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.