The Impotence Of Being Un-Earnest

By the year 1963, the so-called British New Wave was recognized, accepted and praised by critics and audiences not only inside the country but also beyond. Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, John Schlesinger and their counterparts have found themselves well-established directors with international awards, not the rebels they had used to be. It was time for them to sum things up, to look back - in anger or not, - and to reinvent themselves.

Schlesinger's Billy Liar, despite sharing many traits with and exploiting many staples of the already canonized social realist classics, was a change of game in comparison with earlier kitchen sink films (including Schlesinger's own cut-and-dry debut, A Kind Of Loving). For one thing, Billy Liar is a comedy - most New Wave films before 1963 had been bleak dramas. Secondly, it incorporated some new techniques borrowed from the French. And, last but not least, it was less a social drama than a character study - at the same time picking on the change of the social environment that was partly provoked by the young angry men themselves.

Urban reconstruction was a popular metaphor
for the 1960s' social change

As for the the genre - or should I say the tone, for it's not a pure comedy, - Billy Liar was an early example of the shift expirienced by the New Wave. The same year saw releases of Basil Dearden's unusually light-hearted A Place To Go and Tony Richardson's period extravaganza Tom Jones, a quite unexpected follow-up to his The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner. In the following few years more would emerge - most notably, The Knack And How To Get It, The Beatles vehicle A Hard Day's Night (both directed by Richard Lester), and Alfie with Michael Caine. Billy Liar, however, is by no means a crowd-pleasing unproblematic kind of comedy; it is, as I've stated above, hardly even a comedy at all. For a comedy, it's too bitter, its ending too unhappy. Satire would be a more precise word - or tragicomedy, which often comes in hand. Schlesinger's film is almost as angry as Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, and almost as desperate as The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner. Almost, but not quite.

That latter title is especially interesting to draw parallels with - along with less known Private Porter, Richardson's masterpiece was the film that made Tom Courtenay, the star of Billy Liar, famous. Courtenay's performance in The Loneliness is emblematic for the whole movement of the young-and-angry - an angular, grim, not so bright young man, deprivated of any hope in a northern working class milieu. Unlike the characters of the above-mentioned Dearden's film, he doesn't have a place to go and never will. He spends all the film running but his run is bound to nowhere. Unempolyment office or prison - these are the only options he has.

Julie Christie as Liz, a breath of fresh air in the
town's suffocative environment

Courtenay's character in Billy Liar is very different. He is a white collar, working as a clerk in an undertaker's office, has artistic ambitions (in word rather than in deed, but still), and unlike The Loneliness' Colin he is a charismatic and cheerful lad. Billy's face is never straight, he bubbles over with mops and mows - and, being a compulsive liar, he's armed with a vivid imagination full of tall tales. Yet Billy's destiny is the same as that of Colin - he is doomed to end his days in the drab Northern town of his. The difference is, Billy chooses his fate himself - while in The Loneliness' world the mere idea of escape was impossible to conceive, Schlesinger's film assumes the feasibility of liberation, beautifully embodied by Julie Christie's Liz. Her first appearance onscreen is one of the most memorable moments in the film. For this rapidly edited scene Schlesinger adopts cinéma vérité technique - Liz is shot from a distance with no audible dialogue as she is walking around the town, seemingly aimless. While Schlesinger's style is overall influenced by the more famed New Wave from the other side of the Channel, this short sequence looks almost exactly like a hidden camera footage from a Godard movie. Liz doesn't belong here, hence the strikingly odd imagery that presages Richard Lester's portrayal of the Swinging London. Indeed, London is where she came from and where she wants Billy to go. Billy, a twentieth century's male edition of Madame Bovary, won't do that; he will go on living in his drab town as a perpetual wannabe, finding comfort in pipe dreams and reverie, impotent of anything. Even of getting laid despite being a womanizer and having three dates at the same time (there's a hint that Billy's still a virgin). His occupation as a coffin seller foretells his future; or, rather, lack of any.

Billy's job gives a handle to a couple of black jokes -
this scene shows him trying to seduce his girlfriend
amid the phallic gravestones

Schlesinger doesn't negate the social oppression coming from multiple levels of authority (even if he wanted to, his options were limited for Billy is an adaptation). Family, two bosses, and the whole social order of the town - no wonder that Billy constantly daydreams of being significant and in charge. He often fantasizes of being a military officer, or even warlord, enduing himself with symbols of ultimate masculine power - shoulder loops, peaked cap and phallic guns. There're even two imaginary killings of his primary antagonists, the father and the office superior. Billy's of course not a lunatic who can't tell reality from fantasy; cuts from the former to the latter are always abrupt - until the final sequence where the real transits to the imaginary in a cotinuous shot. Now they're one, and that is the end for our lad.

It's interesting to note that daydreaming is the mode of perception closely linked to cinema. Christian Metz in The Imaginary Signifier argues that there is more of a reverie than of a sleep in film watching - both are special modes of wakeful state; in particular, both assume staying awake but inactive. Yet I wouldn't go as far as claiming that Billy Liar is a metaphor of cinema as a mean of escape and, subsequently, source of indecision - although that would be a good explanation of the film's peculiar format: it's shot in Cinemascope just like an escapist genre flick, only it's monochrome, lacking the James Bond's rave of Technicolor. You can invent your own wide-screen country but you will still live in a black-and-white world. Unfortunately, in Billy Liar nobody goes to or talks about movies so that hypothesis would be a stretch of interpretation.

Tom Courtenay giving up: the last shots of
The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner (above),
and Billy Liar

However, Billy Liar certainly adds one reason for the despair and anger of the youth - the oppression is not only external but also internal to one's personality. A character study comes to the fore. Again, let's remember The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, the ending of which resembles that of Billy. Courtenay's Colin in the Richardson's picture also gives up in the end - he stops before the finishing line of the race organized in prison, letting his competitor finish first and throwing away the possibility of being reformed into a decent member of society, for conforming a rotten society doesn't worth a damn. Billy, in turn, backtracks from the railway station simply because he doesn't feel like running off. Billy Liar is more inclined to the literary tradition of a psychological novel - its protagonist could find a character very akin to himself in the classical Russian novel Oblomov.

Social issues take second billing, and in contrast to the hopelessness of Billy's situation they are handled with a certain cautious optimism. The social landscape is changing, visualized by the urban development - new buildings being constructed and old ones torn down everywhere in town. A common metaphor in the Sixties - Basil Dearden, for instance, used it twice, in both A Place To Go and Victim where the first scene is set on a construction site. And there's Liz, an embodiment of hope for a change. In Darling, Schlesinger's follow-up to Billy Liar, we learn what's come out of her life in London - the very same Julie Christie stars as a fashion model at the middle of the capital's vibrant life. For Schlesinger, that film marked even further breakaway with social realist tradition and developing his Bildungsroman ambition, tied with Fellini's Dolce Vita's influence. However, Christie's Diane in Darling ended up being as desperate as many New Wave characters before her. But that is another story.

Nevermore

The older one gets, the more one tends to succumb to that nostalgic idea of the personal golden age one presumably expiriences during the childhood. It is quite understandable how this self-deceptive image is developed in the machinery of mind - memory is selective, and as time goes by our actual memories make way for those invented by ourselves. The first, but not the only thing that makes Carlos Saura's Raise Ravens great is that it eschews the commonplace sentimentalizing on the time of joy and innocence.

Split subject: Ana looks at herself

The story's protagonist is a nine year old called Ana (Ana Torrent, also known for Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive and Jaime Armiñan's The Nest), and she's anything but a Little Miss Sunshine. For this sensitive girl childhood is the time of total dependence, deprivation of freedom, and fear - and is it really something special? When you're a child you must do whatever the parents tell you, anything unknown is a potential source of a danger (in terms of psychoanalisis, anything unsymbolized can cause a trauma, and there're many such things in a child's world); and everything is so bigger than you are. Saura with an assistance of Teo Escamilla (his permanent DoP) and production designer Rafael Palmero does a great job of sustaining the child's point of view throughout the film with low camera angles and elaborate organization of space - the enormous labyrinthine house where Ana and her sisters live. Ana's world is split in two, the real one and the imaginary; there is a moment of pure cinematic magic when we literally see two Anas. From the fenced garden the girl looks at the roof of a neighboring house - and sees herself jumping down.

Ana is an orphan and has to deal with loss of parents. Her mother Maria (Geraldine Chaplin, Saura's longtime collaborator and then-wife) died first - Ana saw her suffering in agony. Shortly after passed the father, and since then the three sisters has been guarded by Maria's sister Paulina. The mother and father are seen only in flashbacks and Ana's daydreams, and from these sequences we learn that Ana feels very differently about the two.

The father (Héctor Alterio) is a dominant military officer, abusive towards his wife and seemingly indifferent towards the three daughters. An embodiment of patriarchy and machismo, he is a counterpart of Luis Buñuel's male characters, typically tyrannical and obsessed with their masculinity. The father's ill-treatment of Maria leads Ana to believe that he's directly responsible for her mother's death, and to hate him. In the very first scene of the movie Ana witnesses a sexual intercourse between the father and his lover - an echo of the Freudian primal scene where a child sees his or her parents having sex and perceives this as a violent act of establishing the father's authority. The association evokes the memory of Ana's mother and the latter appears onscreen for the first time (not until the next sequence we'll learn that it's only a fantasy or hallucination). This night the father dies - poisoned by Ana as the girl herself is convinced.

The mother, on the other hand, is the parent Ana's bound to and moreover, strongly identifies with, which accounts for her hate towards the father. We see the girl pretending to breastfeed a doll, and when the sisters play house she is the mother (note how the children apply their age hierarchy to that of the family: the eldest sister plays the father while the youngest is Rosa the chambermaid). In her daydreaming Ana recalls the tender moments between the mother and herself. In one scene we see a replica of the famous shot from Bergman's Persona - Geraldine Chaplin is caressing Ana Torrent's hair in front of a mirror. Later in the movie Ana and her mother will amalgamate into one just like Persona's Liv Ulmann and Bibi Andersson - the adult Ana, who is the narrator, appears onscreen and we see that she and Maria look exactly alike.

The little heroine is afraid to share the destiny of her mother who sacrificed her career in music for the sake of her husband. Ana is resistant to every manifestation of the traumatizing male dominance - at certain point she even claims she will never wear a bra (to the elder sister's surprise); when she learns about the affair aunt Paulina has with the father's friend - who also happens to be an army man - Ana wants her guardian dead.

The fact that there're only two male characters in Raise Ravens and both of them are military officers is, of course, not a coincidence. The androcentric hierarchy of Ana's family parallels the patriarchal system of Spain under generalissimo Francisco Franco, an autocratic father figure for the whole society (like many dictators do, Franco even adopted a paternal nickname - caudillo, Spanish for chieftain). The dictator is of course represented within a film by Ana's father. The eerie funeral sequence - candlelights, silent whispering, shadowed faces - is a depiction of something Spain itself experienced two months before Raise Ravens was released, when Franco passed. Death of a fatherly dictator is always a shock, even for those who hated him - a phenomenon well-known from memoirs of people who witnessed Stalin's death in the Soviet Union. That said, it is still a relieving disposal from suppression, and Ana demonstrates her attittude by refusing to kiss the deseased; Saura does something quite similar, having overriden the ancient formula "de mortuis aut bene aut nihil." Franco/the father wouldn't have had anyone to blame but himself - it was him who raised those ravens.

Political allegory as a device of defamiliarization (and a mean to trick the censorship - although Franco's censors were not that harsh) was nothing new for Saura's work. In Raise Ravens, however, it is combined with another kind of estrangement - a  temporal distance constructed within the film. Saura had approached the theme of memory before - in El Jardín de las Delicias and La Prima Angélica - but only in the context of past events, especially the Civil War. Raise Ravens, in turn, is a memory of the present - set in the 1970s when the movie was actually made, yet designed as a rememberance. It's also the first Saura's picture to deal with a specific event contemporary to it, namely Franco's death - in fact, Saura's reaction even preceded the cause, and production began when the caudillo was still alive, though generally known to be terminally ill. Such topicality can easily lead to unnecessary present-dayness, making a film a subject to date rapidly; hence the memorial modality that allows to avoid those risks by building the narrative as it was of the events long gone (there's hope in it too - nevermore Franco will be back, he's history). One's own memories are never shocking by virtue of their nature - they're familiar to us, and our mind has a quality of coming to terms with most traumatic experiences - so instead of hysteria and agitation the intonation of Raise Ravens is calm - despite the dramatic events - and pensive. There is sadness and unchildish seroiusness in Ana Torrent's eyes, and some scenes are tantalizingly melancholic; most strikingly so is the dance to a sentimental pop hit Porque te vas.

Photography, the twentieth century's basic medium
for conservation of memory is a recurring motif in
Saura's work (see La Caza, Peppermint Frappé or
El Jardín de las Delicias for references)

So long as Raise Ravens is narrated from twenty years after, it is not a political film but a historical one. Politics doesn't know past tense - pull it out from the present, and it's not politics anymore. When things like Franco's death happen we usually say that we're witnessing the big history, which is some kind of a paradox for the history is the past and cannot be witnessed, it can only be remembered or reconstructed - or constructed for that matter. Ana herself provides an example of how the past is reinvented when she makes up a story behind an old postcard on the wall. Maybe the whole story in Raise Ravens is invented by the adult Ana - to some extent it certainly is: history is never real, it is reality symbolized, framed and edited. But here's what is interesting about this unreliable narrator: provided that she's some twenty years older than the little Ana, she must be talking from the 1990s, yet she doesn't look like she is. Instead of limiting the narrator's presence to a voice-over, which would be quite enough for comprehensibility, Saura shows us her in the flesh, dressed in fashion of the 1970s and looking exactly like Maria, the Ana's mother. Ana/Maria is seemingly not beyond the film, a part of it - and yet she is from twenty years after. She's there and she's not. So is, in turn, the film, transforming the present into past in real time. And so is cinema itself - always chasing reality only to find that, when captured, it's not real anymore.