cerrar los ojos (w&d víctor erice; w. michel gaztambide)

I have never, to the best of my knowledge, watched Erice’s classic film, The Spirt of the Beehive. Or at least, I don’t think I have. Perhaps one day I will watch it and go - oh yes, I remember seeing this in Winchester or York or London or Adelaide. And that would be an entirely appropriate method of remembering, according to this, Erice’s third film. Close your Eyes deals with the issues of memory and ageing, in a luminous, humane fashion. As the third near three hour film I have seen in a row at Cinemateca, it is a wonderful correlative to the supposed need to cram a film with beats and desperate rhythms. Film is storytelling as much as it is percussive, and Erice’s meditative mystery tale is an exemplar of this.

Its simplicity is a large part of its effectiveness. A TV program about strange disappearances contacts Miguel, a director who has long since quit the business. The TV show is making an episode about Julio, the protagonist of the director’s last, abortive movie, who went missing overnight. Due to the actor’s disappearance, the film was never finished, and Miguel’s career fizzled out. Not that he is bitter: he has found a kind of peace living in a small coastal community, with his dog and his translations and spells as a fisherman. But the call to participate in the program will lead to a rupture in this quiet reclusive life, as he goes in search of not so much a meaning for his lost art, as a function. At the heart of the film, perhaps, is the idea that film is both eternal and functional, on a very straightforward basis. Looking at a screen is more than just a way of passing time: it can also change the way your mind works, the way you think, the way you see the world and what is in front of your eyes.

There is something of Prospero about Miguel, albeit a calm Prospero, reconciled to his fate. HIs art will reconfigure those things which have gone awry in the past. Cerrar los Ojos is a valedictory work of art, reminding this viewer of the way in which film is capable of unfolding layers of story and meaning without resorting to histrionics.