With only four feature films in fifty years, Víctor Erice has become a cult filmmaker immersed in an aura of a certain mystery, since he is not given to granting interviews. But during the press conference held this afternoon at the San Sebastián festival, where tonight she is collecting the Donostia award from Ana Torrent, the actress who starred as a child in The Spirit of the Beehive, the first film by the Basque director and winner of the Golden Shell, Erice has expanded at ease.
And he was very excited to be received by the press with a standing ovation. His new work, Close Your Eyes, will be screened at the Victoria Eugenia Theater after the award ceremony and will also premiere this Friday in movie theaters. It is a major film about identity and memory that was acclaimed in May at the Cannes festival, a competition that Erice decided to enter.
A story that talks about an old cinema, on celluloid, in which Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) participates as director of a film in the nineties that could not be finished due to the mysterious disappearance of the protagonist actor and friend, played by a superb José Coronado, who is being tracked for a program of events.
Closing your eyes is a true ode to the seventh art and its healing process. “I believe that the theme of healing is one of the virtues of art and we could limit that to those books, paintings, music and movies that suddenly burst into our lives and modify us. After going through that experience we feel different, in some way. Art as a healer was the fundamental demand of one of the greatest Basque artists, Jorge Oteiza,” he said, unable to hide his emotion, camouflaged under sunglasses.
“He considered that art should have that function so that from that point on the artist would enter society and could dedicate himself to teaching. That was his political purpose, unfulfilled and frustrated so many times, which is to move from art to education.” Erice considers that he does not live up to the soles of the shoes of those artists who have marked him and that he has become involved in this film “out of the most conventional of needs.”
He recalled that cinema, when he was little, in times of misery, “allowed us for a few hours to be citizens of the world and choose our teachers. I believe a lot in the creativity of a filmmaker who is not aware of being making art. That It is the adventure of creation.” And he has noted his concern about the platforms. “Of the Lumière brothers’ original project, only the cinema hall remains today, and as a residue.” “A true film – he added – claims the movie theater as an absolute medium, but large corporations have the tendency to take over all the windows and with that one of the original projects of cinema from its beginnings is lost.”
The director of El sur maintains that “technological development has meant that the act of watching a film is now in the domestic living room and I claim the public experience of watching it in the living room.” Regarding his fame as an epic legend that surrounds his figure, he has mentioned that he distrusts that term. “In that epic story things are told in a way that I don’t recognize myself at all. The epic legend is good as an advertising element,” he declared to immediately claim his activities in the field of short films, video installations and teaching. in workshops. “I resist Closing Your Eyes being broadcast as my testament film,” he says.
At the same time, he has insisted that he does not believe that the film “is nostalgic”, not even when you see the projectors or the movie theater. He says that for 15 years he has been using digital video and new technologies for economic reasons, although he has recognized that in his work “the angel of melancholy does fly over.” Asked about his memories of the night in which he won the Golden Shell in 1973, Erice commented that he went up with the producer and friend Elías Querejeta and that “half of the cinema was kicking and the other was applauding.” “It was a film made against the times of what the cinema conventions were at that time. It is not the same to see a film at the time of its production as to see it when it is already part of the history of cinema and has been socially sanctioned.”
He has referred to the importance of chance in his professional life, to the fact that despite his reputation as a perfectionist filmmaker “I have had to improvise in all my films” and assures that Closing my eyes, whose script he co-signs with Michel Gaztambide , set it in 2012 because “we wanted to distance the filming from the pandemic protocols.” Erice confesses that he is present in each of the characters that appear in the film, “including the nun” and that once each film is finished it belongs to the viewer. “Make it yours!” he said.
After his intervention, the rest of the team joined in, also applauding at length, although Manolo Solo was missing, to whom Erice sent a big hug. Ana Torrent has said that she was overwhelmed by the reception because when she worked with the filmmaker for the first time she was a girl and “at that time she confused reality and fiction and now it is an exciting experience.” In the film Erice wanted to pay tribute to that “I’m Ana” with which Torrent invoked the ghost in The Spirit of the Hive. “I couldn’t resist the temptation to put that phrase back in and it was filmed in the midst of great emotion,” Erice said.
And José Coronado, who is aiming for a Goya nomination for his splendid work, has said that working with Erice “has been a privilege because his cinema is of an authenticity and honesty that is difficult to find in these times. A cinema that does not give anything away to the viewer.” Regarding his role, he explains that it has been a great responsibility and that he has enjoyed the experience. “Erice asked me for a radical stripping of my being and I have had the honesty to throw myself into that ring without artifice.”
