``Close Your Eyes'' and ``I am Ana'' spells, return of gaze

see the sun and moon at the same time

Victor Erice is a filmmaker who explores what lies between two opposing elements. Fear and longing, fantasy and reality, infinity and finiteness. These are expressed almost as "wounds and blades." For example, when the young girl Ana (Ana Torrent) in " The Beehive " leans forward toward the image of " Frankenstein " (31) projected on the screen, her eyes are filled with fear of the unknown as well as a longing for the unknown. It is as if fear expands one's world. At that moment, the wounds widen and heal at the same time. This is deeply connected to Victor Erice's own formative experience with film.

Since " Quince Sunshine ," Víctor Erice has made several short films, all of which approach the essence of Víctor Erice's cinema, including the masterpiece " Lifeline " (2002), in which a boy puts his ear to a clock drawn on the back of his hand and listens to the inaudible second hand (the boy in " Lifeline " is the very image of Ana, who puts her ear to the railroad tracks in " The Beehive ").

“Close Your Eyes” © 2023 La Mirada del Adiós AIE, Tandem Films SL, Nautilus Films SL, Pecado Films SL, Pampa Films SA

In the short film "La Morte Rouge" (2006), Victor Erice talks about his formative experience of his first encounter with film. For Victor Erice, a five-year-old boy at the time, the fear he felt from watching Roy William Neill's " Scarlet Claws " (44) was so intense that it had an impact beyond the screen. Spain during the civil war. A film from a foreign land. Film was a world of the imagination, a refuge, and at the same time, the horror depicted there overlapped with the reality right next to us.

"Close Your Eyes" begins with an unfinished film called "Farewell." The scene is set in a ruined mansion where Trist Le Roy, the King of Sorrow, lives. A room in a Western-style mansion that seems to be filled with the scent of old roses. In the garden of this mansion is a double-faced statue of Janus, a quotation from "Death and the Compass" by Jorge Luis Borges, a writer beloved by Victor Erice. The statue of Janus, which simultaneously looks at the beginning and end of things, corresponds to the relationship between the protagonists of this film, Miguel, a former film director, and Julio, a disappeared actor. Miguel lives in memory, while Julio lives in forgetting. The statue of Janus represents the "gaze" of the filmmaker Victor Erice, who looks at two opposing elements, the sun and the moon, at the same time.

Head south!