Cría cuervos; Carlos Saura

What do you consider to be the main themes of Cría
Cuervos?
T
he film was shot in 1975, before the death of Franco so it maintained
censorship, but on the other hand depicted transition in cinema, as I
language and is typical of the Franco Regime; repressive and fearful. In to
democracy terms of the film itself shall show how later with particular
references to Cría Cuervos.
To begin, the title has a somewhat symbolic meaning, it is a Spanish
proverb: “Cría Cuervos y te sacarán los ojos”, and it reflects the fascist use
of, I would say ‘Raise Ravens’ makes reference to Ana’s rebellious behaviour
against her Aunty Paulina, (who has to raise them) and calls the sisters by
‘crías’ literally meaning young creatures.
The film tells of a story of a woman looking back on how as a child,
she dealt with the deaths of her parents. In flashbacks the young girl Ana,
learns to cope through visions of her late mother. It also reflects the
changes in Spanish society; socially, politically and culturally since the late
1930’s until the verge of transition in 1975.
After the Civil War, a deep crisis fell in Spain and more complex social and
economic problems had to be faced, as we see at various stages during Cría
Cuervos.
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One of the themes in Cría Cuervos would be centred on the Civil War,
as most films towards the post-Franco era gave importance to the
background of a particular historical period, particularly the Civil War and the
first post-war decade of Francoism. We see on the wake the identity of Ana’s
father Anselmo as a military officer during the Second World War. The scene
where Ana is carrying her father’s pistol shows in retrospect the position her
father had held during the war, and the pistol was clearly symbolic for Ana
as it was a gift from her father. Anselmo fought for Nazi Germany on the
Russian Front as part of Spain’s volunteer División Azul, (Blue Division)
ironically in the film he is portrayed for his adultery rather than for his
fascism. Which aroused concern with censorship commissions over the
appearance of military officers in the story line and furthermore the fact that
one of them clearly engages in adultery.
Ana’s families in Cría Cuervos are from a traditional middle-class
background with set authoritarian values and hierarchies of power. This
order is seen empowered on the young Ana, Mayte and Irene by their Aunty
Pauline when she begins to raise them;
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“With
a
child’s
intuitive
understanding,
Ana
resists
Paulina,
who
perpetuates her father’s patriarchal code.’ For Ana, her Aunty was never a
substitute
1
2
for
their
mother
but
Kinder.M The Children of Franco P.95
Hopewell.J Out of the Past P.138
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for
Paulina
on
the
other
hand,
2
“communication of words were never based on affection but on hierarchies
of power” we recall her at the dinner table ‘Si todas nos enforzamos,
acabaremos por llevarnos bien, pero desde ahora el disorden tiene que
parrar’.. Instead of practising affection towards her own nieces she brings
them up on an authoritarian political order and a strict hierarchy, this which
clearly reflects the Francoist epoch. A Francoist upbringing is repressive that
aimed to prepare one into society into social roles than developing their
individuality, which for Ana resulted in the loss of her parents, the want of
love and solitude by elders around her.
Moralities of such middle-class societies and patriarchal codes were
often treated as hypocrisy and double standards. To illustrate, Ana’s father a
man always known to have maids and mistresses left Ana’s mother
depressed, alone and eventually ill through his own infidelity. Issues
concerning moralities at this time were completely hypocritical and beyond
question especially within in the middle-classes.
Women and women issues are major themes in Cría Cuervos, as we
see
three
different
generations
of
women
living
in
an
oppressive
environment; Ana, her mother and her grandmother. We are also drawn to
other female figures shown through social positions e.g.Aunt Pauline and
Maid Rosa. Females in Francoist society lived in a patriarchal society that did
not allow them to have a voice, furthermore women were confined to the
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home as the only surrounding and with it lived a repressive education
system. Saura did not omit this from his films until the end of that decade,
even though the period of liberalisation to censorship in the film industry
came much earlier in 1962. The reflection on the nature of confinement to
female identity is characterised in Cría Cuervos through repression, solitude,
male sexual and social domination, women as mothers, housewives and as
merely sexual objects. The grandmother is restrained to the home and her
only role is assuming that woman in a patriarchal society are confined
without a voice under the Franco dictatorship; mute and silent and probably
mentally and psychologically unstable like the grandmother.
There is also the element of the ‘hypocritical’ bourgeoisie society, in
terms of immorality, in that Ana witnesses depravity in front of her own
eyes, of her dad’s lover dashing out of his bedroom. There is the mother
who abandons her career for a domestic life without complications, except it
leaves her deeply depressed and isolated, while her husband amuses himself
with mistresses and lovers alike. Finally there is the protagonist, Ana, an
extremely confused child who lives in a world of misconceptions, perplexity
and terror;
3
“Ana stands as perhaps Saura’a most complex character.
Motivated by the oppressive environment of her family situation, her actions
can be read on two levels.
3
D’Lugo M, The practice of seeing P.131
4
One as a moving tale of a sensitive child’s loss of innocence; but also a
brilliant allegory of Spaniards trying to ‘reason’ their own emotional
liberation from captivity in the prison-house of Francoist ideology”.
So it
deals with Ana, disempowered in her life and dealing with her own
impotence inside the Francoist society.
There is a psychological theme that partly stems from death right from the
beginning as it shows us that like Francoism slipping away so could easily
the little girl’s parents, as they did. The psychological legacy would always
stay with Ana,
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“The tragic war that had divided country, family and self,
had never been innocent: and who, because of the oppressive domination of
the previous generation, were obsessed with the past and might never be
ready to take responsibility for changing the future.”
Aforementioned, Ana is a very confused child in her mind and jumps to all
kind s of assumptions and makes up stories, has destructive fantasies i.e.
she mistake’s some powder of bicarbonate soda for poison adding to her
dads milk in order to kill him. Then later we see her in his room with her
father dead, she walks away from him with the glass in her hand and into
the kitchen. And so she doesn’t understand the seriousness of the situation.
Later she is convinced that her father is to blame for her mother’s illness the
night he dies from a heart attack. She is tortured by her mothers memories
4
Kinder.M The Children of Franco P.57-58
5
but in her mind still imagines her alive and present. In fact death clearly
affects the protagonist when Ana encounters death and is purely obsessed
by it, so much so that she even offers her own grandmother poison to rid
herself from her loneliness.
“I think that the idea a child has of death is not the same as that of an
adult. I think that for a child, or for Ana at least, death is more of an
accident, a disappearance. For Ana, her mother is not dead, she has just
disappeared and she can reappear at any time. Faced with the hostility of
the adult world, she creates her own separate little world, in which only the
people who are what she expects find their place. In her world, reality
includes memories which seem part of current events, as well as desires and
dreams which mingle with daily life”, Saura in Valeurs Actuelles, 29 June
1976.
She then attempts to poison her Aunt Paulina with the same white powder,
who survives her attempt. She even imagines her own suicide, and there are
also the deaths of her pet guinea pig and hamster. So solitude takes over
Ana, just like it did with her mother, and consequently we border onto the
theme of loneliness and isolation. With everyone dead, Ana only has Rosa to
comfort her, however Aunt Paulina sees to it that even she is kept at lengths
from her niece. So we hear time after time the song the sisters play together
‘por qué te vas? portraying the solitude endured.
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We do start to see a less dimmer picture, for instance; when the adult
Ana realises she needed to be displaced from her family (when she was
young child) to which she figures out after it was that, that had imprisoned
her and entrapped her mind as a child. The child Ana did actually begin to
discover her strengths and implements them to break away from the
emotional and physical entrapment suffered by her family. Seeing the
changing
urbanscape
of Madrid,
something the
girls
had
not
been
accustomed to, moving to new modern spaces in a big city, the consumer
society, the billboards all of this which had previously been blocked from
their world until the final point towards the end of the film. Where we see
the three sisters leaving their gloomy depressing confinement of the family
to go to school Ana has ‘grown’ beyond her obsessions of the memories of
the past that had affected and agonised her. However it would seem that
they are only moving on to another institution that will try to impose a social
identity on to them.
Above all Cría Cuervos carries a wide psychological theme at times too
unrealistic and far fetched.
Perhaps the most important change in institutional influence within
Spanish society since the beginning of the Civil War has been the increased
status of the Catholic Church, which commands greater prestige and not
only among the upper and middle classes but somewhat from the lower
classes too. The scandal of the Opus Dei group set about expanding
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conservative Catholic influence into politics, economics and education, it is
evident therefore that there was an alliance of Catholic influence within the
power structure of Franco’s Spain. So there we see when the film ends,
5“the
sound of the western religious call to worship, toll the reopening of the
parochial school. A long shot of school girls filing in to this type of parish
indicates the education of Spanish women. These girls will be thoroughly
indoctrinated in obedience and submission by the religious institution”.
Bibliography

D’Lugo. M The Films of Carlos Saura, Princeton University Press, 1991

Higginbotham.V Spanish Film under Franco, University of Texas Press, 1988

Hooper.J

Hopewell. J Out of the Past- Spanish Cinema after Franco, BFI, 1986

Kinder.M The children of Franco, in Quarterly review of Film Studies, Spring 1983
5
The New Spaniards;Penguin Books , 1995
Kinder.M The Children of Franco P.96
8

Preston.P Spain in Crisis, Hassocks:Harvester Press,1976

Morgan-Tamosunas.R & Jordan.B Contempory Spanish Cinema,Manchester Uni.
Press,1998
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