SAURA: FILM MAKER AND TRUE FREEDOM FIGHTER

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honors Carlos Saura, Spain’s preeminent director, with a tribute Monday night, it will be honoring more than his filmography. Inevitably, his crucial role as a man of conscience and courage who resisted compromise during the long years of the oppressive Franco regime also will be acknowledged.

The 8 p.m. tribute, in which a number of Saura’s colleagues will participate, launches “The New Spanish Cinema and the Films of Carlos Saura,” which runs from Monday through Sept. 12 at Melnitz Theater, UCLA. (The tribute is being presented in association with the UCLA Film Archives.)

“It was a terrible time in Spain,” Saura reflected this week through an interpreter as he sat by a hotel pool. “In a way, it was really worse after the Civil War was over. It wasn’t until the ‘70s that things were a bit more open.

“Several times I was on the point of leaving the country, but something always kept me staying--a hope, an idea. You kept telling yourself that this would be the year that Franco would die, but he lived on and on! But Spain is my country, where I have my family and my friends. The stories I wanted to tell were in Spain.

“It would have been easy to emigrate; it would have been easy to go to France or any European country. I also had offers to work in the United States, but they were too complicated, and there was the language barrier.”

Best known here for his Oscar-nominated flamenco version of “Carmen,” made in collaboration with dancer-choreographer Antonio Gades, Saura was only 4 when the Spanish Civil War broke out.

That experience and its aftermath has haunted his highly introspective and contemplative films ever since. (Children have always been important to Saura, and he said that he believed directors existed emotionally somewhere between childhood and adolescence, and that when they grew beyond this point they stopped making films.)

Moving from photography to films in the ‘50s, Saura early on developed strategies to criticize the regime. “The Hunt” (1965), his third feature and the first to receive American release, dealt with three old friends who go on a very symbolic rabbit hunt. “It was even more allegorical than I intended,” Saura said, smiling. “I was not allowed to state that these men had been Falangists.”

Released in 1976, “Cria Cuervos” (“Raise Ravens”--”and they’ll tear your eyes out” goes a Spanish saying) is perhaps his finest film, a sensitive portrait of a mother-daughter relationship, with emphasis on the daughter (the remarkable Ana Torrent of the dark, mesmeric eyes), growing up during the height of Franco’s regime and who imagines she has powers over life and death. The mother is played by Geraldine Chaplin, with whom Saura had a long personal as well as professional relationship. (He and Chaplin have a son; he also has two sons by his first wife and two more by his current wife.)

“We met at the Berlin Festival in 1966, and those things that happened, happened,” Saura said with bemused reticence of his relationship with Chaplin. “But it’s been an outstanding collaboration. Geraldine gave me a lot of things. She opened up my provincial point of view to other cultures, other mentalities.

“Her father, Charlie Chaplin, was very, very kind, although when I went to live with Geraldine, her parents didn’t like it at all. They refused to meet me, but I think that Oona (O’Neill) Chaplin, Geraldine’s mother, had more curiosity about me than Charlie! But then women are more curious than men. Then they went to see the first film Geraldine and I made, ‘Peppermint Frappe,’ and Charlie sent me a letter full of beautiful words. And his home in Switzerland became my home.

“He had so many stories, but I could understand only half of what he was telling me. He would put a script he had written for his daughter Victoria on a stand and play all the characters himself. It was wonderful! It was about a little girl who turns into a bird, and it was as if Charlie really started to fly. You really believed he was a bird. It was so innocent--and so very beautiful.

“He was very unhappy when Victoria went off to Paris to be with her clown. When Geraldine took me around Hollywood, showing me her roots, I really felt the impact that this is where everything in the cinema truly began.”

When Saura began his career, encouraged by his brother Antonio, a famous painter, he chose a course in directing in film school. “That’s where I discovered I really wanted to tell my own stories, and I’ve been doing that ever since, almost in a paranoid fashion.

“The late ‘50s was a very difficult time in Spain, not only because of censorship but because young people were blocked by Franco’s people, who didn’t want to give power to anybody. All the important posts in Spain were, of course, controlled by the regime. Everything and everyone was very controlled, but there were two exceptions, the directors Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis Berlanga. They were able to open the door a little for young people, and later I was able to do that myself.”

Saura explained that under Franco a script had to be submitted to the censor before it was shot, and then the censor passed on the finished film.

“You had to defend yourself,” he said. “There was a wall, and you couldn’t go beyond it. You could tell your story to a certain point and that was that. But it was not all that clear-cut. Sometimes the wall was low, sometimes it was high--it all depended upon the amount of political pressure from abroad at the moment. At the beginning the wall was much higher, but it crumbled very, very slowly.”

Saura’s 1970 film “The Garden of Delights” was banned for a year until it was shown at the New York Film Festival without the permission of the Spanish government. A wicked, dark-hued satire, it centers on a brain-damaged industrialist (who became a symbol of living death under Franco) in whose mind is locked the number of his Swiss bank account containing untold millions.

“It was a very good strategy on the part of my producer, Elias Querejeta. Thanks to the success in New York it was finally permitted to be shown in Spain,” Saura said. (The script of his next and similarly anti-Franco film, “Ana and the Wolves,” a satire on various taboos of the church and the military, was banned outright and then passed on re-writes. But Saura went ahead and shot the original script.)

“It’s difficult to talk about the new generation of Spanish film makers,” Saura said. “There’s so little perspective yet, and my reactions are emotional rather than intellectual. I know nearly all of them, and they were also my pupils. There is a power, a strength in Spain right now. There’s no censorship of the cinema, the government helps film makers considerably and there are many production facilities. It’s a privileged moment.

“There are lots of possibilities in the Spanish cinema, but I don’t know yet how it will flower. In the past it’s been a matter of individuals, and now it’s a whole generation. Yet in Spain we’re very much alone, we’re very individual. I admire a number of film makers, but I have very few close friends in the cinema.

“I have a feeling that those of us working in the cinema everywhere are the last of a generation. I feel something is going to change. There are serious problems in the French and Italian cinemas, and the Americans are going along on an established road. I’m afraid the ‘new’ Spanish cinema has come too late: It should have arrived 20 years ago. I feel we’re at the end of a cycle, but I don’t know how films are going to be in the future.”