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The sole complaint one can make against Víctor Erice is actually a high compliment: the man simply doesn't work often enough.
From his epochal start more than thirty years ago, Erice has made a grand total of three features, each a pensive, richly suggestive masterpiece.
His feature debut, The Spirit Of The Beehive (1973), is perhaps the most beloved, a gorgeously unsettling tale of a displaced Spanish childhood under the shadow of ascendant Fascism but illuminated by the dreamlight of the cinema. Set circa 1940, the year Erice was born, and released in the dying days of the Franco regime, Beehive has become a model example of how to embed political critique beneath surface story - notably among the Iranian New Wave auteurs (its tale of a child's stubborn quest resonated loudly for Abbas Kiarostami, one of Erice's greatest admirers).
The South (1983) shared many affinities with Beehive: both films observe family members alienated from their home and from each other; both measure the fallout of the Spanish Civil War through a girl's eyes; and both weave references to classic movies into their childhood (in Beehive it's James Whale's Frankenstein; in The South, both Spanish melodrama and Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt prove fecund inspiration).
Spare on dialogue, Erice's films prize contemplation, a meditative watchfulness that often dissolves into reverie.
From The Rough Guide to Film: An A-Z of directors and their movies [2007 Rough Guides/Penguin]
Author: Jessica Winter. Jessica Winter's writing appears in Time Out London, The Boston Globe, Slate and many other publications. She is associate editor at Cinema Scope and the author of The Rough Guide To American Independent Film (2006).
Image: Víctor Erice, The Spirit Of The Beehive (1973) Courtesy of Víctor Erice and María Moreno / Víctor Erice Archive, Madrid. |
