throughout the movie there are repeated shots of chicken feet of something that looks like chicken feet inside the refrigerator. anyone know the meaning of these shots? it happens many times throughout the film, anybody have any ideas. my thoughts are maybe it has something to do with some aspect of spanish history or politics, that I as an american just don't know enough about to understand.
Hello :)
Spanish people use chicken feet to make stock and they keep it in the fridge, i think there is no significant relevance to this during the film, the only one i can think of is the theme of death which is prominent throughout and obviously the chicken is dead.
Vicki
I am neither Spanish nor Southamerian, therefore my answer is irrelevant with Spanish cultures. But is it possible that those chicken feet are used to indicate the consecutive affairs? Stuffs put in the fridge is supposed to be eaten within a few days, thus every scene exposing the chicken feet should take place just within a short period of days. Since the scenes of this film change from one to one without clear cut (it really puzzles me somehow) and people may get confused with affairs that actually happen at very different times, the chicken feet might be considered as an indicator of the order of some scenes in order that the audience is able to seperate them from other momeries. I am going to re-watch the film to see whether my guess is right.
shareSome such characteristics of Ana's childhood feature in Saura’s experiences. Below is a quote from Carlos Saura:
‘my mother always had plates of chicken feet in the fridge…chicken’s feet are used for witchcraft, making spells, but the first idea was simple…I’d open the fridge and there was a plate of chicken’s feet’ .
This film is all about childhood experiencing - and its a wonderful attempt by Saura to re-describe his childhood in the form of a nine year old child, whose social environment is reminiscent of his own - a francoist context - the death of her father symbolic of Franco's death. Therfore, you will find that many of the images and sequences in this film have featured in his own childhood in one form or another.
Saura: ‘What I am trying to say is that at that age you’ve no idea where it is that you are going, only that people are taking you somewhere, leading you, pulling you and you’re frightened’ .
Many Spanish directors of this time period deal with issues surrounding childhood. The child protagonists, existing inside post-1970’s Spanish cinema, encompass anxieties felt in Spain in response to the Civil War and the ensuing oppressive phases channelled by Franco’s regime . The anxieties derive from the fear that the future of Spain will be occupied by the forthcoming generation, whose childhood is troubled due to the unsettling environment of which they are a part, and which might impinge on the stability of their successive adulthood. Spanish directors, obsessed with notions of childhood, were themselves silent witnesses or mute witnesses - and the adults in such films take for granted the child's experience.
Hence, the childhoods of such directors were ensnared inside an unstable country. It was a time of uncertainty and reliance, characterised by an imperfect biological state, and nurtured by supposed superiors. Few directors have therefore found poetic ways to re-describe their own childhood by utilising especially sensitive child protagonists.
I know pretty much everything you see in a serious film is there for a reason but the chicken feet were a puzzle. Thanks ever so much for explaining it.
"I left everything, and everyone. But no one, no one has ever left me."
Oh, well, the movie is called Raise Ravens , right?
Ravens and crows and chickens...(Oh My!)
Carlos Saura uses symbolism to represent a character or a situation. I think the chicken feet in the refrigerator symbolizes Ana's inability to accept her parents' death. Ana has been frozen (refrigerator) in the denial stage that's why she can't move on (we use our feet to walk and move forward).
http://is.gd/i59aVM
Like someone else said, it has to do with the theme of death, central to the film.
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Luis Buñuel found chickens very spooky and many of his films contain a chicken reference, often in the form of a rooster crowing (which links with Jesus being abandoned three times by Peter "before the cock crows"). One of his films even has someone playing with chicken feet as a puppet; apparently you can pull the bone and cause the toes to open and shut.
Buñuel was one of Saura's models, and as many posters have noted above, the trick may have occurred to him spontaneously for all these reasons at once (his master Buñuel, the reference to abandonment in the Gospel, a reminder of death à la Yorick's skull in Hamlet, the uses of chicken feet for making soup and in witchcraft, being a "preserved meat" frozen in time, the avian title of the movie that comes from a popular Spanish saying about the dangers of having evil children: "Raise ravens/crows and they'll pluck your eyes out").