
When
Wed 28 May – Wed 11 Jun 2025
See below for additional related events
Víctor Erice (1940–) has directed just four features and a handful of shorts in a little over 60 years (the shorts have often been the standouts in portmanteau films). He also contributed a series of beautifully crafted “correspondences” with Abbas Kiarostami that were the subject of a joint exhibition first staged in 2006 (it came to ACMI in 2008).
In the studiedness, poetic precision and contemplativeness of his approach to cinema, as well as his meagre productivity, Erice’s career can be compared to that of Carl Dreyer and Terrence Malick (at least up until the 2010s). The connection to the work of these great, visionary filmmakers doesn’t end there – Erice is equally a filmmaker of environment, light, lyrical composition and of characters who are inseparable from or mired in a particular time, space and historical moment.
Often touching on the legacies of the Spanish Civil War – profoundly so in El sur (1983) – his is also a cinema of strong female characters forging their identity within masculine worlds. Often staged as acts of speaking, of finding voice, its origins are mapped out by the child memorably played by Ana Torrent in Erice’s sublime debut feature, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).
This season presents virtually all of the work that Erice has made for the cinema, along with the series of video correspondences he conducted with Kiarostami. It pays tribute to one of the most cinematic and painterly of filmmakers, an artist who is often preoccupied by the material and melancholy legacy of cinema as exemplified by the travelling projectionist in The Spirit of the Beehive, the memory of early filmgoing and mortality in La morte rouge (2006) and across recent summary work, and return to feature filmmaking after 31 years, the extraordinary Close Your Eyes (2023).
About Melbourne Cinémathèque
Australia's longest-running film society, Melbourne Cinémathèque screens significant works of international cinema in the medium they were created, the way they would have originally screened.
Melbourne Cinémathèque is self-administered, volunteer-run, not-for-profit and membership-driven.
