Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Theyre the only person who can look at me differently, a character says in the film.
This is what I want from them: a final look before I die nothing more.
Without any kind of script, Erice shot pretty much every day as the artist went about his business.
Soon, however, nature took its course.
Rain and clouds shut out the sun; the quinces grew; the leaves changed.
The quinces grow and fall, are eaten or left to rot.
The tree goes through its cycles.
How long did it take forClose Your Eyesto come together as a project?
The screenwriter, Michel Gaztambide, and I started working together in July 2021.
The original plot already existed, written by me several years earlier.
But they were not like the ones described in your question.
It is not true that I have not made films in 30 years.
My short and medium-length films, made from the year 2000 onward, are also films.
They have not circulated through major distribution channels, and they are not many, certainly.
You began making films in the 1960s and made your first feature in 1973.
Many of us feel that the style of cinema has changed quite a bit since then.
It seems undeniable that viewers have changed a lot.
Cinema no longer occupies the space in society that it did in the past.
Films are made and consumed in a very different way.
Their images are digitized to be broadcast on television, computers, tablets, and mobile phones.
This favors a bang out of reception that increasingly approaches the notion of consumption.
It is not strange that users and viewers are talked about so much.
I can perhaps respect them, but their tastes are not the guide for my work.
What does this mean, in your eyes?An echo of the old debate between cinema and life.
Better yet: between art and life.
The memory of Julios former life is meaningless to him.
The film is about the reclamation of a mans identity, but maybe its not the man we think.
Julio Arenas is now Gardel, a pseudonym.
He seems to be content with his destiny.
He has no memory, but does he have consciousness, awareness of the other?
And what you point out regarding the question of identity is very true.
What is the significance of names in the film?
Miguel goes by different names at different points.
And in the fictional film, Mr. Levys daughter, Qiao Shu, is also Judith.
The former appears very prominently.
The latter is perhaps a little hidden, though there are constant examples.
Garay is Miguel, but also Mike in Marina Rincon.
Julio Arenas, who once was Mario Guardione, is Gardel in the nursing home.
Levy has used up to four different names in his life.
His daughter is Judith and Qiao Shu.
Dr. Benavides is pleased to finally learn Gardels true name.
And then Garay asks him what a name is.
In his poem A Compass, Jorge Luis Borges wrote: Behind the name is what is not named.
Its a delightful scene, but also, I felt, a very sad one.
The way its sung in the film, it seems to almost become a song about death.
Was this in the script?
How did you decide on this song?That song was not planned in the script.
I improvised it with the actors on set.
For me, it is a scene not at all sad, quite the opposite.
The film seems to have several different styles.
There are many straightforward two-person dialogue scenes as Miguel searches for Julio.
One is that ofThe Farewell Gaze, the unfinished work.
Its two sequences, which open and closeClose Your Eyes, I shot on 16mm and photochemical support.
But I would prefer to talk about differences in tone rather than style.
It is characteristic of legendary tales whose endings aroused redemption in the viewers conscience.
Think, for example, of the ending ofCity Lightsby Chaplin or ofOrdetby Dreyer.
In the end ofClose Your Eyes, there is a redeeming gaze.
What was the response toClose Your Eyeslike in Spain?
Even though youve only made four features over the past 50 years, youve made lots of shorts.
Has it been frustrating for you that you havent made more features?
And what are the main reasons you havent made more?
Is it mostly to do with financing?
Or have there been other reasons?There have been reasons of all kinds.
Some may be the ones you mention.
But there are more, different ones.
What were the origins of that correspondence?
Abbas sawA Dream of Lightthere.
He liked it a lot.
I believe it was that film that truly brought us together.
I thought that a way to establish an audiovisual relationship between us could be through video letters.
Abbas liked the idea very much.
And so, between April 2005 and May 2007, we exchanged ten video letters.
They gave rise to the title of the exhibition: Correspondences: Erice-Kiarostami.
I know youve done a lot of commercial work.
I havent seen any of your commercials, so Im very curious about them.
How would you characterize this work?
Are you able to bring any of your cinematic sensibility to these ads?Like Kiarostami, its curious.
I worked as a director of commercial films in the 1970s and 80s.
I did it intermittently as a freelancer.
When directingThe Spirit of the Beehivein 1973, I had to completely forget the visual style of advertising.
It becomes a film about the impossible nature of art.
But I had never seen him painting a tree.
So when I started shootingA Dream of Light, I did not know what was going to happen.
It was a real adventure for me.
And what you say is true: Nature remains indifferent to the painters purpose.
The artists model was a living being, a tree whose fruits evolved over time.
Not the clock-coded time that rules our daily lives our work, our leisure but the time of origins.
The one that is inscribed simultaneously in the skin of the quinces and in the face of the painter.
