Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice received the Pardo alla Carriera award at the Locarno Film Festival for his extraordinary contribution to film.
The universal themes of time and memory are found in Victor Erice’s poignant and poetic features and short films. Carlo Chatrian, the Festival’s Artistic Director, comments:
“Erice’s films may be few in number, but are all extremely important in the context of modern cinema, and bear the hallmark of an independent and coherent filmmaker, who is able to give a very personal form to his stories, combining private and collective memory. ”
Born in 1940 in San Sebastian, Victor Erice’s first feature-length film “El Espiritu de la colmena” (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973), is considered one of the masterpieces of Spanish cinema. In 1983, he directed “El Sur” (The South), which as in his first feature, centers on a father and daughter relationship conveyed through memories. Winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Erice’s third feature, the documentary “El sol del membrillo“ (also known as The Quince Tree Sun and Dream of Light) (1992) follows the painter Antonio López and the making of his painting.
Adrian Danks writes in Issue 25, March 2003 Senses of Cinema ( http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/erice/#film):
“In “The Quince Tree Sun” we are asked, gently, to contemplate the intense, but here somewhat dissipated, connection and difference between painting and cinema. We watch the painter (Antonio López Garcia, himself a profoundly quotidian painter) attempt to capture the play of light upon the leaves and fruit of a constantly evolving quince tree, while the filmmaker (Erice, one assumes, though he is never directly present in the film) attempts to document the dynamic processes of creating and ‘imagining,’ while simultaneously showing us the painstakingly serene activity of still-life painting. Inevitably, the film can’t capture enough detail and can’t crystallize the painter’s activity into a suitable closing or defining image; while the painting loses the dynamic of light (and life) in the process of committing the tree to the canvas (but it also captures something of it as well). Nevertheless, each, painting and cinema, goes some way toward capturing the essence of its subject. This tension between a medium of movement (and thus time) and stillness or permanence (and thus a different concept of time) preoccupies Erice’s cinema.”
The Conversation
The Conversation took place on 13 August at the Locarno Film Festival. Moderator Miguel Marías and Victor Erice discussed the difference between the viewing audiences of the present and of the past — a shared point of concern that director Agnès Varda also remarked on at her Conversation at the Festival. Both Erice and Varda addressed the fact that viewers (who now have shorter attention spans) don’t watch films as before; films are watched on small screens, laptops, phones, and so on, which changes the film’s aspect ratio and the look of how the film was shot in and in what format, and in turn, the director’s visual intention.
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