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A Privileged Observer
Spanish director Carlos Saura weaves his highly stylized filmmaking with the mournful, evocative Portuguese song to create Fados, opening March 6 in New York.

By Lewis Beale
March 2009

Fados movie trailer

Saura's films, with links to clips
Director Carlos Saura remembers growing up in Spain in the 1940s and listening to the mournful, evocative Portuguese song style known as the fado. Years later, after attaining international success as a director, Saura returned to the music he had loved as a young man. He found, he says, that “what I remembered and loved had gradually been evolving in a spectacular manner.”

The result is Fados, opening March 6 in New York.

“Fados is a film about the power of the music of a people and a nation,” says the 77-year-old Saura. The film tries “to expand the world [of the fado] by seeking its origins, and particularly its relationship with Brazil and Africa, in order to reveal the richness of Portuguese music in the Portuguese language.”

The subject matter of fados, he says, “deals especially with nostalgia, or saudade,” that very Portuguese sense of hope and yearning, says Saura about the tradition he considers “part of my musical culture.”

“We don't call the film Fado, but use the plural precisely because we want to show it not as an isolated form, but as deriving directly from society and its historical moment,” he says. To illustrate this plurality, the film features performances from a mix of world artists, from Mariza, a leading fado performer, to hip-hop artists SP and Wilson.

“In musical films like Fados, I can become a privileged observer. The narrator is the camera, whose eye observes, analyzes, and reveals a beauty that I provoke, but which others create."
—Carlos Saura
“It’s about the crying of the soul, being melancholic, …and losing yourself in love and drink as well,” says Mexican American singer Lila Downs, who appears in the movie. “The music is a metaphor for [the Portuguese] character.… It’s a tradition that we also have in Mexico in traditional ranchera songs, this sentiment of melancholy and solitude.”

Fados won a 2008 Goya Award—Spain’s equivalent of the Oscar—for best original song. It also earned Goya and European Film Award nominations, a Cinema Writers Circle Award for best documentary, and a Cinema Writers Circle nomination for best cinematography.

The industry acclaim echoes those for Saura’s earlier musicals. Since 1981, when he shot his first dance film, Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding), Saura has been recognized for the masterful way he combines visuals, music, and dance—specifically flamenco and tango. But his career actually stretches back much further, into the repressive Franco era, when he first gained global attention with allusive, metaphorical works like La caza (The Hunt) (1966) and Ana y los lobos (Ana and the Wolves) (1973).

Carlos Saura's Official Website

"Saura was the figurehead of the new Spanish cinema that emerged in the 1960s,” says Richard Peña, program director for New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center. “The films were full of metaphors and symbols, a cinema that had a very dense textuality to it… A film like La caza, on the surface it’s about four friends who go hunting, but it’s very much about the victors in the Spanish Civil War. It invites the audience to do a reading in that way, and that’s how Saura and others worked.”

Yet despite Saura’s success during this period—which included prizes at the Cannes and Berlin International film festivals—when Franco died in 1975 and Spain began becoming a democracy, “that kind of guarded, dense, allusive narrative seemed old-fashioned,” says Peña.

The new political order freed Saura to explore Spanish idiosyncrasy through a new lens: his music films have raised his artistry to a new level—he received two of his three Oscar nominations for his musicals—as he has continued to experiment with cinematography, sound, staging, and sets that often involve transparent screens that can be lit to create interesting effects.

“The idea,” says Saura, “was to create a harmonious visual, musical, and choreographic entity… The origin was Zen influence, from Japanese culture, which seduced me.”

And that started a trend, says Peña: “Nowadays you get people filming dance like Saura. They see it as a complete environmental product in terms of color and space… It’s the intelligence of his approach that marks his work. His dance films are conceived as a total product.”

In Fados, for example, a series of singers and dancers performs in a number of specifically designed settings, ranging from the realistic—a humble tavern—to the almost phantasmagorical, in which vivid colors, mirrors, and camera movement create a startling effect.

“Ever since Sevillanas,” says Saura, referring to his 1992 film, “there’s been an evolution in these plotless musicals where for the first time I used plasticized metal frames which can be lit from either side, the idea being to isolate the artists from any context that might distract from the most important of their actions.”

Saura continues to make dramatic as well as musical films. Io, Don Giovanni, currently in post-production, tells the story of Lorenzo da Ponte, the Italian lyricist who collaborated with Mozart on his opera Don Giovanni. But the director seems most delighted by the challenge of his musical works.

“In musical films like Fados, I can become a privileged observer,” he says. The narrator is the camera, whose eye observes, analyzes, and reveals a beauty that I provoke, but which others create…

“Portugal is now undergoing a musical ‘revolution’ which is being perceived throughout the world. With Fados, we’ve tried to leave this on record.”

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