Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

presented unsuccessfully to the Junta Magna for Goya’s centenary in Zaragoza,
and a libretto in English entitled La duquesa de Alba y Goya (1937) which was
also rejected. 143
This indebtedness to Buñuel, Spain’s most famous surrealist filmmaker, is
mirrored in Goya in Bordeaux (1999) in the primacy of memory and
reminiscences. The film is structured according to the principle of flashback
narration. The old Goya (played by Francisco Rabal), now in exile in Bordeaux,
remembers his life and art in a series of flashbacks in which his younger self
(played by José Coronado), at the court in Madrid, often appears on the screen
simultaneously with the old Goya. As most of the action thus takes place in
Goya’s mind, past and present merge into each other almost imperceptibly. This
fluid sense of time is also achieved through the frequency of fade-ins and
superimpositions in the transitions between the past and present. Past and present,
and time and space are thus functions of Goya’s reveries and memories rather
than real entities. Moreover, the film abounds in close-ups of Goya’s head and
face, producing in the viewer the impression that there is nothing outside of
Goya’s mind. Likewise, the frequent use of the tracking shot 144 and the moving
camera which follows Goya, alternating with scenes in which the camera seems to
143 Cf. Saura and Francisco Rabal, the actor who plays the old Goya, in an interview with Guzmán
Urrero Peña, “Por un retrato de Luis Buñuel: Entrevista con Francisco Rabal y Carlos Saura,” in
Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 603 (2000): 33-35. Saura also points to this homage when he
remarks in the prologue to his screenplay that Rabal interprets “un Goya que tanto me recuerda a
Luis Buñuel y a mi hermano Antonio por su fuerza, su tesón y su curiosidad por las cosas” (15; “a
Goya that very much reminds me of Luis Buñuel and of my brother Antonio for his strength, his
determination, and his curiosity for things,” my transl.).
144 A tracking shot is when the camera moves physically into the scene, so that the spatial
relationships among objects shift, as does our perspective. James Monaco, How to Read a Film:
Movies, Media, Multimedia (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2000) 201.
110