Víctor Erice Director
Filmography Selected
Víctor Erice studied in Madrid, at the Official School of Cinematography (EOC), graduating in Direction in 1963. For a time, he worked as a scriptwriter; later, as a director of advertising films and in 1969 he made his debut as a professional director filming one of the three episodes of The Challenges (Los Desafíos) which was presented at the San Sebastián Film Festival.
His debut feature, The Spirit of the Beehive, won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 1973. His second feature film, El Sur, was presented in the Official Selection at Cannes in 1983. In 1992 he returned to Cannes competition with The Quince Tree Sun (El Sol del Membrillo), which was awarded the Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI award.
In 1996 he participated in the collective feature film Celebrate Cinema 101 with a short film “Questions at Sunset”. Some years later, in 2002, Erice contributed again to another portmanteau film Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet, with the episode “Lifeline” (Alumbramiento).
In 2006, together with the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, he made an installation, Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondences that was exhibited in Barcelona (CCCB), Madrid (Casa Encendida), Paris (Centre Pompidou) and Melbourne. (ACMI). The installation included an audiovisual correspondence between the two directors, and the medium-length film La Morte Rouge.
During the following years, he participated in different audio-visual projects and video installations: about the painter Antonio López; Fragor del Mundo, Silencio de la Pintura, and about the sculptor Jorge Oteiza; Piedra y Cielo, for the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum.
In 2012, in Portugal, he made the medium-length film Vidros Partidos, which is part of a film celebrating the town of Guimarães, Centro Histórico, together with Manoel de Oliveira, Pedro Costa and Aki Kaurismäki.
In 1993, Erice received the National Cinematography Award, and in 1995 the Gold Medal for merit in Fine Arts. More recently, in 2014, the Locarno Festival distinguished him with the Leopard of Honour dedicated to his entire career as a filmmaker.
Now he has returned with Close Your Eyes, his fourth feature film after a 30 year gap, which had its world premiere in Official Selection at Cannes, in the Cannes Premiere section.
Features:
1973 THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (El Espíritu de la Colmena)
San Sebastian International Film Festival – Golden Shell Award
1983 THE SOUTH (El Sur)
Cannes Film Festival Competition
Chicago International Film Festival – Gold Hugo Award
1992 THE QUINCE TREE SUN (El Sol del Membrillo)
Cannes Film Festival – Jury Prize, FIPRESCI Prize
2023 CLOSE YOUR EYES (Cerrar los Ojos)
Cannes Film Festival
TV Series and Shorts:
1969 THE CHALLENGES (Los Desafíos) Drama series
2002 LIFELINE (Alumbramiento), short within Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet
2006 LA MORTE ROUGE, short made for Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondences
2011 ANA, THREE MINUTES, short within 3.11 Sense of Home
2012 BROKEN WINDOWS (Vidros Partidos), short within Historic Centre (Centro Histórico)
“Miracles in movies haven’t existed since Carl Dreyer,” says one character near the end of Close Your Eyes. With this exquisite reverse shot, Erice refutes that claim.
"Miracles in movies haven't existed since Carl Dreyer," says one character near the end of Close Your Eyes. With this exquisite reverse shot, Erice refutes that claim.'
David Schwartz, Reverse Shot
★★★★★
'Erice is a uniquely talented storyteller. His style could never be an ‘ian’. ‘Wellesian’, ‘Hitchcockian’, ‘Spielbergian’, etc. You can’t quite bottle the Erice formula and yet it’s there to be savoured.' The story can be eccentric, sentimental even, but never the Hollywood mode of romantic realism; yet its heart soars when contemplating the power of film. It’s right to say that the performances throughout the cast are excellent, but more important is the pitch of those performances...and the enigmatic conclusion is profoundly moving, especially if you love cinema as a concept.'
Jon Meakin `Blueprint
★★★★
‘Utilising a matryoshka structure – and upcycling the director’s unfinished works the film... introduces jolly nuns, an estranged daughter and a charismatic dog. The script, by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, tarries for singsongs, dinners and poignant conversations about cinema and the self.’
‘Spanish master Víctor Erice returns after a 31-year hiatus...Miracles haven’t existed in the movies since Dreyer died,” insists Max (Mario Pardo), a long-standing collaborator and friend to the hero of 'Close Your Eyes.' And yet, here is a resurrection.’
Tara Brady, The Irish Times
★★★★
'Erice is hardly coy about the notes of personal history. But rather than pursue grudges against producers, autobiography seeps
instead into a detective story with a stark awareness that our central mystery is always vanished time. Where another director might treat the wonder of movies with a wide-eyed, wistful glow, Erice sees it as double-edged: a spell that also spotlights the lack of magic in real life.’
Danny Leigh, The Financial Times
★★★★★
'The very idea that there now exists in the world a new feature film by the long-absent Spanish director Victor Erice is a cause for celebration in and of itself. That the feature, named Close Your Eyes, also happens to stand shoulder to shoulder with the works upon which he made his name, supremely-lyrical stories that explore the profound intersections between landscape, history and art, such as Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur and The Quince Tree Sun, is nothng short of a miracle.'
Though his oeuvre is small, Erice only deals in masterworks, and this one is no exception. The slow and detailed build-up is worth it to feel the full impact of its astounding final passage.'
David Jenkins, Little White Lies
★★★★★
"A touching and methodical exploration of memory, longing and cinema. There aren't many directors who have such delicate control and grasp on the craft, with only three feature films that are all classics.
A powerful movie that makes us reflect on our lives and the essence of memory. There's a mixture of optimism and foreboding for the future...in this beautiful picture.
...reflects on various topics, ranging from art and the love of the craft to the intertwining between love and loss. Miguel and company look back at their relevance in this world through a big screen...it is art and cinema that pick them back up. Most of us have felt such feelings and relied on cinema to brighten up our gray-coloured days."
Hector A. Gonzalez, Loud and Clear
★★★★★
"It’s a film that is keenly aware of ageing and loss, a film suffused with quiet wisdom, and it gradually builds to a deeply moving climax. "Miracles haven't existed in cinema since Dreyer died," Miguel is told, but Victor Erice’s triumphant return to filmmaking certainly feels like one."
Philip Concannon, The Skinny
★★★★1/2
“One of the most influential films to ever emerge from Spain, Victor Erice's 1973 debut The Spirit of the Beehive is about a young girl who retreats into a world of cinema to escape the trauma of life in post civil war Spain. Erice's latest, Close Your Eyes, only his fourth film in his 50 year career, is about an old man who has retreated from cinema.”
‘".. a perfect bookend to a career that began with a child discovering the power of cinema and now might end with an old man rediscovering its importance."
Eric Hillis, Movie Waffler
★★★★
'There is something deeply civilised and gentle about this film.
A mysterious, digressive, long and baggily constructed film possessed of a distinctive richness and humanity, all about the balance between memory and forgetting which we all negotiate as we come to the end of our lives. And it is also about cinema, which helps to promote memory and retrieve that which has vanished, even as it is itself in danger of being forgotten.'
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
★★★★
Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice returns after a long absence with an elegant ode to memory and cinema...
The final scene, set in an old movie theatre, is little short of transcendent.
Anna Bogutskaya, Time Out
The climax, set in a closed down, small town cinema, is no simplistic paean to ‘the magic of the movies.’ In fact, editor Max gruffly jokes that “miracles in movies haven’t existed since [Carl Theodor] Dreyer died!” And yet Erice has dreamed in light an extraordinary ambition for what film, certainly his films, can strive for. As his characters gaze up at the screen, and out, perhaps for the final time, at their audience, it’s hard to envisage a more emotionally overwhelming farewell, if that’s what Close Your Eyes becomes, from a vital, too-often missing, force in world cinema.
Leigh Singer, Sight & Sound
"An Aching Ode to Film, Time and Memory...This exquisite, unhurried exercise in melancholy will mean most to existing fans of the Spanish master, but it's moving enough to make some new ones. A story itself of disappearance and re-emergence, and the potential of cinema to bridge past and present as if decades were days it's potent and poignant enough to reach newcomers to Erice's work, even as fans pore over its self-reflective details.
Guy Lodge, Variety
'Best Films to See this April'
'Victor Erice is a revered figure in Spanish cinephile circles; an avowed influence on Guillermo Del Toro and Pedro Almodóvar
...a haunting drama...as the mystery continues. It's a film about what happens to your calling as an artist when the drama of your life seens to have played out, and the stubborn belief in the power of cinema to work miracles.'
Alex Denney, AnOther Magazine
'It was at this point, during this nearly three-hour film’s drift between the plottier first third and the burgeoning catharsis of the final third, that I realized I was hooked and would follow Miguel anywhere. It had also become clear by then that Erice, now in his eighties, had forgone any attempt to revive the painterly splendor and crypto-minimalist narratives of his early films, and, working with co-scenarist Michel Gaztambide, had instead embraced a seductively meandering, novelistic approach to cinematic storytelling entirely new to his oeuvre. Close Your Eyes is a heartfelt homage to cinema’s singular relationship to memory, but it is also Erice’s most literary film: if Miguel’s The Farewell Gaze seems to resemble a Jorge Luis Borges story, the framing film, with its emphasis on disappearances, stories within stories, and amnesia, echoes the novels of Paul Auster…
Most poignantly, Close Your Eyes ends where The Spirit of the Beehive begins, with a cinema screen becoming not only a mnemonic device, but also a site of psychic transformation.'
Jose Teodoro, Film Comment
★★★★
‘Legendary Spanish director Víctor Erice returns with a fascinating and compelling drama. With sublime and complex performances by Solo and Coronado this slow burning tale proves a masterclass in acting and filmmaking.’
Maria Duarte, The Morning Star
"A great director returns after 31 years...Víctor Erice has made only three features in a 50-plus-year career. These happen to be three of the greatest films ever made.
A stirring tale about memory, identity, and friendship, it feels deeply, almost alarmingly personal. The film proceeds in stylistically distinct movements...tantalizing images...
Close Your Eyes is about cinema, too, though not in the way that we've become used to in recent years: it's not a love letter or a poison-pen missive, but rather an exploration of cinema as memory and of the relative vallue of that memory."
Bilge Ebiri, Vulture magazine
Few filmmakers have such a hold on cineastes with such a slim body of work (three features, including one documentary, and a handful of acclaimed shorts) as Spain’s Víctor Erice. Now, 50 years since his beloved, full-length debut The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and thirty years since his last, The Quince Tree Sun (1992), comes a fourth feature that’s both a long-awaited return for the eighty-two-year-old director, a career summation and an exquisite reckoning of cinema’s power to haunt and enchant, to bring the physically or spiritually dead back to life.
'A slow-burn marvel which climaxes in a sequence of overwhelming profundity and mystery. What begins as an apperantly modest, small-scale drama, ends in a moment of ethereal beauty, for both characters and viewers. Erice still has the courage and the conviction to stage a miracle similar to the one which still set jaws-dropping in (Carl Dreyer's) 1956's Ordet. Only this time, it's not evanescent forces of spiritual fervour that are able to bring a man back to life - its cinema.' (Cannes Film Festival review)
David Jenkins, Little White Lies
"An Aching Ode to Film, Time and Memory...This exquisite, unhurried exercise in melancholy will mean most to existing fans of the Spanish master, but it's moving enough to make some new ones. A story itself of disappearance and re-emergence, and the potential of cinema to bridge past and present as if decades were days it's potent and poignant enough to reach newcomers to Erice's work, even as fans pore over its self-reflective details.
Guy Lodge, Variety
In the final hour the twin themes of memory and identity come to the fore, and Erice brings the film full circle in a bold and surprisingly emotion-packed ending, which offers closure on the right notes of hope and love. So despite all the sophisticated use of meta-cinema and constant cross-references between fiction and reality, the ending is as moving as it is unexpected.
Deborah Young, The Film Verdict
"At a disinterred cinema, light and shadow plays over rapt faces in the dark, in Erice's love letter to all he knows."
Nick Hasted, The Arts Desk
'Critic's Pick'
"A gently shattering tribute to the magic of film...It capture the essence of his whole career...
In some respects it feels like the most nakedly personal film the now 83-year-old has ever made. In others, it feels like the only film he's ever made. Or maybe all of them.'
David Erlich IndieWire
