Thoughts on Victor Erice
Over the past week I watched all four features by Spanish director Victor Erice. Since the release of his highly acclaimed debut film, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Erice has on average released a new film every 16.6 years. First was El Sur (1983), an adaptation of a novella that Erice only shot the first half of before his producers shut down production, then The Quince Tree Sun (1992), a documentary-narrative hybrid about painter Antonio López García, and now Close Your Eyes (2023), his first film in over 30 years that has just been released in the U.S (Erice is 84 years old). I’m not sure Erice’s career has any comparison: a highly touted filmmaker at a young age who struggled for decades afterwards to get projects off the ground, now being celebrated for his semi-autobiographical swan song, a meditation on aging, memory, and the power of cinema itself.
The Spirit of the Beehive is famous without exactly being canonical: I never once heard of it during my years in film school. It wasn’t until last year, as I was curating a list of great films about childhood made for adults, that the film came to my attention. Beehive stars 6-year old Ana Torrent as Ana, a girl living in a remote part of the Castilian Plateau in 1940, one year after Franco’s fascists emerged victorious in the Spanish Civil War. Torrent certainly belongs in the pantheon of great child performances: almost never have I seen a child’s inner life portrayed with such grace, and such mystery. There is no narration of the older Ana reflecting on her past, as is so common with these types of stories (and which Erice misguidedly implements in El Sur); instead, we see the world through Ana’s eyes and are left guessing what her internal life is.
A consistent theme through all of Erice’s work is the power of cinema, the way it informs our understanding of reality. Erice has said that as a child, “cinema was an introduction to reality.” The same is true for Ana, who sees a print of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) that arrives via a mobile cinema to her dusty, forgotten village. The film captivates Ana, and she becomes convinced afterwards that Frankenstein’s monster is real, partly due to her conniving older sister, who tries to scare Ana by pretending to be the monster. At the end of the film, Ana encounters Frankenstein’s monster, who is friendly with the girl. The obvious interpretation is that this scene is a fantasy of Ana’s, but Erice leaves open the possibility that this girl actually summoned the monster into being through her imagination.
In El Sur we have another young girl living in Franco’s Spain, this time named Estrella, whose aloof father frequents the cinema. We soon learn that the father is obsessed with fictional actress Irene Rios, watching her films repeatedly instead of spending time with the family. Estrella spies on her father in a cafe writing a letter to Rios, discovering that the two were lovers in the father’s past life in the south of Spain and that the father’s love is ongoing. For the father, cinema is a vehicle for making this love permanent: Rios is not just a fading image from his past, but a living, breathing figure on the silver screen. It’s plausible that without the power of the movies, the father would have an easier time moving on and be more present with his family. But he remains entranced by his former love, an example of the potential dangers that cinema presents. Trapped between worlds, he dies by his own hand when Estrella is a young woman.
In The Quince Tree Sun, the mechanics of cinema are directly interrogated. The film is ostensibly a documentary about Antonio López García’s painstaking attempt to paint a quince tree in his backyard, but from the beginning it is clear that Erice has something up his sleeve. Instead of long takes of López García painting, as one would see in a Frederick Wiseman film, Erice is constantly cutting between closeups and wide shots, bringing into question how the film was made, since López García is clearly performing certain bits multiple times for the camera. While Erice manipulates reality for this “documentary” film, López García manipulates the quince tree, planting beams around the tree and attaching strings to its leaves so that he can adjust the tree over time to account for the weight of the quinces pulling the branches down. López García is attempting is to capture a hyperrealist image of the quince tree in the morning sun, but since this specific image only existed in one instant, the painter must control the tree over the months he works on the project to appear the way he needs it to.
At the end of the film, things become much more obviously fictional, as López García appears to die while he models for a painting his wife is working on. Intercut with this scene is the quince tree at night, its fruit now on the ground in the winter, but now we see a film camera running while aimed at the quinces, along with artificial lights that help the camera capture its images. Here Erice is putting his cards on the table: this film is an artistic creation, no different than a purely fictional project. This unassuming mode of metafiction is reminiscent of the works of Abbas Kiarostami, who also enjoyed pulling back the curtain in films such as Close-Up (1990) and Taste of Cherry (1997) (it’s not surprising that the two directors worked together on an art installation in 2007). Erice and Kiarostami posit that there is no “capturing” reality through documentary; all art is a creation of the artist, who uses any means necessary to investigate the truth of human experience.
The truth embedded in cinema takes on a different form in Close Your Eyes. The film is about an actor named Julio Arenas who mysteriously disappeared in 1990 while filming a movie directed by his friend, Miguel Garay. The film was never completed (an obvious reference to Erice’s troubles with El Sur), and Miguel, distraught by the loss of his friend, retires from filmmaking and moves to a remote coastal village to live out his years fishing and occasionally writing. The bulk of the film takes place in 2012, when Miguel appears on a show about missing persons to discuss his friend Julio, who is presumed dead. After the episode of the show airs, a social worker contacts Miguel to inform him that Julio is in fact alive, living in a home for the elderly. The catch: Julio (who now goes by Gardel) has no memory of his past life, having experienced a mysterious, traumatic event that wiped his brain clean.
Miguel visits Julio to see if he can jog his old friend’s memory, to no avail. Julio’s daughter, Ana (played by Spirit of the Beehive’s Ana Torrent, now middle-aged), has no more luck when she confronts her father. Eventually, Miguel hatches a new plan: he recruits a friend to bring the film reels of the two completed scenes from Miguel’s film to screen at a local, dilapidated cinema for Julio. Maybe, Miguel thinks, the film will awaken Julio’s memory. His friend shows up with the reels before chastising him: “You think a movie can bring about a miracle?” he asks dismissively. Miguel isn’t sure: he gave up a career in film, after all, so who is he to argue for the transformative power of movies?
Then we arrive at the scene that feels like the culmination of Erice’s career: the two scenes from the unfinished film are projected on good ol’ 16mm film (Close Your Eyes was shot digitally and is heavily imbued with nostalgia for celluloid) to a small audience, including Julio. Miguel and Ana frequently turn to Julio as he watches his former self on the big screen, looking for any indication of recognition. Julio is clearly captivated by what he is watching, but we are unsure what is occurring internally. The second scene involves Julio’s character bringing a young woman to her dying father at the father’s wish. The young woman, in extreme close-up, weeps as her father expires and Julio’s character attempts to comfort her. As the film abruptly cuts to black, Erice cuts to Julio in the audience, who closes his eyes plaintively. Then the film we are watching cuts to black.
What was Julio experiencing? Did he recognize himself? Erice doesn’t provide firm answers, but as the credits rolled, I was left feeling that maybe, just maybe, movies can bring about miracles.