2024-10-03 03:01:00
Inside the sample Panoramas 2024organized by the Cultural Center of Spain in Buenos Aires (CCEBA)he Erice Peninsula focus occupies a central place. He himself highlights the figure of an unusual filmmaker like Víctor Ericewhose career presents unique characteristics not only within Spanish cinema but throughout the world. A work developed over more than 60 years, made up of only four feature films, all included in the program, and a handful of shorts. The Lugones room of the San Martín Theater, Corrientes 1530will be the headquarters where all the films from Peninsula Erice can be seen, selected by the Spanish programmer and writer Fran Gayo.
Erice debuted in 1973 with The spirit of the hivea film that is as cinematic as it is political, but made with such naturalness that both elements can go unnoticed, hidden by the details of the plot. After the Civil War, two girls are shocked after seeing Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) and the figure of the monster becomes the axis of their talks. The film marks the debut of the actress Ana Torrentwho at only 7 years old delivers a magnetic performance that makes her the center of the story. They would work together again 50 years later in close your eyestheir last film (until now).
His second job was the southpremiered at the Cannes Festival ten years after the first, whose story also takes place during the post-civil war. There, a girl lives in a city in the north of the country with her mother, a Republican teacher who suffers the consequences of joining the defeated, and her father, an inscrutable man from the south to whom she has never wanted to return. A characteristic that Erice’s early films share is the appropriation of the child’s gaze to record with apparent innocence the consequences of such a dark period.
It took another decade to see Erice’s third film, the documentary The quince sun (1992), which received the jury and critics awards at Cannes. It revolves around the plastic artist Antonio López’s obsession with portraying a quince, an authentic declaration of aesthetic principles about the artistic gaze that is inevitably transferred from the protagonist of the film to its director. From then on, Erice made sporadic short filmstwo of which, Delivery (2002) y The Red Dead (2006), will be seen in Peninsula Erice along with The lost daysone of the director’s first shorts, from 1963. Only in 2023 would it arrive close your eyes. A grand return that combines drama and intrigue around the disappearance of an actor during filming, until, years later, a series of images of the absent person taken by the director of that film add mystery to the matter.
The selection includes four other titles that make clear Erice’s influence on other filmmakers, making him an unavoidable mark in the history of cinema in his country. It is about The sky turns (Mercedes Álvarez, 2004), Summer 1993 (Carla Simón, 2017), Dryers (Rocío Mesa, 2022) and Yes (Marta Lallana, 2023). For its part, Nine letters to Bertaby Basilio Martín Patino (1965)represents the other side, providing a background that helps contextualize Erice’s appearance on the Spanish cinematographic map. The focus is completed with Historic centera collective film in which, in addition to Erice, the Portuguese Pedro Costa and Manoel de Oliveira, and the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki participated. Each one contributes a short film made in tribute to Guimarães, a historic city in the north of Portugal that in 2012 had been chosen as European capital.
Erice Peninsula, next to the Classic and Modern spotlightmark a break with the identity of Espanoramas, which in its nine previous editions maintained a similar profile to other festivals whose themes revolve around the most recent in a country’s film production. This year the programming no longer proposes a contact with the contemporary but rather a dialogue of a rather historical order. Fran Gayo explains that this change is related to the possibility of offering something different on the occasion of the ten years that Espanoramas fulfills. “From the first meeting at CCEBA, the possibility of doing something special for a special occasion was raised. The exhibition dedicated to Erice was put on the table already on that occasion and we unanimously agreed,” says the programmer.
-LThe most recent film in the program is precisely close your eyesVíctor Erice’s latest work from 2023, which is projected by first time in Buenos Aires. What does this possibility of bringing such a challenging work of this magnitude to Buenos Aires viewers represent for Espanoramas?
-Espanoramas has always been done a little thinking about that, about being a window to a lot of Spanish cinema that for whatever reasons does not make it to the Buenos Aires screens. In this case, this fact, that a film of that magnitude, as you say, is projected at Lugones and MALBA, and that it is within the framework of Espanoramas, is almost a gift for those of us who make the exhibition. Personally, it is part of those factors that make you continue to believe in this work. The whole Erice cycle I feel has been rejuvenating in some ways for me as a programmer.
-How do you explain a filmmaker as personal as Erice to an audience that doesn’t know his work at all or doesn’t know it in its entirety, but only partially?
-Sometimes I feel that Erice has been explained too much when there is no more compelling argument to see. The spirit of the hive o The South to feel that something unusual is happening on the screen. A kind of miracle, an inexplicable emotion that you may have felt with some works by Abbas Kiarostami, Andrei Tarkovski or, I don’t know, Carl Theodor Dreyer, to give three compelling examples. The incredible thing about Erice is that his films can provoke that emotion in someone who is not necessarily a film buff. It is a much more direct cinema than it seems, not capricious, and at the same time it can obviously be the trigger for hundreds of thousands of doctoral works or more specialized books. In my case, the relationship with his cinema has always been very emotional, epidermal. I feel that his films breathe a good part of the history of Spain but always crossed by a humanistic and I would almost say compassionate feeling that is very important. It was 50 years ago and it is right now.
-In the work of some artists we usually talk about periods to differentiate the aesthetic drift of their works. In the case of Ericem, the stages are very marked by the time that passed between each of his films. From that, do you think it is possible to approach your four feature films in terms of periods?
-I’m not clear about periods, I had never thought about it that way. Rather, I think that Erice’s cinema has established periods in Spanish cinema, that his films have resonated strongly every time they have been released, to the point that one can read his influence on many filmmakers in recent decades.
–Just andhe Peninsula Erice program is completed with a series of films by other directors, which in some way dialogue with his cinema. But why were these films and not others chosen to be part of this selection?
-In this case the criterion was more capricious, and involved recovering a film in which we felt that Erice’s influence was clear, and which at the same time had never been screened in Buenos Aires or had been screened a long time ago. . That’s why the idea of recovering The sky turnsFor example. Obviously there could have been many more films, but Espanoramas is a show of very specific dimensions (which this year, in fact, by adding the Classics and Moderns focus doubles the number of films programmed), so we limited ourselves to the titles that finally will be projected. Yes, we would have liked to include some of Marc Recha’s first films or The voices of the nightby Salvador García Ruiz, but it was impossible to find copies for public exhibition.