomy house walled up against the chaotic life of Madrid outside, Cría Cuervos tells the story of eight-year-old Ana, played by Ana Torrent, previously seen in Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). The historical and social references in the film are inextricable from the psychic structures it explores.
Introduced by Geoff Gardner at Ritz Cinemas and by Will Cox at Lido Cinemas
FILM NOTES
By Adrian Danks
Adrian Danks is an Associate Professor at RMIT University and co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque.
CARLOS SAURA
Carlos
Saura was born in January 1932. Although his parents were liberal, and he spent
time in Republican Spain during the Civil War (1936-39), he also had a
bourgeois upbringing and was billeted to his more conservative extended family
for significant periods of time. This conflicted experience and lasting memory of
the war deeply impacted his later films, enabling him to better understand the
deep wounds and traumas of Spain’s recent past.
Initially studying to become a civil engineer, he moved into photography and then short documentary film production in the mid-1950s. He came to prominence when his first feature, Los golfos (The Delinquents, 1960), was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Deeply influenced by the legacy of neo-realism, the film’s wider exposure also led to a fateful meeting with Luis Buñuel in Cannes, leading to a close friendship over the next 20 or so years. Saura’s breakthrough film was La caza (The Hunt, 1966), which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and represented his first collaboration with creative producer, Elias Querejeta. The films they made together between 1966 and the early 1980s represent one of the richest veins of filmmaking in Spanish cinema, with Saura going on to become the country’s most internationally recognised director of the era. This work artfully negotiated the strict censorship privations of the time while also meeting the requirements of international audiences who expected the films to somehow reflect on the impact and legacy of Franco’s repressive regime. These films were also marked by other significant collaborations, including with screenwriter Rafael Azcona and, from 1967’s Peppermint Frappé on, Saura’s partner Geraldine Chaplin. Saura’s critical and commercial popularity peaked in the mid to late 1970s – the final years of Franco’s regime and the first stirrings of democracy – with his masterpiece, Cría cuervos, and Mamá cumple 100 años (Mama Turns 100, 1979).
In some ways the dying days of fascist Spain provided the most productive context for Saura’s subtle, often ambiguous and psychologically complex cinema, though the period from the early 1980s on enabled him to explore the legacy and memory of the Civil War more directly, dramatise the lives of important Spanish artists like Goya and Buñuel, and exuberantly celebrate the legacy of traditional musical and dance forms like flamenco and tango. His “Flamenco Trilogy” – Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding, 1981), Carmen (1983) and El amor brujo (Love, the Magician, 1986) – remains the most acclaimed and influential work of this period. Continuing to make films into his late eighties, and returning to documentary for the last phase of his career, Saura completed over 40 features before his death in 2023 and remains one of the key Spanish filmmakers.
Initially studying to become a civil engineer, he moved into photography and then short documentary film production in the mid-1950s. He came to prominence when his first feature, Los golfos (The Delinquents, 1960), was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Deeply influenced by the legacy of neo-realism, the film’s wider exposure also led to a fateful meeting with Luis Buñuel in Cannes, leading to a close friendship over the next 20 or so years. Saura’s breakthrough film was La caza (The Hunt, 1966), which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and represented his first collaboration with creative producer, Elias Querejeta. The films they made together between 1966 and the early 1980s represent one of the richest veins of filmmaking in Spanish cinema, with Saura going on to become the country’s most internationally recognised director of the era. This work artfully negotiated the strict censorship privations of the time while also meeting the requirements of international audiences who expected the films to somehow reflect on the impact and legacy of Franco’s repressive regime. These films were also marked by other significant collaborations, including with screenwriter Rafael Azcona and, from 1967’s Peppermint Frappé on, Saura’s partner Geraldine Chaplin. Saura’s critical and commercial popularity peaked in the mid to late 1970s – the final years of Franco’s regime and the first stirrings of democracy – with his masterpiece, Cría cuervos, and Mamá cumple 100 años (Mama Turns 100, 1979).
In some ways the dying days of fascist Spain provided the most productive context for Saura’s subtle, often ambiguous and psychologically complex cinema, though the period from the early 1980s on enabled him to explore the legacy and memory of the Civil War more directly, dramatise the lives of important Spanish artists like Goya and Buñuel, and exuberantly celebrate the legacy of traditional musical and dance forms like flamenco and tango. His “Flamenco Trilogy” – Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding, 1981), Carmen (1983) and El amor brujo (Love, the Magician, 1986) – remains the most acclaimed and influential work of this period. Continuing to make films into his late eighties, and returning to documentary for the last phase of his career, Saura completed over 40 features before his death in 2023 and remains one of the key Spanish filmmakers.
THE FILM
Carlos
Saura’s Cría cuervos (1976) has long been seen as a film made in the
shadow of both the final days of the Franco regime in Spain and Víctor Erice’s
similarly themed companion piece, the widely celebrated El espíritu de la
colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973). It shares a lead actor
with Erice’s film – the extraordinary Ana Torrent, in both cases playing
eponymously named child characters – as well as its editor, Pablo G. del Amo,
and highly sympathetic creative producer, Elias Querejeta (a long-term
collaborator with Saura between 1966’s The Hunt and the early 1980s).
Set at either end of Franco’s dictatorship, and contrasting a rural Castilian village with the wealthy suburban streets of Madrid, the films are both worlds apart and deeply interconnected by their intimate, burnished portrayals of isolated and insular characters weighed down (largely unconsciously) by the oppression of a pervasive fascism. They share a somewhat opaque but deeply troubling portrait of an insular society haunted by the visons and internecine conflicts of the past. The two films are also preoccupied by the repression of women, the oppressiveness of church, family, patriarchy and state, the incestuous nature of a stunted society, the fantasies and imagination of children given free rein but haunted by the enveloping social climate and wounds of the past (and present), and the fascinating, matter-of-fact, but cloying presence of death. In Erice’s film, this final notion is most clearly embodied by the figure of Frankenstein’s monster visited upon the children by a travelling picture show, as well as the clandestine presence of a wounded Republican soldier. In Cría cuervos, death appears in many guises, engulfing and fuelling the imagination of the film’s central character. Ana gains agency and consciousness by her seeming ability to both administer death by poisoning her close relations (in fact, the poison is just bicarbonate soda, coincidentally given to her father just prior to his “natural” death) and summon her dead mother and father back into the world of the “living”. In Saura’s film, death is not an abstract notion or a final destination, but a porous boundary or crossing where the past continues to preoccupy and mingle with the present. The dead freely move between these realms, physically interacting with the living. At certain moments, Ana’s deceased mother will take over the combing of her hair from the housekeeper, Rosa, gently tell Ana to return to bed, or enter the children’s bedroom to readjust the covers, tell a familiar story or caress a sleeping child. Although we come to realise that these visions are inexpertly controlled by Ana, and not experienced by her two sisters, they seem to emerge naturally from a world in which time, space, place and the very possibility of progress seem to stand still. The repetitive and elongated nature of childhood temporality and the arrested development of a country and society pulled out of time and even a wider history by Franco’s stultifying regime and its cult of personality, stand side by side. Even the sudden appearance of Ana 20 years into the future and played by the same actor, Geraldine Chaplin, who appears elsewhere as her mother, is merely achieved by a casual pan of the camera. In other films we would expect this adult voice and perspective to frame the narrative – she speaks directly to camera and comments on what she may have been feeling and thinking 20 years before – but it first appears almost 20 minutes into the narrative and never takes priority or authority over other voices. In Cría cuervos, the future, the present and the past exist on a continuum, each open to corruption, invention and revision.
Many commentators have discussed the relationship between Saura’s film and the final days of Franco’s regime. The opening sequence details the death of Ana’s father, a clear if inexact symbol of Franco’s military regime, in the arms of his lover. As in much of the rest of the film, this event is experienced alongside and through Ana’s character as she first hears the gasps of his final moments and then gazes upon her father’s abandoned body after the hasty departure of his clandestine lover. The camera follows Ana as she attempts to make sense of what has happened, exploring her immediate environment in a way that deeply connects us to her emerging, inquisitive but contained consciousness. We are so immersed in Ana’s world and its sparse population by a series of closely-related characters – her sisters Irene and Maite, her grandmother, aunt, mother, father and housekeeper, Rosa – that it is a shock when we follow Ana down to the room where her father lies in state surrounded by an ominous coterie of uniformed military figures. But even in this moment, Ana shows her capacity for a kind of resistance and nascent individuality, refusing to kiss her dead father and seeking the protection of her ailing and mute grandmother in the corner of the room. Ana is mostly uncertain of her motivations and feelings, but they speak to an idiosyncratic emerging consciousness that partly separates her from her surroundings. Nevertheless, the meaning of many of Ana’s thoughts and actions remain ambiguous, speaking to both the censorship of the time – oblique visual symbols and metaphors became a necessary and core part of a progressive Spanish cinema in the 1960s and 1970s – and her own limited experience and perspective. Ana is not a revolutionary figure, but a child formed from and by her surroundings. Although she does express moments of deep emotion and loss – as when she cries out for her dead mother before verbally wounding her aunt after she arrives to comfort her – her character and experience are defined by the unreadable expression or mask that combines her wide eyes, thin mouth and pale skin. She is a witness to all that surrounds her.
Cría cuervos was shot in the summer of 1975. Franco had been in failing health for some time, and would die in November of that year, a couple of months before the film’s triumphant release in January 1976 (it was the sixth most popular film at the Spanish box office in that year and received commercial releases in many territories, including Australia). But it is also important to recognise and remember that there was significant uncertainty about what the dictator’s demise meant for Spain at the time and what would then happen in its wake. Cría cuervos speaks both directly and indirectly to this space, place and time, reflecting the surface changes already present in Spanish society – the glimpses we get of the outside world often highlight its bustling nature as well as the inroads of capitalism symbolised by the billboards that line the city streets, including the walls of the property that hem Ana, her sisters, aunt and grandmother in – and its deep sense of repression and stagnation. Ana and her sisters do embrace some of the symbols of this change – through the early 1970s pop record Ana insistently plays and that accompanies the film’s final moments as the sisters attend the first day of school following their becalming summer vacation; the images of American popular culture that adorn their bedroom walls and are cut by Irene from glossy magazines – but does this reflect a burgeoning freedom or just another repressive regime?
The film opens with a series of photographs of Ana and her family that establish the fluid temporality of the scenes that will follow. The fragmentation and varied composition of these posed images fuels Ana’s imagination and emphasises the co-presence of moments in time, but it also highlights the insistent pull of the past. This points to a history stuck in amber – a visual metaphor or reference also raised by the beehives in Erice’s film – one unable to adequately deal with and move on from the wounds and traumas of the past. Cría cuervos is also a conscious attempt to reflect on this legacy and its particular impact on the freedom of women. It was the first film completed by Saura after his long-term collaboration with screenwriter Rafael Azcona and contains a considerably more sympathetic and nuanced account of female experience than in his earlier films. It is also the first of a series of Saura’s films that become more circumspect and intimate in their core concerns. Although Saura would go on to make further critically acclaimed films, including Elisa, vida mía (Elisa, My Life, 1977) and a series of works celebrating the musical and dance traditions of Spain, including Blood Wedding and Carmen, Cría cuervos now stands as his most complete, searching and fully realised film. It is a rightful and fascinating companion piece to The Spirit of the Beehive.
Set at either end of Franco’s dictatorship, and contrasting a rural Castilian village with the wealthy suburban streets of Madrid, the films are both worlds apart and deeply interconnected by their intimate, burnished portrayals of isolated and insular characters weighed down (largely unconsciously) by the oppression of a pervasive fascism. They share a somewhat opaque but deeply troubling portrait of an insular society haunted by the visons and internecine conflicts of the past. The two films are also preoccupied by the repression of women, the oppressiveness of church, family, patriarchy and state, the incestuous nature of a stunted society, the fantasies and imagination of children given free rein but haunted by the enveloping social climate and wounds of the past (and present), and the fascinating, matter-of-fact, but cloying presence of death. In Erice’s film, this final notion is most clearly embodied by the figure of Frankenstein’s monster visited upon the children by a travelling picture show, as well as the clandestine presence of a wounded Republican soldier. In Cría cuervos, death appears in many guises, engulfing and fuelling the imagination of the film’s central character. Ana gains agency and consciousness by her seeming ability to both administer death by poisoning her close relations (in fact, the poison is just bicarbonate soda, coincidentally given to her father just prior to his “natural” death) and summon her dead mother and father back into the world of the “living”. In Saura’s film, death is not an abstract notion or a final destination, but a porous boundary or crossing where the past continues to preoccupy and mingle with the present. The dead freely move between these realms, physically interacting with the living. At certain moments, Ana’s deceased mother will take over the combing of her hair from the housekeeper, Rosa, gently tell Ana to return to bed, or enter the children’s bedroom to readjust the covers, tell a familiar story or caress a sleeping child. Although we come to realise that these visions are inexpertly controlled by Ana, and not experienced by her two sisters, they seem to emerge naturally from a world in which time, space, place and the very possibility of progress seem to stand still. The repetitive and elongated nature of childhood temporality and the arrested development of a country and society pulled out of time and even a wider history by Franco’s stultifying regime and its cult of personality, stand side by side. Even the sudden appearance of Ana 20 years into the future and played by the same actor, Geraldine Chaplin, who appears elsewhere as her mother, is merely achieved by a casual pan of the camera. In other films we would expect this adult voice and perspective to frame the narrative – she speaks directly to camera and comments on what she may have been feeling and thinking 20 years before – but it first appears almost 20 minutes into the narrative and never takes priority or authority over other voices. In Cría cuervos, the future, the present and the past exist on a continuum, each open to corruption, invention and revision.
Many commentators have discussed the relationship between Saura’s film and the final days of Franco’s regime. The opening sequence details the death of Ana’s father, a clear if inexact symbol of Franco’s military regime, in the arms of his lover. As in much of the rest of the film, this event is experienced alongside and through Ana’s character as she first hears the gasps of his final moments and then gazes upon her father’s abandoned body after the hasty departure of his clandestine lover. The camera follows Ana as she attempts to make sense of what has happened, exploring her immediate environment in a way that deeply connects us to her emerging, inquisitive but contained consciousness. We are so immersed in Ana’s world and its sparse population by a series of closely-related characters – her sisters Irene and Maite, her grandmother, aunt, mother, father and housekeeper, Rosa – that it is a shock when we follow Ana down to the room where her father lies in state surrounded by an ominous coterie of uniformed military figures. But even in this moment, Ana shows her capacity for a kind of resistance and nascent individuality, refusing to kiss her dead father and seeking the protection of her ailing and mute grandmother in the corner of the room. Ana is mostly uncertain of her motivations and feelings, but they speak to an idiosyncratic emerging consciousness that partly separates her from her surroundings. Nevertheless, the meaning of many of Ana’s thoughts and actions remain ambiguous, speaking to both the censorship of the time – oblique visual symbols and metaphors became a necessary and core part of a progressive Spanish cinema in the 1960s and 1970s – and her own limited experience and perspective. Ana is not a revolutionary figure, but a child formed from and by her surroundings. Although she does express moments of deep emotion and loss – as when she cries out for her dead mother before verbally wounding her aunt after she arrives to comfort her – her character and experience are defined by the unreadable expression or mask that combines her wide eyes, thin mouth and pale skin. She is a witness to all that surrounds her.
Cría cuervos was shot in the summer of 1975. Franco had been in failing health for some time, and would die in November of that year, a couple of months before the film’s triumphant release in January 1976 (it was the sixth most popular film at the Spanish box office in that year and received commercial releases in many territories, including Australia). But it is also important to recognise and remember that there was significant uncertainty about what the dictator’s demise meant for Spain at the time and what would then happen in its wake. Cría cuervos speaks both directly and indirectly to this space, place and time, reflecting the surface changes already present in Spanish society – the glimpses we get of the outside world often highlight its bustling nature as well as the inroads of capitalism symbolised by the billboards that line the city streets, including the walls of the property that hem Ana, her sisters, aunt and grandmother in – and its deep sense of repression and stagnation. Ana and her sisters do embrace some of the symbols of this change – through the early 1970s pop record Ana insistently plays and that accompanies the film’s final moments as the sisters attend the first day of school following their becalming summer vacation; the images of American popular culture that adorn their bedroom walls and are cut by Irene from glossy magazines – but does this reflect a burgeoning freedom or just another repressive regime?
The film opens with a series of photographs of Ana and her family that establish the fluid temporality of the scenes that will follow. The fragmentation and varied composition of these posed images fuels Ana’s imagination and emphasises the co-presence of moments in time, but it also highlights the insistent pull of the past. This points to a history stuck in amber – a visual metaphor or reference also raised by the beehives in Erice’s film – one unable to adequately deal with and move on from the wounds and traumas of the past. Cría cuervos is also a conscious attempt to reflect on this legacy and its particular impact on the freedom of women. It was the first film completed by Saura after his long-term collaboration with screenwriter Rafael Azcona and contains a considerably more sympathetic and nuanced account of female experience than in his earlier films. It is also the first of a series of Saura’s films that become more circumspect and intimate in their core concerns. Although Saura would go on to make further critically acclaimed films, including Elisa, vida mía (Elisa, My Life, 1977) and a series of works celebrating the musical and dance traditions of Spain, including Blood Wedding and Carmen, Cría cuervos now stands as his most complete, searching and fully realised film. It is a rightful and fascinating companion piece to The Spirit of the Beehive.
THE RESTORATION
Source: DCP Mercury Films, Spain
The film was restored using an HD digital transfer. Improved English subtitles.
Director: Carlos Saura; Production Company: Elias Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas; Producer: Elias Querejeta; Script: Carlos Saura; Photography: Teo Escamilla; Editor: Pablo Gonzalez del Amo; Set Decoration: Rafael Palmero; Costume design: Maiki Marin; Music: Federico Mompou, ‘Porche Te Vas’ sung by Jeannette.
Cast: Ana Torrent (Ana as a child), Conchita Pérez (Irene), Mayte Sanchez (Maite), Geraldine Chaplin (Maria/Ana), Monica Randall (Paulina), Florinda Chico (Rosa), Hector Alterio (Anselmo).
Spain | 1976 | 107 Mins | 2K DCP | Colour | Spanish with English subtitles | M
The film was restored using an HD digital transfer. Improved English subtitles.
Director: Carlos Saura; Production Company: Elias Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas; Producer: Elias Querejeta; Script: Carlos Saura; Photography: Teo Escamilla; Editor: Pablo Gonzalez del Amo; Set Decoration: Rafael Palmero; Costume design: Maiki Marin; Music: Federico Mompou, ‘Porche Te Vas’ sung by Jeannette.
Cast: Ana Torrent (Ana as a child), Conchita Pérez (Irene), Mayte Sanchez (Maite), Geraldine Chaplin (Maria/Ana), Monica Randall (Paulina), Florinda Chico (Rosa), Hector Alterio (Anselmo).
Spain | 1976 | 107 Mins | 2K DCP | Colour | Spanish with English subtitles | M