Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2008

Publication Title

Letras Peninsulares

First Page

7

Last Page

17

Abstract

With a distinguished career as a director of over thirty-five feature films, Carlos Saura has been a prominent figure within the international film community for nearly fifty years. One of his most critically-acclaimed works, Deprisa, deprisa [Hurry, Hurry], is a documentary-like portrayal of a group of friends - Pablo, Angela, Meca, and Sebas - engaged in ever-escalating acts of crime and violence in Madrid in the early 1980's. This is Saura's second film to deal with the topic of alienated urban youth. In 1959 his very first feature film, Los golfos [The Hooligans], focused on a young gang of thieves in one of Madrid's poorest neighborhoods. These were the children of Spaniards who emigrated to the city from rural communities in search of an economic prosperity that was never realized for them. Los golfos was thematically and stylistically similar to the Italian neorealist cinema that Saura had been exposed to during a week-long screening of films by De Sica, Visconti, Germi, Fellini and Antonioni at the Italian Institute of Culture in 1954. But Saura's all too realistic portrayal of the bleak social conditions in the Spanish capital during the Franco regime caused censorship problems which resulted in a three year delay for the release of the film and sixteen minutes being cut from its length. Censorship had been abolished by 1980 when Saura returned to the urban genre with Deprisa, deprisa, so he was able to achieve a degree of realistic detail that would have been unthinkable during the dictatorship.

Rights

This article was originally published in Letras Peninsulares, 21.1

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