Cinematic time and the question of possibility in Carlos Saura’s Elisa, vida mía (1977)

This essay offers a theoretical approach to reading the relationship between narrative, image and temporality in Carlos Saura’s intensely philosophical yet understudied film Elisa, vida mía (1977). Through close readings, I analyse how the film creates a series of openings or spaces from which to reflect on cinematic time as a reciprocal process of folding and unfolding, entangled with cycles of arrivals and departures, experience and perception, memories and dreams, and illuminance and violence. I also explore the visualization of loss as an essential aspect of Saura’s cinematic construction of subjectivity and spectatorship. Ultimately, this article argues that in Elisa, Saura breaks with a system of suture to establish a cinema of loss or ‘cinema of wounds’ that not only depicts loss as a narrative element, but also integrates a structure of loss into the film’s temporal and visual composition. This loss constitutes a vital form of possibility when it, in turn, becomes part of the spectator’s viewing experience.