Of silence, Blaise Pascal wrote that it was one of the forms of“eloquence”but also “the greatest persecution”. Such is the case with the whispered films of the Spaniard Victor Erice, himself a man of rare speech. His name has nonetheless marked the legend of Spanish cinema, for having given him three of its most sparkling jewels: The Spirit of the Hive (1973), South (1983) and The Dream of Light (1992), so many intense fables on the secret corridors of memory and imagination. Interventions spaced ten years apart, which have long constituted, in addition to a handful of short formats, all the work of the 83-year-old filmmaker, with the reputation of a parsimonious hermit. Until the recent announcement of a fourth opus, Close eyespresented at the end of May at the Cannes Film Festival, but in the glaring absence of its author, who explained it by an open letter in the columns of the daily El País.
To accompany the film, the man preferred the calmer sounding board of the La Rochelle Festival, in the first half of July. Of an imposing size, the bushy face, it is a rock which presents itself to us, from which emanates a soft and balanced voice. Born in Karrantza in the Spanish Basque Country on June 30, 1940, under the military dictatorship of Franco, Erice was struck down as a child by his discovery of cinema, in particular American films which passed the sieve of censorship and permanently impressed his retina. In Madrid, where he went to study law and political science, he branched off as soon as possible towards film school, from which he graduated in 1963. Alongside his first short films, he worked as a critic, and he will always maintain a reflective activity, as an essayist or teacher. A decisive meeting took place at the end of the 1960s with Elias Querejeta, a former pro footballer converted to production, who gave birth to the young scene of the 1960s and 1970s (Carlos Saura, Julio Medem, Manuel Gutierrez Aragon), and proved to be for Erice alternately lucky star and bad genius.
The producer gives the beginner a chance by giving him an episode of the sketch film Los Desafios (1969), on the basis of which he will immediately sign his first feature film, The Spirit of the Hiveevocation of Francoism at the height of a child, Golden shell at the San Sebastian Festival in 1973. Ten years later, it is the same producer who will interrupt the shooting of the Southexile diary of a proscribed family in the 1950s, in a village in the North. “I was convinced that I was going to shoot the second part in the South, in Andalusiaexplains the filmmaker. However, the producer has chosen to show only the first part to Gilles Jacob [délégué général du Festival de Cannes à l’époque]. They took it as is in competition at Cannes, where it received a very favorable reception. But me, I was distraught, because the film was not finished. It was a trauma that I kept with me for a long time and that marked me to the point of leading to my total break with cinema as an industry. I continued to work, but always on the sidelines. »
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