Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Cria!
1976 · Carlos Saura · Cria! on Sightlines
A glass of milk, carried down a dark hallway by a girl in a nightgown. She has put something in it that she believes will kill her father. In the morning he is dead. Whether the powder did anything at all, the film never says, and Ana never asks, because as far as she is concerned the question is settled. She did it. She is eight.
Then somebody puts the record on again.
"¿Por qué te vas?" — Jeanette's bright little pop single about someone leaving — runs through Cría cuervos the way a song runs through a house where children control the record player. Over and over, at the wrong moments, too loud. Nothing else in the film sounds that happy. Nothing else in the film does as much damage.
Saura and his cinematographer Teo Escamilla made one decision that governs everything else. When Ana's dead mother comes into the room at night, she is lit exactly like everyone else: the same curtained daylight, the same warm lamp, the same solidity in the frame. No gauze, no dissolve, no chord on the soundtrack telling you which drawer to file the scene in. The grown Ana, addressing us from twenty years on, gets the same treatment. The image refuses to sort its own material.
Deleuze has a name for an image that has stopped sorting. He calls it the crystal-image, and the idea underneath the word is plain enough. Every moment splits as it happens. Half of it rushes on toward the next moment; the other half is filed as past the instant it occurs. Most cinema shows you only the first half, and when it wants the second it announces a flashback. A crystal holds both faces at once and won't tell you which one you're looking at.
This matters because the handy description of the film — unreliable child narrator — quietly ruins it. "Unreliable" implies there is a reliable version behind the film, a true account distorted by a frightened kid, recoverable if we watch closely enough. The crystal says there is no such version. The father's death is not murder-or-coincidence with the answer withheld. It is both, permanently, because Ana is the only instrument the film has and she is not lying.
Pablo González del Amo's editing is the second half of the method. Deleuze separates the recollection-image, the dated flashback that retrieves a former present and plays it back, from what he calls sheets of past: memory as a territory you move around inside rather than a tape you rewind. Cría is the second thing. The strata are joined by direct cuts and matched gestures, so a movement begun in one year finishes in another, and the record is the hinge that swings between them. Deleuze would call those joins irrational cuts: the two shots don't share a continuous space, and the gap itself becomes the place you're asked to stand.
Ana Torrent was seven or eight. Saura keeps coming back to her face, and the face does not perform. Deleuze's word for her is the seer, the voyant, the character who has stopped being an agent and become a witness. Older cinema ran on a circuit — see a situation, act, change it — and Ana's circuit is cut at the meaning end. She does act. The milk is arguably the only real action anyone takes. It changes nothing she can read. What's left is a face in close-up holding one quality steady instead of cycling through reactions, which is a qualisign: grief in a child who has no vocabulary for it and so simply watches, and judges.
The sisters climb into their dead mother's clothes and jewelry and play at being grown women. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture like that a gest: a bodily attitude that puts a whole social relation on display. The girls are not expressing themselves. They are wearing the household. The proverb in the title, raise ravens and they'll peck your eyes out, reads as a warning about children; watch the dress-up and it turns over. The eyes are the ones the children inherited.
Geraldine Chaplin plays the mother in the past and Ana grown in the future. One body, two times, and the film never remarks on it. Deleuze's term for contradictory presents held together is peaks of present — not past-then-now, but several nows coexisting, each fully real. The casting makes it physical: the woman Ana lost and the woman Ana becomes share a face.
And the house is rotting. Deleuze sorts crystals by condition, and the one that fits here is the crystal in decomposition, the ordered and well-appointed world going bad from inside, which he found in Visconti's aristocrats. Transpose it to bourgeois Madrid. Heavy furniture, a wheelchair pushed up to a wall of photographs, a pool, a walled garden, the housekeeping routines, an officer of Franco's army in the bedroom. Shot in 1975, the year Franco died in November. Released in 1976. A film about a household waiting out a death the country outside had already had.
Saura had spent a decade learning to say things sideways because censors were reading, and by 1975 the apparatus was weakening enough to press harder, but the method held: the state gets played by a family. Deleuze's account of modern political cinema turns on exactly that collapse. The private affair stops being private, not because a filmmaker has decorated it as metaphor, but because there is no public world available to carry it. The people, in his phrase, are missing. Nobody in this house appeals to a society. There is an aunt, a routine, and a record.
None of this arrives from nowhere. Torrent's gaze was invented three years earlier in The Spirit of the Beehive, along with the hushed, honeycomb-filtered daylight Cría takes over wholesale; casting the same child guarantees the reference reads. The temporal braid comes out of Saura's own La prima Angélica (1974), where a man walks into his childhood and the remembered past physically occupies the present frame. Cría refines that device by stripping out the last of its signposts. Ana and the Wolves (1973) had already built the single-house, Chaplin-anchored family-as-regime allegory whose confinement staging this film inherits. Further back sit Wild Strawberries, where memory intrudes bodily and the protagonist stands inside his own remembered scene instead of cutting away to it; Persona, whose merging of two women's faces is the permission slip for Chaplin's double role; and Hiroshima mon amour, which invented the association-driven montage that fuses two times into one stream and made the straight cut between them legal.
What Cría handed forward is harder to point at than a shot, because it isn't a shot. It's a permission: you can put a child's interior life on screen at full strength with no marker at all separating what she sees from what she remembers or invents, and an audience will keep up. Torrent's face, together with Beehive's, became the standing image of a Spanish childhood under the regime, a device later filmmakers could pick up already loaded. The song went off and became an international hit on its own, which is a strange fate for a piece of mourning equipment.
Watch it again and hold one question: at any given moment, which Ana is looking? The child in the house, the woman speaking from twenty years on, or the mother who has the same face as both. The film will not tell you. And then somebody puts the record on again.
Concepts in play
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Escamilla's photography grants the dead mother's night visitations and the adult Ana's direct address the same solidity and light as the present scenes — no dissolve, no optical signal to sort memory from fact.
- crystal in decomposition — The bourgeois Madrid house going rotten from inside: furniture and photographs of a family in decline, the wheeled invalid grandmother before a wall of old pictures, a Francoist officer dying in the bedroom, shot in the year Franco died.
- sheets of past (order of time) — González del Amo joins present, memory, fantasy and flash-forward with direct cuts and matched actions rather than dated flashbacks, with objects and the repeated record as the connective tissue between strata.
- irrational cut / interstice — Temporal layers are spliced without dissolves or optical signals, so the viewer must continually reorient across the gap the cut opens.
- the seer (voyant) — Ana's only action — the powder in her father's bedtime milk — changes nothing she can interpret; what remains is an eight-year-old watching the household, 'a consciousness taking everything in and judging it.'
- qualisign (icon of quality) — Saura's recurring framing of Ana Torrent's unsmiling, interior face with its enormous dark eyes, holding a single steady quality rather than a series of reactions.
- pure optical and sound situations — '¿Por qué te vas?' played again and again by the children becomes a sound situation with no action attached to it — a plaintive song about leaving that functions as the film's engine of involuntary memory.
- peaks of present — Geraldine Chaplin's dual casting as the remembered dying mother and as the grown Ana narrating two decades later, so mother-past and daughter-future coexist in one body.
- the gest — The sisters dressing up in the dead mother's clothes and jewelry, and the household's recurring rituals staged as inherited performances that double the generations.
- falsifying narration — The grown Ana frames the film as recollection while the child's fantasies — the poisoning, the mother's nocturnal returns — are given the same weight as fact, entangling guilt and innocence with no recoverable true version.
- the people are missing — Saura's censorship-era strategy of indirection, with the single shuttered house standing in for the state: a family drama carrying a politics because no public world exists in the film to carry it.