el espíritu de la colmena (w&d víctor erice, w. ángel fernández, santos de blázquez)

Erice’s film lurks at the back of the room when people who know about film talk about film. It possesses a mystique, one of those films which has to be seen,  but which not that many have actually watched. It is one of several cult films where the protagonists are children (Night of the Hunter, Come and See, Ivan’s Childhood, Kes etc). I had managed to spend fifty years or so not watching it, but last night it finally caught up with me. It’s a woozy, mesmerising journey through childhood in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. 1940, the Republicans have lost, a generation is about to go into political lockdown. Ana and Isabel are sisters living in a rural village with their parents, who have survived the war. They are girls who have a vague awareness of the wider world, something they pick up through osmosis, perhaps. Which is a plausible way of communicating how we are all affected by those things which happen beyond the horizon, even though we are not directly conscious of this, or even fully aware of what those things beyond the horizon actually are. Erice threads tropes - Frankenstein, shaving, the taste of an apple. Was it just me who saw in the dead republican an echo of Guevara laid out on a table in La Higuera? Nothing much happens and at the same time all sorts of things are happening. The director plays with time, allowing the film to reveal or remember how childhood is a time of endless time, of games that always hide their true meaning, a time of fierce competition, quiet fears, small joys.

nb - in English this film is called The Spirit of the Beehive

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.