Victor Erice

Víctor Erice was born in Carranza (Vizcaya) on June 30, 1940. From a very young age, he was fascinated by cinema. “I started watching movies in the ’40s, by John Ford , Howard Hawks , Michael Curtis , Victor Fleming . But I didn’t know who they were, we chose the movies because of the actors, not the directors. It was always a children’s decision. At that time, the encounter with the cinema was a public experience. Today, children discover cinema on television, it is a private experience. I think that makes a big difference.”

He studied Political Science and Law, before enrolling at the Institute of Cinematographic Research and Experiences, where he graduated in 1963. After several shorts, his first meeting with the producer Elías Querejeta took place , who hired him for the collective film Los desafíos , which consists of of three segments. His – about the encounter between three Spaniards and an American soldier – is far superior to that of those directed by Claudio Guerín and José Luis Egea .

The clever Querejeta noticed his talent and decided to produce his first feature film for him, El espíritu de la colmena , from 1973, with a script co-written with the film critic Ángel Fernández Santos . The producer himself and the technicians are fascinated by the meticulousness of the filmmaker, but at the same time they are absolutely baffled. What do the images of some men playing cards have to do with the sequence of a projection in a cinema? Are they part of the same movie? How do you plan to mount them? Once the assembly is finished, everything makes sense, and an unprecedented lyrical force. Ana, an imaginative and curious girl from a post-war Castilian village, goes to see Doctor Frankenstein .and becomes obsessed with the monster. Her father is so dedicated to her work that he barely has time for her… For Erice the most important sequence is the one in which the girl discovers the monster on the screen. She filmed the very young Ana Torrent really surprised for the first time by the presence of Frankenstein’s monster. The filmmaker wanted to capture with the camera the moment in which someone of a young age discovers the cinema.

Since little Ana didn’t understand why the rest of the actors were called one way, and when they started filming, they had other names, Erice decides that the characters should be called the same as the people who play them.

“The title actually does not belong to me. It is taken from a book, in my opinion, the most beautiful that has ever been written on the life of bees, and authored by the great poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. In that work, Maeterlinck uses the expression ‘The spirit of the hive’ to describe that all-powerful, enigmatic and paradoxical spirit that bees seem to obey, and that human reason has never come to understand”.

The film wins the Golden Shell in San Sebastián, and critics hail it as the great event of the Spanish cinema era. The highly personal style of its author captivates viewers, but he has a problem: anyone who tries to imitate him and make movies on the same wavelength runs the risk of boring the sheep.

It took just 10 years for Erice to launch his second feature film. Romantically paired with the writer Adelaida García Morales, a story by this author gives rise to El sur . If Ana Torrent had been quite a discovery, here he hires a teenager, Icíar Bollaín , just as impressive in her film debut. The central theme is similar again, childhood and the parent-child relationship. In a town in the north of Spain, a girl grows up with the suspicion that her father –completely isolated– keeps a secret.

In the middle of shooting, the producer – again Elías Querejeta – suffers serious financial problems. He decides to suspend the production, and premiere the already shot sequences, as if they were an independent film. This tremendously disappoints the filmmaker, who is not clear about Querejeta’s move. They have since parted ways professionally.

Erice’s 90s film was El sol del quince , a risky documentary about the hyper-realist painter Antonio López , as he paints a quince tree in his garden that is about to bear fruit. On this occasion, López stops the camera on the painter – the film is slow and lasts 139 minutes – and his objective is to capture the very moment in which the artist’s inspiration arises.

At the start of the first decade of the 21st century, Erice was on the verge of carrying out another project, the adaptation of El embrujo de Shanghai , the novel by Juan Marsé . But he produces the film Andrés Vicente Gómez , the man behind comedies like Torrente , who asks the director for commercial concessions. He is not willing to give up a minimum, with respect to his artistic vision. He will shoot the movie just as he envisioned it or he will do nothing. In the end, he leaves the project and the producer replaces him with Fernando Trueba , who shoots one of the worst films in his filmography.

His ten-minute short Alumbramiento is part of the collective film Ten Minutes Older , in which twelve other teachers take part: Aki Kaurismäki , Jim Jarmusch , Wim Wenders , etc. He also shot a medium-length film, La morte rouge , which evokes his own childhood, to be released on the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to him and the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami in Barcelona .