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Don’t Tell Victor Erice He Hasn’t Made a Film in 30 Years
The Spanish director tells us about his first feature since 1992, the mesmerizing Close Your Eyes, and the art he’s made in the time since.
Close Your Eyes follows a director, Miguel Garay (Manolo Soto), who started shooting a movie 30 years ago but then had to abandon it when his lead actor and best friend, Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado), walked off the set and disappeared. In 1992, he released A Dream of Light(also known as The Quince-Tree Sun, a direct translation of its original title, El Sol del Membrillo), a documentary following the artist Antonio López Garcia’s efforts to paint a quince tree growing in his backyard. This gently riveting, award-winning picture (which Erice describes as “undoubtedly my riskiest” and which turned out to be the last feature he’d release before Close Your Eyes) opens with an extended depiction of Garcia’s methodical and precise preparation: pulling and pinning strings across the tree, painting dotted lines through the quinces and the leaves so as to position them accurately within the canvas.
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