Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Cria!
1976 · Carlos Saura · Cria! on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for the same pop song playing again and again. (sound)
Jeanette's '¿Por qué te vas?' keeps recurring as the record the children play over and over, at odd moments, too loud, more than any other music in the film.
Payoff: A bright, cheerful little song is doing more emotional damage than anything spoken.
Watch how the house stays dim, curtained, and half-sealed. (light)
Teo Escamilla lights the Madrid house in soft daylight and deep shadow, so the interior feels closed off from the outside world at every hour.
Payoff: The house reads like a place suspended between being lived in and being a memorial.
Watch Ana's face for what it refuses to show. (performance)
Torrent plays the girl watchful and unsmiling, her large eyes doing all the work of a consciousness that's taking everything in and judging it.
Payoff: You're being asked to read a child's whole interior life off one steady expression. In the reading: qualisign (icon of quality). Deleuze calls a face holding one quality steady, instead of cycling through reactions, a qualisign.
Notice that one actress plays two different women in this house. (performance)
Geraldine Chaplin appears as both the mother in remembered scenes and Ana grown up narrating from years later, without the film remarking on the doubling.
Payoff: The same face standing in for two different people starts to feel deliberate, not accidental. In the reading: peaks of present. Deleuze calls contradictory presents sharing one body peaks of present, several nows held as equally real at once.
Watch the sisters play dress-up in their mother's clothes. (staging)
Saura stages the girls repeatedly trying on their dead mother's clothes and jewelry, a recurring ritual rather than a single scene.
Payoff: The household's inheritance is being performed by children before they understand what it costs.
Once you have seen it
Watch Ana carry a glass of milk down the dark hallway. (structure)
Ana believes she poisoned her father's milk and that this killed him, though the film never confirms whether the powder did anything at all.
Payoff: The question isn't answered because, for Ana, it was never actually in doubt. In the reading: falsifying narration. Deleuze calls a story that refuses to settle its own truth falsifying narration, guilt and coincidence held equally real.
Watch a scene end in one year and resume in another. (cutting)
González del Amo joins strata of present, memory, and flash-forward with direct cuts and matched gestures, using the record as the hinge that swings between them.
Payoff: The gap between two cuts is where the film wants you standing, not on either side of it.
Watch the house itself for signs of quiet decay. (structure)
Heavy furniture, a wheelchair before old photographs, a garden and pool, all sit inside a household made to feel ordered but rotting from within.
Payoff: A private family's stagnation and a country waiting out a death outside rhyme without either being named.
Carry this in: Watch Ana's face, and listen for the same record returning at the wrong moments.