Ageing and Coming of Age in Carlos Saura's La caza ( The Hunt, 1965)

In a frequently-cited interview, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón declared that Carlos Saura's third feature film, "dio la vuelta al cine que se hacía en España. En cuanto a tener un lenguaje aseado, para mí hay un cine español de antes de La caza y otro después" (Torres 28). However, the status of Saura's 1965 La caza as a watershed film has not always been undisputed. Its potential was intuited before the shoot by one of the film's acting leads, Alfredo Mayo, but many producers rejected the project until it was taken on by Elías Querejeta, with whom Saura was to work in creative tandem in twelve further features over the following sixteen years.1 The reception of the film on its release was also mixed. It was championed by journals like Nuestro cine, featuring twice on its front page (Monterde 113n28),yet questioned by Film Ideal (Sánchez Vidal 44). While its impact on Spanish [End Page 457] film-going audiences was negligible, as was typical of the Nuevo Cine Español,2 it caused a stir at foreign film festivals, such as Berlin (where it was awarded the Silver Bear), New York, London and Acapulco, although it had been rejected by Cannes (Gómez 364; Sánchez Vidal 44). La caza has enjoyed more consistent acclaim in later years, and has been praised by both practitioners of, and commentators on, Spanish cinema, especially those concerned with its auteurist traditions.3 Over almost forty years of scholarship on La caza, our understanding of the importance of the film, and of the nature of what Gutiérrez Aragón terms its "lenguaje aseado," has evolved. Critical responses are parables for their own times, as they shift in focus from emphasizing the film's political import in accounts written during, and immediately following, the dictatorship, to wider concerns in recent years. Thus Manuel Villegas López, who published the first Spanish book on the NCE in 1967, would stress the indirect political critique encrypted in La caza, in a style of expression which is itself indirect and encrypted—the result, no doubt, of the time of writing. He describes the film variously as a "máscara. Todo está detrás," a "fórmula [que] es preciso desarrollar para llegar a su verdadero y concreto significado" (83), a "kábala," a "jeroglífico, cada uno de [sus elementos] significa una cosa y todos juntos, otra" (85), and finally "Lo que se verá, si se puede, está más allá de lo que se ve: es el secreto del film" (86). This emphasis on the film's "secret" critique remained central to analyses well into the 1980s. Even though the regime was over and the dictator dead, the fight against Francoism on the ideological front continued in the pages of film criticism. These accounts of La caza tended to focus on its evasion of censorship. In particular, the rabbit hunt was understood as a metaphor for the Spanish Civil War; consequently the self-destruction of the rabbit-hunters/war-victors at the end of the film looked forward to the inevitable collapse of the dictatorship established by that conflict (see Hopewell 71-76; Higginbotham 79; Kinder 160; Torreiro 320; Monegal 203-08). [End Page 458] In 1988, Agustín Sánchez Vidal suggested that political readings of the film were tied to the time of its reception: Si en su día la construcción arquetípica de los personajes y el sentido parabólico de la película imponían por encima de cualquier otra consideración una lectura política, la perspectiva actual libera a La caza de esas servidumbres coyunturales. (48) Echoing this idea that changing times free La caza from the debates of its immediate socio-historical context, critics have suggested further lines of enquiry: these range from the film's exploration

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