ON MORE than one occasion Carlos Saura declared that if he stopped working, he would die, and when death eventually struck, there he was at work. 

On February 10 2023, Carlos Saura, one of the key figures of Spanish cinema, passed away. He had just released a documentary film (Las Paredes Hablan, “Walls Can Talk”), signed the stage direction of a play about the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (Lorca por Saura) and was trying to set up a long-awaited film project about Picasso.

Born in Huesca, northern Spain, in 1932 he was a scriptwriter, novelist, filmmaker, photographer and painter; a man who lived in an unstoppable creative torrent.

Saura is the author of at least half a dozen milestones of Spanish cinema in the second half of the 20th century. La Caza (The Hunt, 1966), Peppermint Frappe (1967), La Prima Angelica (Cousin Angelica, 1973), Cria cuervos (Raise Ravens, 1975), or Carmen (1983), are essential viewing for students and film historians as well as embedded in the memory of many spectators.

And at the same time his enormous oeuvre as a photographer and painter, which has yet to be evaluated in its entirety, marks him out as one of the most brilliant and prolific image-creators in Spain.

All in all, Saura will be remembered first and foremost for his position as the author whose genius defied Franco.

His film-making falls into two periods. 

In the first, working with the producer Elias Querejeta in the circuits devoted to auteur (or art-house) cinema, his films were associated with opposition to Franco opposition and found great success.

The second, which began after the transition and saw him leave the “Querejeta factory”, allowed him to broaden his interests as a film-maker, trying out new genres, narrative approaches and aesthetic strategies. In general, despite such masterpieces as Deprisa, Deprisa (Hurry, Hurry 1980), Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding 1981), La noche oscura (The Dark Night 1989), Flamenco (1995) or Iberia (2005), his work was not received with the same acclaim as previously. 

Scholars such as Manuel Palacio or Agustin Sanchez Vidal attribute this to Saura’s reputation in the 1960s as the prime exponent of an anti-Franco discourse. With the establishment of the new democratic order, Spanish critics turned away from a director who nevertheless, during the 1980s, experienced the period of his greatest international success.

After Bunuel’s death and before Almodovar’s breakthrough with Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1988), Carlos Saura was Spain’s cinematic ambassador.

For a time, the Spain of the late Francoism could be best imagined via the allegorical and mysterious cinema that Saura created; whether the naturalistic images of Hurry Hurry or the stripped down and self-conscious musical films with the dancer Antonio Gades. 

These were works that brought him a singular international success when in Spain critics and audiences turned their backs on his films, with the singular exception of ¡Ay, Carmela! (1990).

To this day, Saura is the Spanish film-maker who has won the most awards at the top festivals (Cannes, Berlin and Venice) and has received the most recognition from foreign institutions.

This probably led to him being the film-maker chosen to shoot prestigious commissions such as Sevillanas (1992), for the Universal Exhibition in Seville in 1992, or Marathon (1992), the official film of the Barcelona Olympic Games, also in 1992. His fame as an official Spanish translator even enabled him to shoot an exotic spot for the French soft drink Orangina.

This same fame undoubtedly led him to delve into the genre of musicals “with an accent” that he made until the end of his career, which included explorations of flamenco, jota, sevillana, Mexican corrido, tango and northern folklore from Argentina, and Portuguese fado.

These films helped him to develop an unusual and increasingly refined inter-disciplinary dialogue, to revisit and reformulate a series of Ibero-American imaginaries associated with popular culture and folklore and, finally, to redefine his own image as a filmmaker associated with what it means to be “Spanish”.

With Saura, the last trace of one of the most important generations in the evolution of Spanish cinema disappears. 

He was both a student and later a teacher at the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematograficas (IIEC, later known as the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografia). 

He also took part in the Salamanca talks, a conference organised in 1955 between different personalities from the Spanish film world to discuss the future of Spanish cinema after the civil war. Saura belonged to the generation that fought to change the face of an industry that was subjected to the dictates of the Franco regime.

Considered a member, along with Mario Camus, Julio Diamante, Basilio Martín Patino and Miguel Picazo, of the so-called New Spanish Cinema, Saura made a place for himself among the most outstanding film-makers of the European new waves. Although he paid the price of censorship in Spain, not to mention the cynical use of his films as a form of external legitimisation for the dictatorship, he became a point of reference for cinephilia worldwide. 

In addition to all that, Saura also forms part of the pantheon of European film-makers who  worked tenaciously and rethought their work until their last day. In a recent colloquium on his work held at the Cervantes Institute in Paris, he refused to be called a “classic”, as to him that implied becoming petrified and, in short, stopping.

In this sense, Saura has always managed, in his perpetual self-renewal, to remain faithful to an idea of modernity that animated other great names such as Agnes Varda, Karel Vachek, Marco Bellocchio or Costa-Gavras, and who built the evolving language of the best European cinema.

Gabriel Domenech Gonzalez is profesor ayudante especifico at the Departamento de Comunicacion, Facultad de Humanidades, Comunicacion y Documentacion (UC3M) of the Universidad Carlos III. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. 

--><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199837/count.gif?distributor..." alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important" referrerpolicy="no-referrer-when-downgrade" /><!-- End of code. If you don't see any code above, please get new code from the Advanced tab after you click the republish button. The page counter does not collect any personal data. More info: https://theconversation.com/republishing-guidelines --></p>