Cinema Beyond Cinema: The Craft of Carlos Saura
Watching Carlos Saura’s Tango, my mind kept
drifting back to an Indian pioneer who was never quite known as a “filmmaker”
in the conventional sense. He was Uday Shankar, the legendary maestro of Indian
classical dance. In 1948, at a time when Indian cinema was still in its
adolescence, Uday Shankar created Kalpana—a film that, in many ways,
marked the coming of age of this young industry. His work was nothing short of
revolutionary, for it dared to experiment with the audio-visual medium in ways
unheard of during those years. When Indian screens were dominated by
melodramatic sagas and mythological retellings, Shankar re-imagined cinema as a
stage for dance, for imagination, for protest. In Kalpana, crafted as a
dance-drama yet embodied in cinematic form, he overturned the grammar of
popular film. Watching Tango, I was struck again and again by the
uncanny resonance between Shankar’s Kalpana and Saura’s film—the shared
language, the similar intensity of perception. How far, after all, is the
language of cinema from the vocabulary of dance? Dance is nothing but the
articulation of the human body in motion, embodying the very essence of art.
And cinema, woven of light and sound, is a joint perception, a shared dream.
The distance between the two is perhaps no more than the space that separates
living vision from its projection on the screen.
Whenever humanity encounters catastrophe, a strange transformation occurs—objects and human beings begin to mirror each other. That is why both Uday Shankar and Carlos Saura chose to channel the ruins of humanity through dance translated into cinematic idioms. When Kalpana was created, India was stumbling through the chaos of its new freedom: famine, hunger, political repression, moral corruption. Humanity itself seemed fractured. Uday Shankar staged this crisis through his art. His protagonist, moving from one closed chamber to another, steps into a world without ground beneath his feet—plunging into the inferno of corruption and tyranny. Through the sheer magic of Indian dance, Shankar etched this fall of man with unforgettable force.
Carlos Saura, decades later, sought a similar artistic purpose. Spain’s greatest wound was the Spanish Civil War—a tragedy immortalized in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. In 1998, nearly forty years after the war’s end, Saura returned to that dark memory. And astonishingly, he too chose dance as his language, painting the canvas with music and color. Two nations, two cultures, two centuries apart—yet both directors converged in the same intuition: that dance could carry the unbearable weight of history.
For only an artist knows how daunting it is to transpose one art form into another. Watching Tango, one feels the audacity of such unveiling. Through the solitude, love, heartbreak, and creative visions of a dance instructor, Saura makes the audience shiver in the cold silence of the theatre. Life itself unfolds in the rhythm of Spain’s most passionate dance. As long as the film lingers in the realm of personal feeling, it remains intimate. But then, as great art must, Saura lets it expand. The dancer Mario’s private life spills onto the stage, his movements growing into the collective cry of a nation—the Civil War, the brutality of man against man, the cries of despair. From individual anguish rises universal pain. The personal dissolves into the historical. For in truth, human history is but the accumulation of countless individual desires, fears, and contradictions. Each personal lifetime becomes an index for the society it belongs to. Saura’s art, again and again, enacts this realization—history and consciousness blending into one.
Saura’s medium was new, because Tango is not “pure cinema” in the orthodox sense. It is rather a quadrangle, a fifth medium born of cinema fused with music, dance, and painting.
By fortune, I later encountered Saura’s most recent film, Goya. Francisco Goya, Spain’s immortal painter, was once court artist to King Charles IV. A mysterious illness left him deaf, but from that silence came his most radical transformation. Close to the Spanish aristocracy, intimate with the Duchess of Alba (his model for the famed Clothed Maja), Goya witnessed from within the rot of monarchy. When the Duchess was murdered and court intrigues spiraled into bloodshed, Goya was banished. Across Spain, political chaos reigned. In exile at Bordeaux, he narrated this darkened history to his daughter Rosario, recording through his canvases the nightmare of a ruined age.
An artist’s inner vision finds form in his art, laying bare the diseased soul of his time. Goya’s followers would often ask, “Why are your works always filled with sorrow?” His answer was disarming: “Because my life has shown me only the cries of suffering humanity.” He could not paint in daylight—pain revealed its colors only in the night. Sleepless, haunted by nightmares, he would rise with brush in hand, and craft epics of despair.
Saura’s choice of subject is extraordinary. In both Tango and Goya, he masterfully intertwines the individual with the collective. He transforms the private agony of one human being into the testimony of a whole society. His protagonists are deeply enmeshed in the structures of their times, reflecting and evaluating them. Rarely has cinema witnessed such immersion in the collective consciousness. Saura, therefore, does not merely tell stories. He builds unforgettable visions where the solitary flame of personal grief becomes the blazing torch of history itself.
Whenever humanity encounters catastrophe, a strange transformation occurs—objects and human beings begin to mirror each other. That is why both Uday Shankar and Carlos Saura chose to channel the ruins of humanity through dance translated into cinematic idioms. When Kalpana was created, India was stumbling through the chaos of its new freedom: famine, hunger, political repression, moral corruption. Humanity itself seemed fractured. Uday Shankar staged this crisis through his art. His protagonist, moving from one closed chamber to another, steps into a world without ground beneath his feet—plunging into the inferno of corruption and tyranny. Through the sheer magic of Indian dance, Shankar etched this fall of man with unforgettable force.
Carlos Saura, decades later, sought a similar artistic purpose. Spain’s greatest wound was the Spanish Civil War—a tragedy immortalized in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. In 1998, nearly forty years after the war’s end, Saura returned to that dark memory. And astonishingly, he too chose dance as his language, painting the canvas with music and color. Two nations, two cultures, two centuries apart—yet both directors converged in the same intuition: that dance could carry the unbearable weight of history.
For only an artist knows how daunting it is to transpose one art form into another. Watching Tango, one feels the audacity of such unveiling. Through the solitude, love, heartbreak, and creative visions of a dance instructor, Saura makes the audience shiver in the cold silence of the theatre. Life itself unfolds in the rhythm of Spain’s most passionate dance. As long as the film lingers in the realm of personal feeling, it remains intimate. But then, as great art must, Saura lets it expand. The dancer Mario’s private life spills onto the stage, his movements growing into the collective cry of a nation—the Civil War, the brutality of man against man, the cries of despair. From individual anguish rises universal pain. The personal dissolves into the historical. For in truth, human history is but the accumulation of countless individual desires, fears, and contradictions. Each personal lifetime becomes an index for the society it belongs to. Saura’s art, again and again, enacts this realization—history and consciousness blending into one.
Saura’s medium was new, because Tango is not “pure cinema” in the orthodox sense. It is rather a quadrangle, a fifth medium born of cinema fused with music, dance, and painting.
By fortune, I later encountered Saura’s most recent film, Goya. Francisco Goya, Spain’s immortal painter, was once court artist to King Charles IV. A mysterious illness left him deaf, but from that silence came his most radical transformation. Close to the Spanish aristocracy, intimate with the Duchess of Alba (his model for the famed Clothed Maja), Goya witnessed from within the rot of monarchy. When the Duchess was murdered and court intrigues spiraled into bloodshed, Goya was banished. Across Spain, political chaos reigned. In exile at Bordeaux, he narrated this darkened history to his daughter Rosario, recording through his canvases the nightmare of a ruined age.
An artist’s inner vision finds form in his art, laying bare the diseased soul of his time. Goya’s followers would often ask, “Why are your works always filled with sorrow?” His answer was disarming: “Because my life has shown me only the cries of suffering humanity.” He could not paint in daylight—pain revealed its colors only in the night. Sleepless, haunted by nightmares, he would rise with brush in hand, and craft epics of despair.
Saura’s choice of subject is extraordinary. In both Tango and Goya, he masterfully intertwines the individual with the collective. He transforms the private agony of one human being into the testimony of a whole society. His protagonists are deeply enmeshed in the structures of their times, reflecting and evaluating them. Rarely has cinema witnessed such immersion in the collective consciousness. Saura, therefore, does not merely tell stories. He builds unforgettable visions where the solitary flame of personal grief becomes the blazing torch of history itself.
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