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FILM AND TELEVISION: 21st Century Goya
Carlos Saura’s Goya in Bordeaux, recently issued, visualises the different stages of Goya’s life and development as an artist, played out against the turbulence of Spain’s history, court politics, the horrors of war and personal illness. Saura and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro tell this in flashback, through Goya’s lectures on art to his young daughter, Rosario.
In a sense, Goya’s paintings anticipate cinematic narrative. He uses several frames and contrasting representations to tell his stories—from The Fair of Madrid (emphasising individual scenes as part of a wider narrative of social class), through contrasting images of women to the documentary intensity of The Second of May and The Third of May. His ‘Black Paintings’, first painted on the walls of his house, are digitally reproduced in the film with disturbing impact. His practice also takes account of tradition and history, into which he inserts his own challenges or experimentation. The film shows him searching out Velasquez’s Las Meninas in the basement to which it had been banished, to ponder its pictorial conundrum before composing his own royal portrait.
Goya in Bordeaux engages us through a dialogue between the older artist and his younger self as he develops his practice. Saura also places us inside Goya’s interior world, his often nightmarish visions where memory and present meld and collide, as he stumbles through virtual galleries of his previous paintings. He dramatises this complex narrative, with its shifting periods and spaces, dialogues between past and present, across different visual surfaces. The fluid boundaries between memory, hallucination and reality are visually expressed through a series of sliding screens and shifting planes. An aluminium frame, draped with translucent materials and capable of being lit from several angles, combined with perforated screens, made it possible to change lighting and moods, and to import different digitised forms of the paintings.
Combining scanned and printed images, various forms of projection and virtual sets, with Storaro’s own ‘Univisium’ standard (aspect ratio of 2:1, which he asserts is the future for the image), the film reproduces Goya’s palettes of colour, light and shade—sometimes stretching the paintings as a backdrop for live action, at other times exploiting the intensity of visceral and bloody visions, allowing fluent moves from a naturalistic mood to the spectral or fantastic.
The film indirectly invokes Walter Benjamin’s essay on the reproduction of the work of art and, in a curious way, re-charges that arguement. Writing before the rapid development in digital reproduction at the end of 20th century, Benjamin argued that modern methods of reproducing of works of art disperses its “aura.” Yet, as this film shows, digitising Goya for a 21st-century cinema audience re-presents the artworks as a remediation and, in the process, reinvigorates the work of the past. In this sumptuous biography, Saura and Storaro expand cinema’s visual lexicon. They push digital processes to compose a fitting tribute to the painter seen as a forerunner of Modernism—creating a visual correlative for Goya’s own innovative practices—a 21st-century Goya.
