Spain, 1973. A slow cultural awakening is underway, with the country’s dictator Francisco Franco ill and the armed forces more concerned about the armed Basque separatist organization ETA – it was the year they murdered Admiral Carrero Blanco – than about artsy, rebellious films. The Spanish Civil War and its effects still could not be discussed, but insinuations could be made. And Víctor Erice is a master at making subtle, poetic and effective allusions.
That year, his first film The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena) won the best film award, the Golden Shell, at the San Sebastián Festival. Now, fifty years later, at the age of 83 and with just three more films under his belt, Erice returns to the festival as an acclaimed master of Spanish cinema. He will receive the Donostia Prize for his contribution to cinematographic art, an award that will be added to many others he has won for each of his films.
The Spirit of the Beehive takes place in a small town in Castille in 1940, the year of Erice’s birth and a year after Franco had come to power in Spain. It is the story of a family that goes to extraordinary lengths to live as if nothing has happened: the father writes metaphysical texts about his bees, the mother writes letters that are little more than bottles cast into the ocean. The two daughters Isabel and Ana, ages 8 and 6, learn arithmetic in rhymes mixed with prayers offered to the souls in Purgatory.
Cinema becomes the disruptive element here and will be a constant in Erice’s work. In Ana’s fertile imagination, Frankenstein and a Republican fugitive mix. and she tries to contact a spirit to understand the magic of cinema. The luminous, yearning photography, so reminiscent of classical Spanish painters, is by the magnificent DP Luis Cuadrado, who has inspired generations of cinematographers. The Spirit of the Beehive was met with enthusiastic acclaim and received several awards at film festivals.
While audiences waited impatiently, the director’s next film took ten years to arrive. The South (El Sur) is another post-war story in which a girl, Estrella, who ages from 11 to 16 years old in the film, discovers – again with the help of cinema – the burden of memories and the past.
In The Spirit of the Beehive as well as in The South, religion, politics, and money are not discussed; in fact, very little is discussed. The characters write a little, and listen and imagine a lot. Especially the girls, who are the protagonists of both films. By the time The South came out in 1983, Franco was dead and more things could be shown: the father refuses to attend church, the mother is referred to as a “rebuked teacher,” and Estrella dreams of a mythical South where it is warm, there are palm trees and everyone is happy. The South was planned as a two-part film, of which only the first part could be made. Ironically, it’s the part that takes place in the north.
Nine years after The South, Dream of Light (El sol del membrillo, sometimes called The Pear Tree Sun) was released in 1992. It could be called a quasi-documentary – I would not offend the filmmaker by calling it “false” – in which Spanish painter Antonio López works in his studio trying to portray the essence of the sun and to paint a quince tree. The artist is accompanied, cared for, and interrupted by migrant workers, his family, and other characters. López, a generous and affable man, talks about art while describing the tree, its fruits and the effect of the sun on them. Erice’s gaze follows the sun and the inhabitants of the house, widening the perspective only with a group of elegantly dressed people, probably art dealers. In the end, it is cinema that can give an epilogue to unfinished paintings, with a camera on stage and lights that give the quince tree what the sun could not.
During the next 30 years, Erice “entertained” himself with short films and fragments of ensemble films. Just when his fans had lost hope for another full-length feature, he directed Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos), which premiered at Cannes this year. In it, a Spanish director searches for an actor, who vanished 30 years ago but whose body was never found.
Víctor Erice has the ability to make deceptively simple films, with various contexts, images and sounds that get into the spectator’s brain, sometimes to play there, sometimes elusive, and at other times remaining there to live. The golden light, the characters who feel so close, open shots of plains swept by the wind, the eyes of Ana Torrent (a young girl in The Spirit of the Beehive, an adult woman in Close Your Eyes) all remain in the memory. Depending on the viewer, these may include the images of houses that seem abandoned, cypress roads, corpses, melancholic music, the whistle of a train, the feeling of sadness at the end of the film — followed by the joy of having been able to see it, albeit fleetingly. At the center of each of Erice’s films, surrounded by great formal beauty, there is a search for identity, both individual and collective, and a reflection on memories, their weight and their importance to survival. Topics that all audiences relate to.
Critic Deborah Young called Close Your Eyes “a passionate and attractive reflection on art, memory, identity.” Víctor Erice closed the circle, because – despite the 50 years that have passed – this does not seem very distant from the end of The Spirit of the Beehive in which, to attract a spirit, the girl repeats, “I am Ana, I am Ana, I am Ana”.
More about Victor Erice
Close Your Eyes
San Sebastian 2023: The Verdict
Cannes 2023: The Verdict
