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

Buero’s drama, Saura’s Goya in Bordeaux dramatizes El sueño de la razón as
internal, mental threat that is mirrored by a scene of social oppression. At the
beginning of this scene, Goya is working on the Romería a San Isidro (The
Pilgrimage of San Isidro). Suddenly, he starts hearing noises and seems to have a
mental attack. When he sits down in the posture of the Sueño de la razón, his face
buried in his arms, his paintings (the Pinturas negras) come alive and haunt him,
starting the dramatic ekphrasis of the Sueño de la razón. In the second part of this
sequence, Cayetana, the Duchess of Alba and Goya’s supposed lover, suddenly
stands in the middle of the room. As she recedes, the room fills with people in a
social gathering. Unexpectedly, however, the ceiling, a blue cloth, threatens to
smother them. The scene ends abruptly with a jump cut to the old Goya’s present
in Bordeaux, drawing concentric circles into his notebook. I will discuss aspects
of both the montage and the mise-en-scène of this ekphrastic sequence in order to
show how Saura’s film translates Goya’s aquatint into filmic language. Analyzing
the types of cuts (montage) as well as the camera distance, angle and movement
(mise-en-scène), and the use of music, I show how Saura achieves a
transmedialization of this image similar to the one of the poem and the drama
through filmic means.
In this sequence, the types of cuts that predominate are jump cuts and
superimpositions, both of which contribute to the impression of the scene as a
drama originating in Goya’s mind. 146 While the close-up predominates in this
scene, heightening the claustrophobic atmosphere, a long shot is used at one
146 Camera distance refers to the use of close-ups, full, three-quarters, medium, or long shots
(Monaco 197).
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