University of Texas Press Society for Cinema & Media Studies
Interior Gardens: Victor Erice's "Dream of Light" and the "Bodegón" Tradition Author(s): Linda C. Ehrlich Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Winter, 1995), pp. 22-36 Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225834 Accessed: 31/05/2010 15:34 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=texas. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
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InteriorGardens:VictorErice'sDreamof Lightand the Bodeg6nTradition by Linda C. Ehrlich
D6nde os vi yo, nostalgicaspostales? En qu6 cinemaplayeroal airelibre o en qu6'lbum de buqueslineales? -"Invierno postal,"RafaelAlberti' Victor Erice's most recent film, Dream of Light (aka The Sun of the Quince [El sol del membrillo], 1992) moves beyond his earlier preoccupation with the periods of transition following the Spanish Civil Warto a focus on a subject resembling the still life (the bodeg6n), with its sense of familiarityand mystery. In his first two films, The Spirit of the Beehive (El espiritt2de la colmena, 1973) and The South (El Sur, 1983), the director's emphasis was on figures who emerge from the light in the manner of paintings by late sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury masters like Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Vel"izquez,Francisco Zurbaran, and Bartolome Esteban Murillo.2 In Dream of Light, which won the 1992 International Critics' Prize and the Jury Prize at Cannes, Erice follows the light as it plays quixotically with a different kind of subject, the quince tree in the courtyard of the house of Spanish artist Antonio L6pez Garcia.3The artistic decisions Erice makes in his third film call to mind decisions made by masters of seventeenth-century still life painting in which each object proclaims its own name and yet no object is a statement capable of standing on its own. Autumnal Figures. In his prefilm introduction during the 1992 New YorkFilm Festival, Erice spoke of the two protagonistsof the film: the artist in the autumn of his life, and the quince tree reflected in the first days of autumn (figure 1). Working without scripted scenario, professional actors, or a prearranged budget, Erice and his staff recorded on camera the progress of one artist'sstruggle to capture on canvas his feelings for this tree, which (we later learn) is associated with childhood memories.4 The two and a half hours of the film are structured solely around the exuberant and painful steps in the (ultimately unsuccessful) painting of this one canvas. All this might bring to mind films like Henri-Georges Clouzet's The Mystery of Picasso (Le Myst&rePicasso, 1955), where Picasso paints on a specially devised translucent canvas, or Jacques Rivette'sLa Belle Noiseuse (1992), about LindaC. Ehrlichis currentlyassistantprofessorof Japaneseand cinema, Universityof Tennessee,Knoxville.She is the co-editorof CinematicLandscapes:Observationson the VisualArts and Cinemaof ChinaandJapan. of TexasPress,PO. Box7819,Austin,TX78713-7819 Copyright? 1995by the University
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Figure1. Thepaintermarkingthe quincetree(Courtesyof RosebudFilms,S.L. [Madrid]).
the intense give-and-take between an aging and reluctant painter and his beau tiful, equally ambivalent model. But Dream of Light has none of the former film's flamboyant dramatics nor the latter film's exhausting psychological dynamics, with its submerged but explosive eroticism. Appropriate to the "two protagonists"- man and tree - Erice's film is instead a profoundly simple exploration of the exactness of art and life and the integro (integrity) of the artistic and cinematic model as affected by the flow of time. Equally striking is Erice's editing, which transfers the film from the realm of documentary to that of storytelling. Erice called the editing period "eight months of reflection, following the eight weeks of active filming," which resulted in three hours of usable footage.5 The director's extremely reticent camera style allows the viewer a multiplicity of ways to become involved with the film, and the narrative is gently nudged forward just at the point when the viewer might start to lose interest. Erice's decision to remain resolutely focused on the artist and on this one painting and yet to insert at intervals subjective records of the world around the artist calls to mind qualities of exactness and subjectivity in Spanish painting such as the bodeg6n. The bodeg6n was a term first used in Spain for a rustic eating place and then applied to works combining genre and still life.6 According to the Diccionario de la lengua castellana (1726), the bodeg6n is defined as "those canvases where pieces of meat and fish, and poor people's foodstuffs, are painted."'7 The path toward general acceptance of this form was not a smooth one, even when Cinema Journal 34, No. 2, Winter 1995
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it was considered religious allegory. As Francisco Pacheco (1564-1654) wrote in his Arte de la pintura (Seville, 1649), paintings of flowers and fruits "can be very entertaining. But painters should try to put greater care in paint.... such as figures and animals which are more highly thought ing living things, of."8 Like Antonio L6pez's choice of the quince tree as his artist's model, the work of Juan SianchezCotain(1561-1627) focuses, in a calm, solemn manner, on what is most unassuming.9 A still life like Cotin's Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (San Diego, Fine Arts Gallery) requires viewers of the painting to humble themselves before the objects while also allowing the seemingly mundane to appear in a transfigured light. Writing of the bodegones of Cotin, Norman Bryson discusses the inversion and awakeningof vision evoked by such paintings, a state in which the viewer is separated from established modes of seeing.1o The lack of a fixed vanishing point in such a still life adds to a sense of eternity, while the sculpturalquality of the objects allows for the introduction of a sense of monumentality. In Cotin's painting, the spherical quince and cabbage are suspended on strings, while the cut melon and whole cucumber rest on a table close to the picture plane, as if seen through a window. This frameworkgives the impression of a window inside a window. Bryson notes that these objects are shown as a kind of "geometric space [that] replaces creatural space, the space around the body that is known by touch."" Tension between the spiritual and the material becomes the very content of the painting. The light, entering from the upper right-hand corner, and the seemingly infinite dark backgrounddraw our attention not only to the diagonal composition and alternating color scheme but also to the way all the objects but the cucumber seem less than perfect in shape or maturation. In Dream of Light, the artist'sapproachto the quince tree is equally mathematical, essentially negating any sense of exterior space. Antonio L6pez places nails in the ground to mark the exact position of his feet before the canvas, and he constructs a frame around the tree, hanging a weight to marka central point. Erice places his camera with equal care, often in the same relationship to the painter that Antonio L6pez assumes toward the tree. Like the artist'swork habits, Erice's film itself is orderly, with a strict sense of chronology and a journal format that begins with a printed title announcing the date: September 29. These dates, printed on the screen before each sequence, serve as a punctuating device and as an echo to the visual reminders of the changing weather. This precision is remarkablefor a film which began as nothing more than an invitation to Erice to visit the artist'sgarden when he would begin a new painting. An equal sense of precision guides Zurbarin'sStill Life with Oranges, Lemons and a Cup of Water (California,Norton Simon Museum, 1633 [figure 2]). In the horizontal and nonhierarchical arrangement of four lemons on a pewter plate, a basket of oranges, and a rose on a pewter saucer, all placed on a narrow ledge, the painter seems to be saying that the artistic image must be precise,
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Cinema Journal 34, No. 2, Winter 1995
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Figure2. Franciscode Zurbarin,StillLifewithLemons,Orangesand a Rose, 1633,oil on canvas,241/2x 431/8 in. (Courtesyof the NortonSimon Foundation,F.1972.6.P), reproducedby permission.
balanced, restorative. Skillfully using chiaroscuroto create shapes, Zurbarin arranges the objects frontally before the viewer in a kind of motionless realm. We are drawn to the objects and yet kept at a distance, wondering at the light in which objects in the frontal plane are thrown into relief while the background remains in darkness, allowing us no access to the interior of the scene (and, in a sense, denying an interior entirely). In this way, the still life eliminates the normal sense of depth or distance between the object and the viewer, while setting up a deceptive intimacy with the object. We can almost smell the fragrancesof the fresh fruit, orange blossoms, and rose and, like Antonio L6pez at the beginning of Dream of Light, we long to enjoy the perfume of the objects on display. Jonathan Brown describes this painting by Zurbarin as "a showpiece of artistic virtuosity. ... Its every aspect has been calculated to produce the effect of nature raised by artifice to a higher power."l12 This same principle applies to the working style of Antonio L6pez in Dream of Light. Within the framework of an adherence to the "natural,"the painter inevitably affects his subject, the tree, as the director and his camera affect the painter. Leaves, fruit, and bark marked with a rough geometry of paint and the building of "protective" structures around the tree are but two examples of the ways the painter influenced his subject. But the strongest force, the natural ripening and withering of the fruit, prevails. This force is allowed its own centrality, despite the director's subtle attempts to augment the basic narrative arc slightly with shots of the moon and other reminders of the world outside the garden. Reducing the cinematic vocabulary to this extent is both a Cinema Journal 34, No. 2, Winter 1995
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Christand the Virginin the Houseof Nazareth,oil on Figure3. Franciscode Zurbardin, canvas,ca. 1635-1640, 165 x 218.2 cm. (Courtesyof the ClevelandMuseumof Art, LeonardC. Hanna,Jr. Fund,60.117),reproducedby permission.
prerequisite for this kind of film and a courageous act. Erice mentions that the expansion of time-a favorite theme of Antonio L6pez--is something that can be captured by "the language of cinema."13 When asked if there is an Oriental dimension to his film, Erice responded: "I said to Antonio that the paint traces on the quince reminded me of the I-Ching hexagrams. They are the measure of the internal movement of the tree."'14In the same way, Norman Bryson points out that, in the "culture of artifacts" of the still life, objects are both passive and self-determining.'5 Each object is at once highlighted and defamiliarized because of the lack of illusionistic depth. The "extreme spirituality in extreme realism" of Dream of Light can be seen in works of Spanish Baroque art like The Virgin and Christ in the House of Nazareth (Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, ca. 1640) by Zurbarin (figure 3).16The objects in the painting speak as eloquently as do the human figures, and Zurbarain(like Erice centuries later) creates a scene which is both intimate and dreamlike. The objects placed around the seated figures of the Christ Child and the Virgin Mary-a terra-cotta cup of water, a basket, pears on the table-
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Cinema Journal 34, No. 2, Winter 1995
appear naturalistic, cast in sharp outlines, and yet they are arranged in an odd but purposeful manner that emphasizes their symbolic significance, in what Brown aptly terms "a moving tension between the everyday and the extraordinary."'7We follow the sadness in the Virgin'sgaze to the small branch of thorns at the Christ Child's feet as we ponder the human dimensions of the sacred. One of Erice's most frequent shots is that of a three-quarter view of the painter framed by leaves as he contemplates the tree. When Antonio L6pez's face is seen through a clear ruler as he measures the proportions of the tree, we see as well the measure of the man. The artist is shown in a series of quotidian tasks-sweeping up dust in his studio, having his hair cut by his wife, stretching canvas on a frame, chatting with an artist friend, Enrique Gran, who comes to visit.18 The patient accumulation of these cinematic images in Dream of Light, like the accumulation of seemingly mundane images in Zurbarin'spainting, allows us to ponder the sacred dimension of the human. Counterpoints. A humorous counterpoint is set up in the film through the comparison of the artist'swork with that of three immigrantworkersplastering a wall in his house. Pronouncing the early sketches of the artist as "weird"and the unknown quince fruit "like an unripened pear," the three Polish men are moved by urgencies different from those of the artist. Equally telling are the close-ups of the work of Antonio L6pez'swife, MariaMoreno. In contrast to her husband's expansive and direct relationship with the tree, Maria'sglass etchings of flowers, perfected under a magnifying glass, offer another, more introverted look at nature. The couple share a concern for exactness in representation and a love for nature. A painting of the quince tree, Antonio tells us, was "her idea." While the three artists-Antonio L6pez, Maria Moreno, and Enrique Gran-examine the initial attempt at the painting, we gaze over their shoulders, adding our own opinion of whether the tree on the canvas should be lowered or not, of whether it "breathes."We observe the artist observing his subject, and we, the viewers, are placed metaphorically within the frame as well. The many shots of cityscapes and clouds emphasize the sense of "real"time passing, while they also serve to remind us of all that might distract the artist and pull him from the illusory shelter of his garden. A radio brings in news of the breakup of the Soviet Union and of troubles in the Middle East. Trainspull out of a station along a jumble of tracks, passing by poorer neighborhoods where laundry is hung out to dry, graffiti-covered huts, and impersonal city apartments where shadowy figures watch blue-lit television screens. Erice calls the telephone poles "electronic trees," representative of what he sees as the ubiquitous nature of the mass media in today'sworld.'9 These images are more disjunctive and jarring than the shadows that cloaked characters in Erice's earlier films. We long to return to the sanity and order of the courtyardand the quince tree. Antonio L6pez attempts to construct barriers against these invasions, like the temporary wood and cloth structure he builds to cover the quince tree from Cinema Journal 34, No. 2, Winter 1995
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rain. Nighttime shots of the tree "at rest" in its manmade boundaries of string make it appear bound against its will. The moments pass-chairs remain empty after their occupants have left them. In a "transcendentalstyle" reminiscent of films by Japanese director Ozu Yasujir6, mute objects speak in a familiar yet barely decipherable language. Giavariniobserves how the quince in the film surpasses the underripe apple pie that remains uneaten on the kitchen floor in La Belle Noiseuse: "[In Erice'sfilm] nothing is lost, but all is transformed."20 And, in a telling phrase, William Johnson writes of the "enriched reality on the screen" in Dream of Light.21 Ultimately, Dream of Light is a sequence of present moments, even when memory is consulted. Reproductions of works by the great masters are placed casually around the studio or near the sink or are tacked onto a bulletin board. With the quince tree as a frame, the husband tenderly examines his wife's injured hand. Enrique Gran props up leaves with a stick while Antonio L6pez works at the easel. Although the quince tree in Dream of Light differs from the still life in its ability to be altered by the passage of time, the accumulation of present moments that make up the film is an example of what Giavarinicalls a "being with" that transcends the need for completeness.22
The Spirit of the Beehive: Memory.Whatare some of the steps the director has taken toward this highly distilled style and this concentration on the implications of the present moment? An examination of his two earlier films reveals motifs that are most fully developed in Dream of Light. The Spirit of the Beehive, set in the Castille of the early 1940s, opens with the arrivalof a film whose reels are transported from village to village by truck. This long-awaited film, James Whale's Frankenstein(United States, 1931), is introduced on screen by a mysterious man who advises the audience not to take what they are about to see too seriously. But this is too hard a task for little Ana (age five) and her nine-year-old sister Isabel, who watch wide-eyed as this tale of monsters and monstrous love unfolds. Ana'spale face, set against the black of the movie "theater," is reminiscent of portraits by Velizquez and other Spanish masters. Her eyes, like black wells in the darkness, seem to be absorbing the story as revealed truth, even when her older sister informs her later that "everything in a movie is a lie" (figure 4). When Ana finds a wounded Republican soldier in a shed on her parents' property, she assumes him to be an incarnationof the mysterious monster in the film. Parallelsbetween Ana'sworld and that of the soldier are reinforced in shots like the dissolve from Ana sleeping on her side to a shot of the soldier in the same position in the shed. The empty plain leading up to the shed, captured in one of the many stationarycamera long shots in the film, serves as a transitional space between the outside world and the world of the "monster."The shed itself, with two parallel doors facing the viewer, resembles a Spanish corral for theatrical productions (a large rectangular platform with two doors and a curtained recess between them) through which actors would enter and depart.
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Figure4. Anaand Isabelin The Spiritof the Beehive(Courtesyof KinoFilms).
Katherine S. Kovaicsalso points out how images of enclosure in Spanish films of this period reflect the postwar mood in which intellectuals were silenced.3 Returning one day to the now-empty shack, Ana sees blood on the straw and stone. Not knowing that the soldier has been killed by the Guardia Civil, she runs out into the fields at night in search of her mysterious monster. Meanwhile, the village hall-cum-theater becomes a funeral parlor when the body of the dead soldier is laid there before burial, reflecting the interconnection of the themes of art and death in much Spanish pictorial art. Close-ups of details of the oil paintings in the children's room and the father's study reinforce these thematic concerns-a small child holding the hand of a woman, Saint Jerome writing in a book on a desk on which a skull is placed as a memento mori. The adults in the family-Ana's father, Fernando, and mother, Teresa-live in hidden, seemingly separate universes, full of secretive letters, the orderly geometries of golden beehives, the potential for death inherent in wild mushrooms. It is a world in which a surface quiet belies the chaos underneath, and Kovdicsrightly notes that "in this landscape, human figures appear dwarfed, not by any imposing buildings or mountains, but by the sheer emptiness of the space and the vastness of the silence."24 The father, ensconced in his white beekeeper's garb like an alien from another world, epitomizes the way those on the "wrong"side of Franco'sRevolution had become shadows of their true selves. As Cinema Journal 34, No. 2, Winter 1995
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viewers, we are rarely in these adult characters' world; rather, we are often privileged by Ana'spoint of view. Isabel's world is positioned somewhere between that of Ana and that of her parents. Capable of a cruelty and duplicity that Ana is just beginning to discover, she also displays a child's vulnerability. During the last frames of the film, Ana, bathed in a cool blue light, gazes through a window and then closes her eyes at the sound of a train. No longer does she need to place her ear to the track to hear the sound of a train'sapproach, as earlier in the film. The theme of the unknown in this film, so important to the Frankenstein story, prepares us for the next stage in the journey of Erice's protagonist. El Sur: Knowledge. El Sur (1986), Erice's second film, continues the exploration of a child's coming into knowledge. In this film, a young girl, Estrella (literally "star"),moves from her immersion in the mysterious world of her father, Augustin, to a growing awareness of her own uniqueness. Part of an unfinished two-part cycle, El Sur ends with the beginning of Estrella's journey to the southern part of Spain following her father'ssuicide. The south is not only the site of the father'searlier life but also the locus of Estrella'slonging. In an old cigar box, the young girl saves hand-painted postcards of women in brightly colored costumes and mantillas posing before palm trees, gardens, and patios, those symbols of a greater warmth than one could experience in the north. Visuallinks connect the two geographicalareas, at least in Estrella'smind, A postcard from the south of a lake and rowboats becomes a view of ice crystallized on a toy sailboat in the frozen lake on the land of the Seagull (La Gaviota) on which Estrella and her parents live. Estrella'sfamily's house (like the one in The Spirit of the Beehive) lies outside the boundaries of the town, in what Augustincalls "the frontier."The "mystery"of the father serves as one tenuous connecting thread between the two geographical regions: Why does he refuse to return to the south? What was his relationship with the woman who has taken the stage name Irene Rios? From where does his power of divinationarise?What is drivinghim to depressionand a growingfeeling of alienation? We learn that Estrella'sfather is a doctor, and the brief hospital scene draws on the visual conventions of seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings of artists like Vermeer, with nurses in starchedhabits leaning over a patient in a close interior shot. Not surprisingly,these intimate interior scenes, in which a muted light streams through the window, are associated with women-Julia, Estrella's mother, putting her daughter to sleep or dressing her as a petite bride for her first communion. The narrator,an older Estrella, connects her memories of her mother with the window, where the older woman sat in the afternoons sewing the small girl'sdresses, like the dressmakerin Velhzquez'spainting of that name (figure 5). Although it is the father in Erice'sfilms who has the special power of divination, it is the women who survive-worn and resigned like Augustin's mother, who visits from the south, or round and exuberant like the simple-
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Cinema Journal 34, No. 2, Winter 1995
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Figure5. Diego Velizquez, The Needlewoman,ca. 1640-1650,oil on canvas,291/s 235/8in. (Courtesyof the NationalGalleryof Art,Washington,D.C., AndrewW. Mellon Collection,1937.1.81.[81]/PA),reproducedby permission.
spirited Milagros, the mother's maid, who complains of how the others have confused their lives with words that are "tunnels without an exit," spaces without light. The fathers in these first two Erice films pace back and forth in their private studies, and the insistent sound of their footsteps seems to hypnotize the daughters and propel them forward in their own search. The connection between father and daughter through the pendulum, an Cinema Journal 34, No. 2, Winter 1995
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Figure6. Fatherand daughterin El Sur (Courtesyof NewYorkerFilms).
instrument of divining, echoes the connection in The Spirit of the Beehive between Ana and the soldier through her gift of her father'swatch to the stranger. Erice's films are primarily stories of faces and hands-hands that hold a pendulum to reveal one's fate, call monsters into being, or create the wonder of a painting. In one extraordinaryscene in the attic study, Augustin and Estrella are shot in a tight composition, engulfed in darkness, with the light focused on their faces and hands. The exquisite intimacy between father and daughter is heightened by this chiaroscuro lighting that emphasizes the edges of forms (figure 6). Dangling the pendulum before his daughter, Augustin instructs her to close her eyes, erase all thoughts from her mind, and then rise and walk around, while she herself holds the pendulum. As she walks, her face moves in and out of the light until the pendulum starts to move, seemingly on its own. As the camera pulls back, we see both father and daughter in profile, but now Estrella is significantly in front. The light fades, first on the two figures, then from the window itself, as if the window were the source of all illumination and the catalyst of all action. The inward gaze of figures like Santa Rufina and Santa Justa in the works by Murillo call to mind the kind of introspective look found on the face of the adolescent Estrella in the film El Sur.
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Extensions of Memory. In Erice's three films, the journey motif moves from memory and fantasy, through knowledge, into the present, essential moment. The theme of the intermingling of life and death, introduced by the narratorof the film Frankenstein in Erice's first film, is nowhere clearer than in Dream of Light in the artist's regard for the quince tree. Enrique Gran reflects on how middle age, and approachingold age, add a note of urgency to a person'swork. This intensity is later echoed in the crisis when inclement weather and ripening fruit work against all the artist'sefforts to complete the painting before winter and yet not to compromise in terms of exactitude. In an essay on the paintings and drawings of Antonio L6pez, Francisco Calvo Serraller points out that "knowing how to wait is artistically ... difficult, but for Antonio L6pez, it is also absolutely essential."25 As Laurence Giavarini perceptively notes in his commentary on the film: "Fromhis position as geometrist and architect of light, Antonio L6pez wishes not so much to possess his subject as to accompany it through time.'"26 In each of Erice'sfilms photographs play different roles. In The Spirit of the Beehive, they inform the child Ana of her parents' irretrievable past; in El Sur, they show the adolescent Estrella the south, a place of promise and possibility, and, as in the photograph of the actress Irene Rios, they signal the end of Estrella'sinnocent immersion in her father'sworld. In Dream of Light, Antonio tells his friend Enrique that they must abandon the idea of finding a certain photograph from their art school days. The artist is suffused with memory and yet must remain rooted in the present to continue to thrive. In this sense, in his third film Erice has moved away from what Marsha Kinder refers to as the "indirect, highly interiorized narrative [with its] complex hermeneutics" that can be seen as connected to the melodramatic tradition of the late eighteenth century.27 Moments, without any reliance on off-screen events to augment the story, and yet more than a collage of moments. The theme of the present as extension of memory becomes clear in the conversations about art school days between Antonio L6pez and Enrique Gran and in the dream of childhood memories of the quince tree that overcomes Antonio as he poses on the bed for his wife's deathlike painting of him, in the manner of the "semblance of sleep in death" that Erice notes in the art of the Spanish Baroque.28The painter was at first reluctant to have his dream included in the film but, after seeing the first takes, he realized how crucial its role would be.29 Erice also notes that one reason he decided to include the long dream section was that he had the impression that something very intimate between the tree and Antonio L6pez had escaped the camera. The dream of the monster in The Spirit of the Beehive has become a dream of warmth and revelation in El Sur and, finally, a dream of light. The child's dream has matured and become a dream of childhood. In Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse, the finished painting is never revealed to the viewer, although we are offered a tantalizing view of a corner of the painted surface. Erice's film also concludes with an unfinished painting. Although both Cinema Journal 34, No. 2, Winter 1995
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NF.4
The quince tree filmed at night. (Courtesy of Rosebud Films, S.L. [Madrid])
films concern the emotionalworkingsof an aging painter,Erice'sfilm leaves us with the possibilityof rebirth, while Rivette'sends on a note of defiance and dissolution. The first version of Dream of Light ended with Antonio L6pez's dream. Only after returning to the painter's house six months after filming did Erice notice that traces of paint remained on the old fruit (like a "hieroglyph"), despite months of rain and snow." The reference to spring at the end of Erice's film could seem cliched but again is rescued by a directorial decision to include an image of the camera in the last frames. The "cold, mechanical eye" of the camera (as the director describes it) becomes a minor character of the film and a contrast to the eye and hand of the painter. For a director whose films have focused on eyes and hands, this is an extension of his interest in what he calls the dispassionate nature of the camera. In these last shots, Erice shows the camera recording at night under an artificiallight, thus placing in the foreground the inescapable artifice of the cinema, even in a film with as flat a narrativestyle as Dream of Light. To Erice, the camera is simultaneously "an instrument that reproduces reality and a 'forceps' for that reality."31Paradoxically,the placing of the camera in the foreground in this dimly lit scene adds to the film's sense of mystery, as we realize even more clearly the inadequacy of our attempts to record the powerful changes in nature. Janet Maslin notes this quality in her review of the film: "Mr. Erice's film is much bigger than it may appear to be. It is also, like its subject, undeniably one of a kind. "32 All Erice films remain as haunting memories, but in different ways. In The Spirit of the Beehive, it is Ana's eyes that one cannot forget; in El Sur it is the dance between the father and young daughter. In Dream of Light, it is the glimpse of the artistthrough the blossomingbranchesof the quince tree, reminding us that art is "conceivedas perception (which engages all the senses), as work (which grows more intense with age), and as process (which involves a constant struggle for a fullness and a perfection that can never be totally achieved)."33 Although Antonio L6pez was never able to fully capture his vision of this one quince tree on canvas, when we think back over the film, we are filled with the light that illuminates the upper part of the fruit, leaving the tree in shadow and withstanding the vicissitudes of weather and human whim. Neither intermittent clouds nor the unfinished nature of the painting mask that sensation. Like the bodeg6n, the simplest of objects in Erice's film appear at once mundane and transcendental. Dream of Light is a film that matures along with the fruit on the quince tree. Does the film end with spring? Does it end with the limitations of the artist and the camera?
Notes I would like to thank Michelle LeGault for her assistance with translationsfrom French sources, Dorothy Habel of the Department of Art, Universityof Tennessee/Knoxville for her insights into art historical considerations related to this topic, and Douglas Wilkerson for his comments on the first draft of this article. Additional thanks go to New Yorker
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Cinema Journal 34, No. 2, Winter 1995
Films, Kino Films, Milestone Films and Video, the staff of the New YorkFilm Festival, and the Department of Romance and Asian Languages of the University of Tennessee for their assistance. Special thanks go to Victor Erice for taking time to discuss his films with me (Madrid, August 1994) and to Jim Amelang for his help with translation. 1. From Cal y canto (1926-27): "Where did I see you, nostalgic postcards? In which open-air sea-side cinema, or in which album of drawings of boats?" (Translationby C. B. Morris, in This Loving Darkness: The Cinema and Spanish Writers 1920-1936 [Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1980], 86.) 2. The Spirit of the Beehive won first prize at the San SebastiainFilm Festival and the Silver Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival, and El Sur also won top awards at the Cannes and Chicago film festivals. Victor Erice was born in the Basque region of Querejeta but has been associated with the Madrid Independent Cinema. In addition to the three films discussed in this paper, he also directed one episode of the anthology film Los desafios (The challenges, 1969) and has written many screenplays and essays about cinema. 3. Dream of Light sharedthe Jury Prize at Cannes with RussiandirectorVitaliKanesvski's An Independent Life. It also won the Gold Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival. Antonio L6pez Garciawas born on January6, 1936, in Tomelloso (Ciudad Real), Spain. He studied at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he met his future wife, painter Maria Moreno. His work has been widely exhibited internationally,and a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Centro Reina Sofia in Madrid in conjunction with the premiere of Dream of Light. The work of Antonio L6pez, which began in the isolated climate of the Spain of the 1940s and 1950s, has displayed a concern with the temporality of the subject and with a movement awayfrom abstraction. Influences on his style come from such artists as Velizquez, Vermeer, Cezanne, and the early Italian painters. Examples of his work can be found in Michael Brenson, F. Calvo Serraller, and Edward J. Sullivan, eds., Antonio L6pez Garcia (New York:Rizzoli, 1990). 4. The fact that Dream of Light was filmed without any initial arrangements for production money was, in the director'swords, "a kind of madness." At one point he ran out of funds for film stock and switched to filming through a video camerajust to be able to keep his promise to himself to film every day. 5. Laurence Giavarini and Thierry Jousse, "Entretien avec Victor Erice et Antonio L6pez," Cahiers du Cinema 457 (June 1992): 32. 6. Early bodeg6n painters include Alonso Vizquez (ca. 1565-1625), Antonio Mohedano (1563-1625), and Blas de Ledesma (de Prado, 1556-1593/98). Some Spanish painters primarily associated with religious painting, such as FranciscoHerrera the Elder and Alonso Cano, also attempted the art of the bodeg6n briefly. Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) painted bodegones for several years but then moved from that form. 7. Barry Wind, Veldzquez's Bodegones: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Genre Painting (Fairfax,Va.: George Mason University Press, 1987), 11. Note also J. L6pez-Rey, Veldzquez'Work and World (Greenwich, Conn.: New YorkGraphic Society, 1968), 29. L6pez-Rey writes that "as for quality, a good bodeg6n ought to bring to the same degree of vividness the human figures and objects with which they are grouped without letting the depiction of any one overpower the others" (29). 8. Arte de la Pintura 2: viii. The work was begun ca. 1600, finished in 1637, and circulated among artists before it was published. Note the English translationin Robert Enggass and Jonathan Brown, eds., Italy and Spain 1600-1750: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 215-16. 9. Cotainpainted still lifes up to the time when he entered the Carthusian order in 1603, and the reductiveness of his subject matter and palette seems a foreshadowing of his decision to sever ties with the mundane world. Cinema Journal 34, No. 2, Winter 1995
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10. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 63-64. 11. Ibid., 70. 12. Jonathan Brown, Francisco de Zurbardn (New York:Abrams, 1991), 78. 13. Giavariniand Jousse, "Entretien avec Victor Erice," 33. 14. Ibid., 36. 15. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 13. 16. This phrase is coined by Robert Hughes in his review of the Zurbardinexhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See "From the Dark Heart of Spain," Time, October 5, 1987, 79. In his introduction to the catalog of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Zurbarin exhibition, Martin S. Soria writes in a similar way of the evidence of the "visionary and the visible" in the artist'swork (Oliver Chevrillon, Zurbardn, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987 [exhibition catalog], viii). 17. Brown, Francisco de Zurbardn, 80. 18. Many of Antonio L6pez's own paintings reflect this interest in the everyday, with their depictions of laundry soaking in a sink, leftovers of a meal, a partially open icebox, or a man after an operation. His paintings of a quince tree date from the early 1960s. 19. Giavariniand Jousse, "Entretien avec Victor Erice," 34. The telephone poles are the only objects in the film which were filmed from an area outside of Antonio L6pez's immediate surroundings. 20. Laurence Giavarini, "Ombre portee," Cahiers du Cindma457 (June 1992): 31. 21. William Johnson, "Dream of Light (El sol del membrillo)"(Review), Film Quarterly 46, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 44. 22. Giavarini, "Ombre port6e," 31. 23. Katherine Kovics, "The Plain in Spain: Geography and National Identity in Spanish Cinema," Quarterly Review of Film and Video (special edition, Remappingthe PostFranco Cinema) 13, no. 4 (1991): 29. 24. Ibid., 31. 25. FranciscoCalvo Serraller, "Enlightened Reality:The Paintings and Drawings of Antonio L6pez Garcia,"in Brenson, Serraller,and Sullivan, Antonio L6pez Garcia, 38. 26. Giavarini, "Ombre portee," 30. 27. Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1993), 67. 28. Giavariniand Jousee, "Entretien avec Victor Erice," 36. Ernest Gombrich goes so far as to write that every painted still life intrinsically contains a vanitas motif because "the pleasures [the still life] stimulates are not real . .. the more cunning the illusion, the more impressive, in a way, is this sermon on semblance and reality" ("Traditionand Expression in Western Still Life" [book review], in Meditations on a Hobby Horse ... , 2nd ed. [London: Phaidon, 1971], 104). 29. In an interview with Nativel Preciado, Antonio L6pez commented about how the release of the film "unbalanced"his life, because he felt embarrassed about seeing himself on the large screen. Nevertheless, he praised Erice's film as "extraordinary . .. with great ethical values [that] reflect passion for work, the true dimension of humanity, the nature of a group of generous people" (Rondaiberia [October 1992]: 32; 46). 30. Giavarini, "Ombre portee," 31. 31. Giavariniand Jousee, "Entretien avec Victor Erice," 34. 32. Janet Maslin, "Watchingas a Painting Comes Slowly into Being," New YorkTimes, October 1, 1992, B3. 33. Kinder, Blood Cinema, 445.
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Cinema Journal 34, No. 2, Winter 1995