Within the Spanish pantheon of cinema, Carlos Saura (who died this winter at the age of 91, shortly before the Berlinale) counts amongst its most prolific and awarded auteurs. Across a career that spanned almost seven decades, Saura collected trophies at Europe’s most important festivals (notably, in Cannes and Berlin), along with multiple Foreign Film Oscar nominations, thus making a decisive contribution to the transformation of Iberian cinema from one of isolation, created under extremely difficult conditions (both economic and, especially, political, given the years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship), into a household brand. Although his endeavors in the realm of fiction remain, by far, the most well-known part of his filmography (with titles such as Cria Cuervos, Peppermint Frappe, or the Flamenco Trilogy), like so many others, Saura began his career in non-fiction: with a trilogy of short films directed in the late 1950s; he returned to the format after more than three decades, in the early 1990s, with Sevilanas (1992), going on to direct 11 more, of various lengths, before passing away – the majority of them focused on subjects related to the arts (music, architecture, painting etc.). 

Such is also the case with the last film released during his lifetime, The Walls Can Talk (Las paredes hablan), which was released in San Sebastian half a year before his passing: a film that starts from a hypothesis that sounds fascinating – that there is a direct and inextricable link between the earliest art forms of human civilization, the cave paintings of the Palaeolithic era, and one of its most modern forms, that is, graffiti and street art.

To explore this theory, Saura assembles a relatively motley group of (mostly male) experts from a variety of fields – from art practitioners and theorists to biologists and anthropologists – and interviews them 1-on-1, moving from particular artistic intentions to broader questions about the evolution of the human species: the fact that humans possess self-awareness and that the ultimate expression of its consciousness resides in rituals (like, for example, burials) and, above all, in the existence of art and humanity’s capacity for symbolic, abstract thought. (“Fabulation is the distinguishing characteristic of the human species,” one of the experts says, at one point – certainly a seductive thought in the economy of such a film.)

This journey takes the filmmaker from the outskirts of Madrid, which are covered in graffiti tags and stencils, to the caves where the world’s oldest cave paintings have been discovered by archaeologists, from Colavanas to Chauvet. Saura is simultaneously interested in the plastic content of these artworks, how they form a language of their own, and, above all in their medium: the wall (“Painters have always worked on walls,” says a sculptor, at one point). Ergo, the neighborhood kid with a spray can in his hand, who hides from the city lights that can attract the attention of the police, can claim his direct lineage from the prehistoric man, who outlined the shape of his hand in the depths of a cave illuminated by a torch that burned on animal fat.

Those expecting a swan song from Saura will however be disappointed. This last film – which opens with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges and ends with another from Empedocles – suffers intensely from its choices in terms of form, rendering it virtually indistinguishable from television docu-reportages: digital zooms and pans (along with various cheap-looking visual effects), talking heads, drone footage, omnipresent muzak, and so on. It almost feels like Saura’s involvement in this project is a fun fact: one finds nothing of the psychological finesse of his famous dramas from the sixties and seventies, but rather, we find ourselves swept away by a relentless torrent of information that is spoken, rather than shown (all the more tiresome given that the few female figures in this film are far less prominent than the male ones). There’s something spectacular about the art forms this film explores and their juxtaposition, but its bombardment of cultural talkshow-style discussions, which are edited in quick succession, coupled with the aforementioned techniques, make the act of contemplating and filtering them through one’s knowledge and sensibilities, or even the mere act of staring at them in wonder, one that is impossible one. Because whatever you might need to think about what you see is already there, everything is spelled out in these ample, stuffy talks: all you have to do is watch and assimilate everything from the comfort of your armchair.

Certainly, as a spectator, one gets a thankless feeling when one sees the latest film by a canonical master and finds it to be rather weak (a feeling that I had, for example, when I saw Andrzej Wajda’s last film, Afterimage, itself an exploration of art), which is all the more thankless when you have to write those feelings down. I’m not trying to say that the various connections the film makes are not interesting, on a strictly intellectual level, though it often feels like the film is going in circles from a certain point onwards, and the information itself is often not novel, either. There are also a few contradictions at play: although the punk origins of graffiti (in mid-1970s New York) are mentioned at one point, along with a very brief discussion of how it’s criminalized by the police and frowned upon by much of the population, the political, anti-system, often anarchic nature of this artform is almost completely missing from the discussion (under the guise of the connection with Paleolithic, thus, a pre-political time). There is also something strange here – the fact that these are the only (and wholly opposite) historical periods explored in the film, without even a passing mention of any other historical form of mural art: at least of the frescoes created during Antiquity or the Renaissance (not to mention, by other cultures: such as Aztec monumentalism, with its influence on artists such as Rivera, Orozco or Siquieros). See the film’s last montage sequence, which is awkwardly reminiscent of a PowerPoint presentation: the works featured in these photographs seem chosen according to a completely random criterion, if any.

“Everything is cyclical. It’s as if no one has ever made anything new” says, in the final scene, one of the artists interviewed by Saura – a tepid and convenient conclusion that completely ignores any kind of context (of any particular historical era or place – see, for example, the missed path of the genesis of graffiti in Spain, after the fall of the Franco regime, one that I imagine would have been easy to explore) in which these arts originated, an essentialist reduction that sounds more like a nice little poetic idea than the concrete conclusion of a research process.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.