An Artist Who ‘Dared to Expose His Inner Turmoil’

Carlos Saura’s new film, “Goya in Bordeaux,” which opens today, is a long-awaited project for the 68-year-old Spanish director. As Saura has said: “Goya has pursued me throughout my whole life. I’ve always felt a powerful attraction for his painting and his personality, and both are still a mystery to me.”

Saura is best known in the U.S. for films such as “Blood Wedding” (1981) and “Tango” (1998) that explored the theme of national identity through use of music and dance.

“Goya” is the fictional story of one of Spain’s greatest painters, Francisco Goya (1746-1828), who lived during one of Spain’s most tumultuous eras. Saura intends the film to be an exploration of the painter’s mind in the last years of his life. Goya chillingly captured the cruelty of war in his 1814 masterpiece “The Third of May, 1808.” He was also a brilliant portrait painter who worked mainly for the Spanish aristocracy.

Saura dedicated “Goya in Bordeaux” to his brother, Antonio, who died in 1998 and whose art was displayed in some of Saura’s earlier films. In the film, scenes from Goya’s paintings were re-created on a sound stage with the help of Academy Award-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who won a Goya (Spain’s version of the Oscar) for his work. The film stars Francisco Rabal, one of Spain’s foremost actors, as Goya in his later years.

Here Saura discusses how he translated Goya’s life and art into film.

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In my film, I have tried to do away with the superfluous and to focus on aspects of Goya’s life and works that have interested me. I have not tried to make a biography or a psychological portrait of the painter.

I have tried to find an aesthetic that would correspond with my vision. To do this, we built a stage with semitransparent plastic to create the illusion of rooms--modifying the idea of time and space in a way that is similar to what we did in “Sevillanas,” “Flamenco” and “Tango.” With the help of Vittorio Storaro--without whose help and friendship “Goya in Bordeaux” would not have been possible--we decided to print photographs, decorative pieces, paintings and etchings, directly on the translucent plastic.

Like the antique “dioramas” [stages], the rooms would expand to become reflections of his paintings or the countryside. Some of the most evident examples would be scenes from “La Pradera de San Isidro” [A Walk in San Isidro] and “The Disasters of War.” At the same time, the translucent material would allow us to show the future and the present cohabiting in the same space.

My film moves backward--from the end toward the beginning. It begins in 1828, when Goya is exiled in France at the age of 82 and ends when the painter is born in the small town of Fuendetodos, Spain.

The decision to structure the film this way was not capricious. I was interested in accompanying Goya in his last days in Bordeaux, when his memory is fading and the shadow of death follows him constantly; it is a Goya who takes refuge in his memories and reflects upon his life and work.

Goya lived his last years accompanied by three women:

Leocadia Zorrilla, his lover, who was 40 years his junior and accompanied him until his death. She had a strong personality and her character no doubt helped Goya overcome his troubles with aging.

The second woman is actually a 13-year-old girl, Rosarito, the daughter of Leocadia and Goya, whom the painter adored and protected. And someone who from a very young age showed promising signs of talent in painting and drawing. In “Goya in Bordeaux” Rosarito is his friend, confidant, the only person the painter opens his heart to.

The third woman is Maria Pilar Teresa Cayetana, Duchess of Alba, who was not only beautiful but witty and intelligent--according to the testimony of that era--and someone about whom quite a bit has been said. She was the lover of many important men, including Prime Minister Manuel de Godoy.

In the fall of 1792, Goya, then 46 years old, was infected with a terrible disease that almost killed him. It was a traumatic experience that surely changed his character. The illness resulted in complete deafness, which affected him through the end of his life. He was a vibrant and cheerful man who overcame the sickness, but the subsequent manifestations of the illness forever marked his paintings.

It is known that Goya was madly in love with the Duchess of Alba and that she never responded with the same passion. He painted and drew her in many ways, with love and longing and with despair. In one of the most famous paintings, which belongs to the Hispanic Society in New York, the Duchess appears clothed as a “maja” [a woman from Andalusia], and at her feet is an inscription reading “Only Goya.” I like to think that the memory of that attractive and fascinating woman accompanied Goya all his life.

His deafness inspired Goya to do “Los Caprichos” [The Whims], a series of works that showed him becoming more fluid as a painter, and his drawings more daring. Even though his income came from earnings as a court painter and from private commissions, he dared to expose his inner turmoil in the series of “Caprichos.”

In a sinister story, full of jealousy and royal intrigue, the Duchess of Alba was poisoned. The rumor was that Queen Maria Luisa--who hated her beauty and desired her fortune--assisted by her lover Godoy, killed the duchess. This is a story that was never properly investigated but that Goya must have known quite well.

Once the duchess had died, the queen wasted no time in appropriating her jewels. A painting by Diego Velazquez, “La Venus del Espejo” [formerly owned by the Duchess], became the property of Godoy--a man who claimed to own the most “risque” paintings of the time, including several nude and clothed “Majas” by Goya.

In the 18th century when Goya was born, Spain was a destitute and ignorant country, dominated by a corrupt aristocracy and an authoritarian [Catholic] Church. Disease and war had whittled down the population, which was barely 10 million at the end of the century. Only a small group, among them Goya, hoped to change the country. While France and England were preparing for the future, Spain was sleeping a long siesta waiting for someone to come around and improve the country’s situation. The stupidity of Spain’s governing class dragged the country into a war [against the French in 1808]--further plunging the country into misery and hopelessness.

Goya lived and saw the brutality of that war. He saw it, he was told stories about it, or he imagined the horrors: razed towns, men, women and children fleeing the starvation, the diseases, the torture, the rapes and death. Imagine those scenes repeated again and again today in the age of television! Like a premonition, Goya alerted us about a possible future with his book of etchings. “Disasters of War,” which was one of his most important works, would not be published until 50 years after his death.

Goya went into exile not only because he felt betrayed and cynical about the future--which at his age was justified--but because of constant death threats he received when he lived in Madrid. Fear of reprisals finally forced Leocadia and Goya to leave Spain and move to France--a decision not easily made by a man of 80.

Perhaps to compensate for a life marked by obligations and commissions, he finally allowed his imagination to run wild [during his time in Bordeaux], with a sharp, sometimes cruel irony. He made hundreds of drawings, lithographs and etchings in which he would alternately explore violence and tenderness.

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His social satire turned into a work of art full of sharp critiques that created problems for him with the Inquisition [still a force in Spain at that time]. Some of the paintings that he painted directly onto his walls, the so-called “Black Paintings” now at the Prado Museum in Madrid, show us the dark side of the mind: monsters, nightmares and hallucinations.

Goya was an intuitive and vital man, a free spirit who loved walking along the delicate paths of the imagination without losing his footing in the real world. Looking carefully at his work, it is evident that the apparent carelessness with his brush--a mouth half open, quick, thick brush strokes, and an expressiveness within accurate portraiture--is the imprint of an artist ahead of his time who spurned academic norms.

In his speech at the Academy of San Fernando, he says one phrase that I think defines him:”I never saw lines or colors, only shadows that move back and forth.” My brother, Antonio [Saura], who was a painter, liked to say that those words were the most lucid description he had heard about modern painting.

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Translated by Times staff writer Lorenza Munoz.