Summary:
José, Paco and Luis – three friends who share a common history – get together for a day of rabbit hunting and invite Enrique, Paco’s brother-in-law, to join. The land on which they hunt, owned by José but maintained by his tenant Juan, was the site of many deaths during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) – a fact that gradually is revealed to both the unsuspecting Enrique and the audience. As the day’s hunting events progress, tensions swell, eventually culminating in a human massacre. Of the four hunters the only one to survive is Enrique.
Analysis:
Heralded as one of the greatest films ever to have been made about the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and its residual effects on a politically and culturally traumatised post-war society, Carlos Saura’s third feature-length film, La caza (The Hunt, 1965), remains a triumph of modern cinema. Often characterised as a psychological thriller about fratricide, the film paints an intensely intimate, at times claustrophobic, portrait of masculinity, violence and repression, which unfolds through a starkly minimalist narrative centred on four men who spend a day together rabbit hunting on a former Civil War battlefield.
Indeed, La caza’s battlefield plays a crucial role in the film’s visual economy, wherein it is both framed as the oppressive backdrop to the main action and foregrounded through numerous long shots and close-ups as a wounded body. A series of establishing shots (long shots and aerial views) at the film’s onset show the hunters descending into the vast and hollowed subterranean valley, but the camera undercuts human presence in favour of highlighting the barren, lifeless landscape as an additional protagonist. This desert valley is, of course, reminiscent of the futuristic, post-apocalyptic descriptions in Luis’s science fiction novel El quinto planeta (‘the fifth planet’), where the post-human environment appears contaminated from a distance. These shots, in turn, are counterbalanced with medium and close-up shots that bring into sharp focus the scorched, pock-marked, almost lunar-like hunting grounds, whose holes and crevices subtly reveal bullet holes and secret bunkers – ‘open wounds’ leftover from the war. With the aid of Luis Cuadrado’s spectacular photography, the camera captures these remnants of war not as extraterrestrial but as naturalised elements embedded in the landscape. These remains constitute spectral evidence of a collective national history that, on the one hand, the land retains and suppresses, and on the other hand, it accumulates and exposes over time. In the end, the film poignantly illustrates that the emergence of these historical traces wields a certain force or violence that haunts the present.
As the landscape gradually gains significance throughout La caza’s mise en scène, shifting from symbolic stage to historical site, its terrain not only embodies but also begins to exude the same tensions, anxieties, and disease that plague the protagonists. In this regard, Saura’s work could be categorised as a film of and about embodiment, and specifically how place embodies time and history. In fact, one of the most unique if not radical components of the film is the way it draws on landscape not just as a reflective surface that mirrors the conditions of the post-war era, but also as a container in which the time of the present is itself conditioned, and to some degree inflicted, by other temporalities. In this regard, landscape becomes an event – a dynamic and wavering entity that settles and unsettles film subject and viewer alike, unveiling a matrix of entangled temporalities within the singular space of the film’s diegesis and by extension the space of the screen. This is perhaps why a majority of La caza’s narrative violence emanates from the natural setting: the infernal heat and relentlessly oppressive sunlight, as well as the overall sensations of enclosure and suffocation that are evoked in the oscillation between images of the open, expansive range of the grounds and the steep, severe walls of the surrounding hillsides.
But from the ‘event of landscape’, the violence that manifests in La caza is neither depicted in a straightforward manner nor made overtly graphic until the end. Even though tensions among the hunters escalate throughout, it is not until the final scene of human massacre that the spectator is presented with the occasion to witness, as the frightened young Enrique does, an explosion of violent and fatalistic behaviour that is not only unambiguous, but also sudden and shocking. This is not to suggest that the film overall fails to treat violence as one of its central thematic concerns, which of course it does. Rather, it is important to note that while violence is central to the film – a central if silent actor – then it is neither explicit nor excessive, but instead gradually unravels through various layers of intensity.
Next to films in which violence is immediate and perhaps particularly gruesome, gory and/or bloody, such as those of American director Sam Peckinpah (1925–84), who is rumoured to have undergone a transformative experience upon viewing La caza that later inspired him to make The Wild Bunch (1969), Saura’s deliberately slow-paced, methodical exploration into the evolution of violence, by contrast, is more suggestive and implicit. A good example of this is the first hunting sequence, which is performed as a routine military operation and hints at what some scholars have argued is the film’s insistence on ritualised and/or fetishised forms of violence. As the four men march over the uneven terrain, weapons in hand, it is through a series of voiceovers that the spectator is given a window into their isolation, fears and internal anxieties. But what begins as seemingly innocuous observations steadily swells (José is nervous and exhausted from the sweltering heat, Paco dreads becoming ‘crippled’ and Enrique is troubled by the uncanny feeling of having ‘been there before’). These interior monologues, though distinct in content, reach a point of convergence that anticipates the aggressive exchanges that are really taking place, and for which the rabbit hunt is merely a subtext. Underscoring this point further, once a rabbit is spotted and the shooting begins, shots of the hunters are not crosscut with images of their supposed prey, but with images of each other, creating the editing illusion of a human ‘crossfire’ that binds these men together in a visual display of mutual antagonism as they ‘aim’ at one another. Of course, the hunt sequence is only the first in a chain of actions that crescendo in anticipation of the final ‘unfriendly fire’ that will end in tragedy. Within this chain, Saura effectively portrays the overwhelming sense of anguish among the men, which can be seen as a kind of slow death methodically structured into every detail and made all the more palpable through the slow deterioration and alienating effects of the land, as well as by the musical score, which vacillates between silence and the funereal drum beats of a military march.
Within the spatial and temporal dynamics of what could be called La caza’s ‘slow-moving’ violence, the magnified feelings of entrapment are equally prevalent. In fact, these sensations give rise to the general tone of dis-ease or discomfort underlying the film’s narrative. The concept of disease, along with its many allusions to contamination, quarantine, wounds, pain, and death, occupies a significant amount of screen time. For disease is closely linked not only to the heat, but also to physical ailments and mental states: José’s chronic stomach pains and feelings of failure, Juan’s bad leg, his bedridden mother, Paco’s paranoia and regret, Luis’s alcoholism, and last but not least Enrique’s boyish innocence, which socially exiles him from the group. All of these examples, of course, find a narrative parallel in the myxomatosis infestation that has plagued the rabbits, a visible disease that causes death by paralysis, and which at one point Enrique describes as ‘monstrous’.
To date, the allegorical readings of La caza are abundant. While the rabbits are often read as a metaphor for a population of sickly, devastated Spaniards, the campsite is associated with Spain, and the hunters are usually equated with the impoverishment of Franco’s ultimately self-defeating legacy. From these interpretations, have risen a number of compelling readings that analyse intergenerational conflict, intragenerational difference, the theme of ageing, animalisation and dehumanisation, the role of technology and apparatuses, visibility and blindness, the relationship between censorship and self-censorship, and the notion of intertextuality.
Needless to say, scholarship on La caza has devoted considerable attention to the film’s masterful critique of the Franco dictatorship (1939–75), a critique made all the more impressive given the strict censorship laws to which the film’s production was subjected. In fact, the constraints of censorship are largely responsible for the innovative measures that Saura, along with his producer and henceforth lifetime collaborator, Elías Querejeta, had to engineer. This, in part, explains why after undergoing several script changes, not least of which included eliminating any overt national or historical references to the Civil War, the film relies so heavily on the embodied aesthetic of the landscape, as well as on framing and editing techniques that elicit a sense of confinement. From the opening credit sequence, which is a long take of agitated, caged ferrets, to the last final freeze-frame shot of Enrique running out of the desert panting for dear life, the film’s visual language of imprisonment functions on multiple levels – spatial, physical, emotional and psychological – and ingeniously replicates the very circumstances under which Saura and his crew were working. Of course, the characters reproduce this logic as well, since their psychological entrapment leads to a practice of self-censoring, articulated as a symptomatic and ultimately incurable pact of silence. Thus, in order to speak about Spain’s political and cultural climate of repression, Saura adopted a strategy of self-censorship, grafted onto the fiction of the text.
Worth noting is that the film was shot entirely on the location of a real former battle site outside of Madrid, a detail that has led some critics to perhaps overly emphasise the film’s neo-realist aesthetic, a claim that Saura himself has repeatedly contested. But for as authentic as the geographical location and its history are, the film’s mise en scène is anything but straightforwardly realist, with its high-contrast black and white generating quasi-surreal lighting extremes that oscillate between dark, impenetrable shadows and the bleached effects of underexposure, all of which are the result of the natural light of the sun. Moments of over and under-exposure, as we have seen, occur in the narrative as well. Underneath the veneer of silence, flashes of a persistent and untimely past ignite a flame that fuels the perpetual cycle of violence.
Beyond depicting the evolution of the repetitive cycle of violence, La caza also examines its origins. One point of interest that curiously has been given little attention is the cadaver of the unknown solider. Often cited as an inconsequential or excessively transparent object, the cadaver, preserved and kept secret in a cave, is arguably the most important object in the film and is significantly located at the very centre of the main action. While spatially it is placed in the centre of the cave (an old bunker from the war), which is located in the centre of the hillside, temporally its ‘revelation’ occurs at the middle of the film’s duration, indicating a decisive turning point in the narrative. Once the cadaver comes into view, what is symbolically brought to light (reiterated literally as José strikes a match in the cave to illuminate his ‘secret’) is the body as a site of loss.
But this body is paradoxically lost and never quite lost enough. In other words, it constitutes an absence that cannot be mourned. Similarly, the body’s presence, while conjuring a common history among the men, fails to solidify their homosocial bond. It is perhaps unsurprising that the two men in the cave scene should have opposing reactions to the unveiled secret of the dead soldier’s presence. This opposition underscores the fundamental tension between entering into the pact of preservation in which the lost object is guarded and shared, and wilfully casting it into oblivion, visually rendered in the film as leaving it in the dark. Between, on the one hand, the desire to witness and communicate this loss, and, on the other hand, the desire to keep it buried and thus out of sight, we begin to arrive at a deeper reading of the film: it is not simply that the hunters perpetuate a cycle of violence, but that they do so because they are unable to articulate and mourn their mutual loss.
For many critics, La caza stands as the neo-realist cornerstone of not only Saura’s oeuvre but also New Spanish Cinema. Whether we classify the film as neo-realist or not, its cinematic invention and visual articulation of repression is nothing shy of brilliant. In weaving together a multitude of surfaces and temporalities that create new ways of seeing what could not be said, La caza has distinguished itself as a classic that will engage viewers for decades to come.
Patricia M. Keller
Cast and Crew:
[Country: Spain. Production Company: Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas. Director: Carlos Saura. Screenwriters: Angelino Pons and Carlos Saura. Producer: Elías Querejeta. Cinematographer: Luis Cuadrado. Editor: Pablo González Del Amo. Music: Luis de Pablo. Cast: Ismael Merlo (José), Alfredo Mayo (Paco), José María Prada (Luis), Emilio Gutiérrez Caba (Enrique), Fernando Sánchez Polack (Juan), Violeta García (Carmen).]
Further Reading:
Roberto Cueto, Roberto, La Caza: 42 Años Después, Valencia, Ediciones de la Filmoteca, 2008.
Marvin D’Lugo, The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1991.
Marvin D’Lugo, ‘La caza [The Hunt]’, in Guide to the Cinema of Spain, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1997, pp. 43–4.
Marvin D’Lugo, ‘Landscape in Spanish Cinema’, in Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner (eds), Cinema and Landscape, Bristol, Intellect, 2010, pp. 117–30.
Sally Faulkner, ‘Ageing and Coming of Age in La caza (The Hunt, 1965)’, in A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University, 2006, pp. 145–74.
Marsha Kinder, ‘Carlos Saura: The Political Development of Individual Consciousness’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 3, 1979, pp. 14–25.
Marsha Kinder, ‘Sacrifice and Massacre: On the Cultural Specificity of Violence’, in Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993, pp. 136–96.
Katherine S. Kovacs, ‘The Plain in Spain: Geography and National Identity in Spanish Cinema’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1991, pp. 17–46.
Elena Medina de la Viña, ‘Una vuelta a nuestra memoria: La caza, de Carlos Saura’, in Quaderns de Cine, Vol. 3, 2008, pp. 113–19.
Antonio Monegal, ‘Images of War: Hunting the Metaphor’, in Jenaro Taléns and Santos Zunzunegui (eds), Hispanic Issues. Modes of Representation in Spanish Cinema, Vol. 16, 1998, pp. 203–15.
Felipe Aparicio Nevado, ‘“La Caza Del Hombre,” Recreación de un motive legendario, novelesco e histórico en La Caza de Carlos Saura’, Arbor, Vol. 187, No. 748, 2011, pp. 269–77.
S. García Ochoa, ‘“Mirarse en la pantalla”: El cine de Carlos Saura’, Hispanic Research Journal, Vol. 10, No. 4, September 2009, pp. 357–69.
Margarita Pillado-Miller, ‘La República va al doctor: Síntomas de la Guerra Civil en tres películas de Carlos Saura’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, 1997, pp. 129–40.
Augustín Sanchez Vidal, El cine de Carlos Saura, Zaragoza, Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada, 1988.
Carlos Saura and Angelino Fons, La Caza: Guión, Madrid, S.N., 1973.
Carlos Saura and Linda M. Willem, Carlos Saura: Interviews, Jackson, MS, University Press of Mississippi, 2003.
Schwartz, Spanish Film Directors (1950– 1985): 21 Profiles, Metuchen, NJ, Scarecrow Press, 1986.
John David Slocum, Violence and American Cinema, New York, NY, Routledge, 2001.
Guy H. Wood, ‘Thomas Hobbes y Carlos Saura: Una aproximación leviatánica a La caza’, Film Historia, Vol. 12, Nos. 1–2, 2002, internet resource, www.publicacions.ub.es/bibliotecadigital/ cinema/filmhistoria/2002/lacazahtm.
Guy H. Wood, ‘Plagios, plagas y descastados en La caza de Carlos Saura’, Letras Peninsulares, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2003, pp. 163–79.
Guy H. Wood, La caza de Carlos Saura: Un Estudio, Zaragoza, Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2010.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.