Vic­tor Erice: ​‘Cin­e­ma is a form of destiny’

It has been 31 years since we last saw a fea­ture film by the Span­ish mae­stro Vic­tor Erice, and that film was the tran­scen­dent doc­u­men­tary the ephemer­al nature of art, The Quince Tree Sun. He remains most well know for his 1973 debut, The Spir­it of the Bee­hive, about a young girl’s trans­for­ma­tive encounter with cin­e­ma, and he fol­lowed it up in 1983 with a melan­choly study of an emo­tion­al­ly estranged father and daugh­ter in The South. Close Your Eyes is a scin­til­lat­ing and unspeak­ably pow­er­ful addi­tion to this small but per­fect­ly formed cor­pus of films, telling of a film­mak­er attempt­ing to find the miss­ing actor who strayed from his incom­plete final film.

LWLies: When you start­ed work­ing on the script for this film, did the sto­ry derive from an image, an object, or some­thing else?

Erice: The idea for Close Your Eyes was gen­er­at­ed by the mem­o­ry of my film The South, and from the frus­tra­tion that came from it being unfin­ished [due to bud­getary restric­tions, Erice was only able to make half of the pro­posed fea­ture]. What this new film talks about is anoth­er unfin­ished film as well as the whole idea of ​“unfin­ished­ness” and what that means in art and life. I always had this idea float­ing around in my mind, but Close Your Eyes only real­ly took shape when I con­coct­ed the char­ac­ter of the direc­tor. The ori­gin, then, is not an image or an object, but a very per­son­al experience.

Close Your Eyes address­es the idea of an artist look­ing back at the work he’s made. Can you talk a lit­tle bit about your rela­tion­ship to your own films. 

With cin­e­ma, I main­tain a rela­tion­ship that I would describe as ​‘exis­ten­tial’. What that means is that cin­e­ma, for me, is every­thing. It’s not just a pro­fes­sion­al occu­pa­tion. But this idea of the exis­ten­tial con­cerns all aspects of cin­e­ma: my work as writer and direc­tor of the film; my enjoy­ment as a spec­ta­tor; my analy­sis of the cin­e­ma I see; as a teacher in work­shops. It’s total. I may be called a pedant for say­ing this, but Jorge Luis Borges was once asked, ​‘What is lit­er­a­ture?’ and he respond­ed, ​‘It’s a form of des­tiny.’ I don’t know whether I can sim­ply adopt that stance, but that is what I feel: cin­e­ma is a form of destiny.

When did you first devel­op this idea of cin­e­ma as this all-envelop­ing thing?

To answer this we should go back to the ori­gin. The first time I went to the cin­e­ma I was five-and-a-half years old. It was a rev­e­la­tion. I had an expe­ri­ence that was exact­ly the same as Ana in The Spir­it of the Bee­hive. It was an expe­ri­ence of hor­ror; of com­plete ter­ror. The film I watched wasn’t James Whale’s Franken­stein, it was Roy William Neill’s The Scar­let Claw from 1944, a Sher­lock Holmes film, but it was a very sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence. I doc­u­ment­ed all of this in my short film La Morte Rouge. So we’re talk­ing about 1946, it was post­war Europe, and the land­scape was in a com­plete state of ruin. I could see in my coun­try and in the streets of my city the direct con­se­quences of this hor­ror. And it wasn’t just the Span­ish Civ­il War, but World War Two as well.

The Scar­let Claw, a fic­tion­al work, just took me to real­i­ty. I could see the con­ti­nu­ity, the rela­tion­ship between film and the suf­fer­ing and des­o­la­tion that was present in the streets. In that film, peo­ple dressed like peo­ple in my city. If it had been a film set in the Roman Empire and the actors were wear­ing peri­od cos­tume, maybe I wouldn’t have felt such a strong con­nec­tion, but because it was so real I felt it straight away. Also of note is that the mur­der­er in the film was a post­man, and he dressed exact­ly like the post­men in my town. So when­ev­er the post­man came, I would hide in the cor­ner. For me, cin­e­ma was an intro­duc­tion to real­i­ty. All my films have a his­to­ry of some­thing that hap­pened in reality.

This idea of young peo­ple hav­ing this rev­e­la­to­ry expe­ri­ence with cin­e­ma in The Spir­it of the Bee­hive and La Morte Rouge is reversed in Close Your Eyes, as this rev­e­la­tion occurs clos­er to the end and to some­one much older.

The ques­tion that I leave in the end of Close Your Eyes, where blood ties and friend­ship haven’t been able to revive a person’s lost mem­o­ry: is that some­thing that a film can do? That is the chal­lenge. And there will be many answers to this ques­tion; as many answers, in fact, as there are spec­ta­tors. A key ele­ment is that there are moments where actors look direct­ly into the cam­era. What I want­ed was for the actors to be look­ing at the spec­ta­tors. I want to cre­ate a dia­logue with the audi­ence. The debate, then, is has the daugh­ter failed in bring­ing back her father’s mem­o­ry? Has the best friend failed also? For an actor, is it much more impor­tant to have one film that helps to fill in the blanks? We know how actors live their lives. Going back to La Morte Rouge, this mur­der­er post­man is an actor who dressed up as a post­man, so the film is about this ques­tion: what can an actor be? For me, that’s fundamental.

You show that Miguel, the direc­tor char­ac­ter, has once writ­ten a book about his­tor­i­cal ruins which he re-dis­cov­ers in a book shop. Do you have a per­son­al inter­est in the explo­ration of the past?

The truth is that for this film I’ve had to use a con­ven­tion that is used in thrillers. Dis­cov­er­ing some­thing that hap­pens that is unknown, and thus being inspired to take a jour­ney. And I used this device con­scious­ly, to get more finan­cial sup­port. My pre­vi­ous film, The Quince Tree Sun, was very rad­i­cal: it had no actors, had no script what­so­ev­er, but it was a real­ly mod­est pro­duc­tion. But for this film I need­ed a lot more finan­cial sup­port; I had to go through the var­i­ous TV sta­tions, the min­istry of cul­ture, and I had to play their game. And as such, they want­ed to see a script in advance. And so it’s the same as some­one like Pedro Cos­ta – we both used to work out­side of the sys­tem. And with this film, I am inside the sys­tem. And it’s the con­ces­sion I had to make to be able to talk to peo­ple again. The chal­lenge for me in this film was how to move from the idea of the enig­ma – which is some­thing that’s miss­ing – to the mys­tery – which is some­thing unan­swered and beguil­ing. This is a strat­e­gy to get fund­ing. A friend of mine jok­ing­ly said that by doing this I was enter­ing ​‘ene­my territory’.

And yet it feels like it’s unmis­tak­ably like a Vic­tor Erice film. One aspect that is dif­fer­ent is the dig­i­tal aes­thet­ic.

I’ve worked with dig­i­tal before. And actu­al­ly in this film there is a bit where I work with film, in the mak­ing of the apoc­ryphal film-with­in-a-film, The Farewell Gaze. My opin­ion about dig­i­tal is that it has giv­en us this unprece­dent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­trol images, and this is extra­or­di­nary. But it’s also a fun­da­men­tal change to the lan­guage and gram­mar of cin­e­ma. Now, we’re not cap­tur­ing images as the Lumière broth­ers orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed; now we are man­u­fac­tur­ing images. We’re in this place of absolute abstrac­tion where even arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence may one day be able to make a film. For me what is clear is that dig­i­tal cin­e­ma is not an audio-visu­al medi­um. It’s not the same as film. Audio­vi­su­al is not cin­e­ma any more, and I’m quite clear about this. It’s not about cap­tur­ing light and sound. That is to say, we, the film­mak­ers, are not chang­ing the world in front of the cam­era, but we are chang­ing the image we cap­ture of the world from behind the cam­era. For me, this is a ter­ri­ble loss for artists everywhere.

How much dig­i­tal manip­u­la­tion did you par­take in with this film?

None. Some slight light cor­rec­tion, but prac­ti­cal­ly no post-pro­duc­tion. With dig­i­tal images it’s about cal­cu­la­tion. The direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy doesn’t need to make the same prac­ti­cal cal­cu­la­tions and mea­sure­ments that they once did. Now what a direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy needs is a good colourist – some­one who can manip­u­late the image. From the time of the Lumière broth­ers – and I’m not com­ing from a roman­tic point of view, I’m not nos­tal­gic for this era – the only thing that’s left is the cin­e­mas them­selves. But the places where spec­ta­tors go to watch films are also dis­ap­pear­ing. Now peo­ple watch film on TV, com­put­ers and mobile phones. The true place to watch a film is in the cin­e­ma. But the big cor­po­ra­tions are get­ting rid of them. I think they should be kept. It draws me back to the mid­dle-ages where poet­ry was spo­ken in pub­lic rooms or squares, and I see cin­e­mas as serv­ing a sim­i­lar func­tion. When I was a child, see­ing a film meant being out of the house, with my fam­i­ly, with my friends, social­is­ing. It is pos­si­ble that cin­e­mas are resid­ual now, and that’s what hap­pen­ing. It’s an anthro­po­log­i­cal change.

Is Close Your Eyes your last film?

Some crit­ics have referred to it as my ​‘swan­song’, but I’m resist­ing that as it means my des­tiny is a ceme­tery, and I want more than that.