Cinema begins – so its founding myth goes – with the Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. As proof of concept for their new motion picture technology, the Lumière brothers made a series of ‘actuality’ films depicting scenes from everyday life. When La Ciotat Station was shown in 1896, spectators are said to have jumped from their seats as the train chugged towards them on the screen, fearing they were about to be run over. There is a brief but significant allusion to La Ciotat Station in the new film by Victor Erice, a director preoccupied by the porous boundary between illusion and reality. The protagonist of Close Your Eyes is a former director named Miguel Garay, now living in seclusion and working as a translator. In a box of artefacts from the shoot of an abandoned film, Miguel discovers a flipbook of La Ciotat Station. We watch as he pages through it and brings the static images to life.
Though an elder statesman of world cinema, Erice has only made four feature films, and Close Your Eyes is his first in thirty years. He remains best-known for his debut The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), released in the final years of Franco’s dictatorship and set at its dawn. It stars a seven-year-old girl named Ana Torrent who, fifty years later, will also appear in Close Your Eyes. Torrent ended up essentially playing herself – ‘I remember my character in the film was even supposed to have a different name, but at that age, I didn’t understand why they weren’t calling me my name, so Victor changed it to Ana’ – which was fitting for a protagonist unable, or unwilling, to differentiate fact from fiction. In the film’s opening scene, a travelling cinema arrives in a remote village for a screening of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). The townspeople excitedly congregate – among them Ana and her sister, who are spellbound by the fantastical tale. Afterwards Ana is haunted by the image of Frankenstein’s monster, her obsession inflamed by her sister’s insistence that a spirit lives in an abandoned shack nearby.
This otherworldly fascination is set alongside the icy gloom overtaking her family. Their opposition to Franco’s regime is subtly intimated: Ana’s mother writes longing letters to a former lover, whose address is a Red Cross camp in France for refugees; her father listens to a banned radio feed at night. The stifling, downcast atmosphere is counterposed to rapturously beautiful shots of the Spanish countryside drenched in golden light, rendered by Luis Cuadraro’s painterly cinematography. Ana soon discovers a mysterious man who has taken shelter in the abandoned shack. Her sister turns out to be right, in an unexpected way: the man represents a lingering vestige of the Republican resistance, which becomes clear when he is murdered. From Ana’s point of view, such political allegiances are illegible. The film’s reticence to make them explicit stemmed from the climate of the time, its oblique narrative a response to the threat of censorship. Yet these constraints are richly generative: the film exists in a dreamlike fugue, its events filtered through a child’s gaze and suffused with the kind of free-floating dread, so characteristic of childhood, that arises when comprehension breaks down.
Following this early peak, however, Erice’s career suffered a series of disappointments. His subsequent two films were curtailed not by the shadow of authoritarianism, but by market forces. Erice had to abandon El Sur (1983) when the producer pulled funding before its final section could be shot. The film centres on a father and daughter, Estrella, living in the Spanish countryside. Her coming-of-age is intertwined with a dawning awareness of her father’s past. She learns that he and her grandfather had a bitter falling out over her father’s opposition to Franco. One day, she stumbles upon him leaving a cinema, moved to tears by a film. She follows him to a café, where he composes a letter to the actress, whom he used to know in a past life. He writes that he just saw her shot on the big screen: ‘I realize that what happens in movies isn’t real, but I’m horribly superstitious’. Like Spirit of the Beehive, the film derives a mixture of brooding dread and incandescent beauty from the viewpoint of a young girl venturing into new and unknown provinces. It ends as Estrella is set to embark on a journey that promises to resolve the mysteries. Yet the missing denouement also imbues Estrella’s fate with an open-ended sense of possibility; her final words – ‘I was going to see the south at last’ – contain the traces of an unwritten chapter still to come.
A decade later, Erice made The Quince Tree Sun (1992), a documentary about the Spanish painter Antonio López García which again fell prey to financial problems. The production ran out of money for film stock, forcing Erice to shoot portions of it on Betamax. Erice’s difficulties echo those of his subject: the film portrays the painter’s protracted, ultimately unsuccessful, effort to finish a painting of a tree in his backyard before it wilts and dies. The jarring visual contrast between sections shot in luminous 35mm and the flat, washed-out digital footage inscribes the film’s material constraints into its surface – its form itself an emblem of the world’s inhospitability to artistic expression. Erice’s next project, The Shanghai Spell, was smothered at conception: he worked on it for three years, writing a script that he considered to be one of his best, only for the producer to choose another director. Stung by repeated disappointments, Erice withdrew from feature filmmaking, producing only sporadic short films and installations.
The legacy of these difficulties weighs heavily on Close Your Eyes. The opening section takes place in 1947, at a baroque estate on the outskirts of Paris, whose owner is hoping to enlist a World War II Resistance fighter to find his lost daughter in Shanghai. In a metafictional sleight of hand characteristic of Erice, these early scenes turn out to be footage from the protagonist Miguel’s abandoned film, The Farewell Gaze. The resonances of this film-within-a-film are hard to miss: the Oriental overtones recall The Shanghai Spell; like El Sur, The Farewell Gaze was interrupted during shooting and never completed. Though not for financial reasons: its lead actor and Miguel’s close friend, Julio Arenas, went missing. Decades later, a true crime television show interviews Miguel for a segment on Julio’s disappearance, dredging up old memories and sending him on a journey to reconnect with his past life. We discover that Miguel was an anarchist in his youth, imprisoned alongside Julio for ‘disorderly activities’. And we meet Julio’s now middle-aged daughter, Ana.
Ana Torrent’s performance can’t help but evoke her role in Spirit of the Beehive – producing an uncanny doubling effect, as if the child has been superimposed onto the adult, with the present and the past flitting in and out of sight, an impression that only intensifies as the film reveals its preoccupation with spectres of history. These are cinematic as well as political: the film alludes not only to La Ciotat Station, but to Hollywood classics such as Ray’s They Live By Night and Hawks’s Rio Bravo. In a curiously anti-climactic plot twist, Miguel receives a phone call from a staff member at an asylum who tells him that Julio is alive, institutionalised after having lost his memory. It is what Fredric Jameson might call an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction: as though Close Your Eyes sublimates the obstacles that hampered Erice’s career into the solvable mystery of Julio’s disappearance. But Julio’s memory loss also carries a political valence. Throughout his films, Erice deals with politics only in the past tense: his characters are always looking back on their political engagements having left them behind. Julio’s amnesia, then, perhaps carries a double import: an erasure of his radical past but also, in wiping the slate clean, a new beginning.
After the dissident is murdered in Spirit of the Beehive, Ana runs off into the wilderness. In the middle of the night near a moonlit stream, she encounters Frankenstein’s monster, who embraces her. Is this a figment of her imagination? Or has the world of cinema breached the screen as the first spectators of La Ciotat Station feared it could? Although Erice’s oeuvre bears the scars of worldly exigencies, he still seems to harbour the hope that the influence might flow in the opposite direction: that the world might bend to cinema’s powers. Towards the end of Close Your Eyes, Miguel decides to screen portions of The Farewell Gaze for Julio, in the hope that it might help him recover his memory. But Erice’s film ends without revealing how the screening has affected Julio. When Miguel explains his plan, a sceptical friend tells him that ‘miracles haven’t happened in cinema since Dreyer died’. Against all evidence, Erice wants to believe that they still can.
Read on: Ronald Fraser, ‘How the Republic was Lost’, NLR 67.