From Velázquez’s Mirror to Dream of Light: A Conversation About Film
Shiguéhiko Hasumi, 1992
Translated by Ann Sherif
The Theater of the Matters is honored to present an essay by Shiguéhiko Hasumi, who is a profound influence on our understanding of cinema. This translation by Ann Sherif was originally published in The Cinema of Víctor Erice: An Open Window (2007), which was edited by Linda C. Ehrlich, and remains one of the most important collections of writing on Erice in English. Special thanks to Hasumi, Ehrlich, and Sherif for allowing this to happen.
This text accompanies Nicholas Ray x Víctor Erice, a double bill program of Ray’s Wind Across the Everglades with Erice’s Dream of Light.
Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez - Museo del Prado, Madrid
“When I first came to Madrid as a student, I often went to the Prado Museum to look at Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor, 1656). In those days, the painting hung in a much smaller, more modest gallery than the one where it is now,” Víctor Erice told me, recalling his early days in college in this capital city. “Now it is the centerpiece of a larger gallery, surrounded by a group of other works. I much prefer the room where it used to be, because it was lit mostly by natural light from the windows, and I could go to look at the Velázquez by itself. When I was in college, there were many fewer visitors to the museum than there are now, so I could, if I chose to, sit in the gallery for hours and watch the painting gradually change with the light coming in from outdoors.”
As Erice spoke, I could detect in his face traces of the taciturn young man who, during the Franco regime, left his hometown of Carranza for Madrid. This internationally acclaimed filmmaker had entered college with the intention of studying economics, only to switch to the film school Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía and devote himself to writing movie reviews. Undoubtedly, the time he spent in the narrow gallery of the famed Madrid museum studying Las Meninas still influences his creative efforts.
As if in confirmation of my thoughts, Erice said, “I’m sure that you can imagine what an important experience that was for me to be able to sit forever contemplating the sense of perspective in Velázquez’s work and examine it with great care. It was fantastic for me. That painting brought up a whole range of questions about ‘representation’ for me. What is a creator? What is an audience? What does it mean to paint? What is the gaze? In that sense, I found the Velázquez piece to be surprisingly ‘modern.’ My first encounter with the painting started me thinking about these issues, and I’ve never stopped. They are an essential part of my filmmaking. That’s why I was so impressed with Foucault’s The Order of Things (Les Mots et Les Choses), especially the sections concerning Las Meninas. I couldn’t get enough of it. I knew that I had found a kindred spirit in Foucault, and found his writings tremendously moving.
“I very much wanted to attend the international conference on Foucault last year, but I was editing Dream of Light (The Quince Tree Sun) and so I had to stay in Madrid. Even now that the film is done, I find myself running all over the country, trying to get all the problems with distribution of the film straightened out. I didn’t work with a producer, you see, because I started making the film without plans or preparation.”
At the time of my interview with Erice, Dream of Light (The Quince Tree Sun) was scheduled to debut in October 1992 at Madrid’s Alphaville Theatre.
In the middle of the busy city street, Víctor Erice stopped and gazed calmly at me with his sensitive, deep-set eyes, framed by large black glasses. As I returned his gaze, I became aware that the bustle of the crowds and city sounds that had surrounded us were fading away. Though I knew that we were walking through one of the most lively parts of Madrid, I sensed that I was being drawn into a calm space that might best be called “Erice time.” Indeed, the last time I had seen him in Tokyo, he told me that he would be making another movie soon, in just a couple of years. Despite his promise, it took more than ten years for the director of El sur to create his next film, Dream of Light (The Quince Tree Sun). Perhaps Erice’s body clock dictates that rhythm—one film every ten years. Such a leisurely pace suggests the expectations of a prima donna, such as the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, that the world would adjust to suit his schedule, but Erice would never dream of presenting such a public persona. When we encountered each other again in Madrid, I felt certain that he greeted me with the words, “How quickly time passes!” but I may have been mistaken. Perhaps he had actually said, “How slowly time passes!” Perhaps I had started living in “Erice time” the moment I stepped off the plane in the Madrid airport.
I knew, however, that it was not only the leisurely pace of “Erice time” that had made us stop in the midst of the hubbub in that busy square not far from the Prado Museum. It was also because at that moment I valued above all else the rare experience of walking alongside a film director who is unlike almost all others—unusual because he does not regard his role as solely concentrating on “art,” and thus delegates to a producer the bothersome tasks of raising money and negotiating with movie theatres. Despite the fact that all of Erice’s admirers were waiting for the release of the new film with great anticipation—it had, after all, been twenty years since his first film The Spirit of the Beehive appeared, and ten years since the release of El sur—Erice had made no effort to take measures that would shorten the wait. Indeed, he insisted on handling all of the undoubtedly vexing logistical work, down to meetings about distribution of the film. The passage of time was of no consequence to Erice, because he had taken it all into his own hands, as if to assert that the process of his film coming into being was something he had to watch personally, and not something he could merely pass on to others. As I looked at the man standing before me, I felt moved to the very core by the realization that I was in the presence of a film director who was blessed with a profound devotion to the power and art of the cinema.
It probably was well past eight in the evening by then. It felt like a summer night in Madrid, and the sun was still lingering on the horizon. The Plaza del Sol bustled with small groups of people who sat chatting and relaxing before dinnertime, which is quite late in Spain. No one, of course, recognized the thin bearded man who stood talking with a Japanese man as the filmmaker Víctor Erice, the Spaniard who had amazed the world at the Cannes Film Festival. Just a half an hour earlier, he had brought a bundle of handsomely produced press releases and other information on his new movie to my hotel. He had spread out the Spanish, French, and English editions of the publications on a table in the hotel lobby. Erice expressed his annoyance that the publisher had accidentally omitted a quote by film critic André Bazin from the French edition. More disappointing to him, though, was the impossibility of communicating the true meaning of the Spanish title of the film El sol del membrillo in other languages. A literal translation would be “the sunlight falling on the quince tree,” but to every Spaniard, the phrase also bears a slightly inauspicious nuance. Erice explained that the sunlight referred to is specifically that of late September, when the quince begins to ripen. In Spain, many people still believe that children should not have much exposure to the sunlight at that time of the year. Therefore, when the film was shown at Cannes, the French title Le songe de la lumière (equivalent to the English, Dream of Light) was not sufficiently expressive because it failed to convey the haunting connotation of the Spanish phrase.
When I commented that the Spanish title El sol del membrillo sounded somehow mysterious and alluring, even to ears of someone who knows very little Spanish, Erice nodded languidly. I further inquired if the “ripening of the quince” referred also to the inevitable stages of overripeness, decay, and death, and Erice replied that “the sunlight falling on the quince tree” connotes death, as well as some ineffable quality that beckons one to madness. Dream of Light (The Quince Tree Sun) is therefore an autumn film.
It had not been Erice’s intention to make a film about autumn. Rather, it was in late September one year, the time of the “quince tree sunlight,” that Erice happened to hear that his friend, the painter Antonio López, planned a painting of a quince tree. That was enough to make Erice grab his camera and start filming. Not surprisingly, he had no producer to work with, nor so much as a line of script. Just as the painter Antonio López had no notion of how his experiment would turn out, Erice had no preconceived notion of what type of film he would make. Such were the origins of Dream of Light (The Quince Tree Sun).
Antonio López in Víctor Erice’s Dream of Light
Erice handed me a copy of his interview with a Spanish critic, which he described as the most detailed and satisfying interview he had ever done. The interview was, of course, in Spanish, and I tried my best to understand the passages that Erice pointed out to me. I managed to get the gist of it, which was that Erice regarded his spirit in conceiving of and making the film as comparable to that of a fisherman who stands with his fishing line dangling in the water, uncertain about what he will reel in. I also understood that Erice had been inspired by Rossellini’s comment about his film Stromboli (Stromboli di dio, 1950) that he did not view the final product as being of the utmost importance but rather felt that his goal was the process of aiming the camera on a character in a precarious state, and capturing the nuances on film. Erice smiled kindly at my efforts to comprehend the Spanish text that he had shared with me.
ENTER THE WOMAN WITH THE BROOM
Soon after our conversation at my hotel, Erice and I went out and walked at a leisurely pace through the crowds, headed toward the Spanish Film Archive (Filmoteca Española) where we planned to meet a mutual acquaintance. The man we were going to see was, in fact, the director of the Filmoteca. Mr. José María Prado, who is known to all by his nickname “Chema.” He had offered to give us a tour of the Filmoteca’s theater, Cine Doré, which boasts the finest facilities in Europe. It was Chema who had kindly contacted Erice for me, when I had been unable to locate him in Madrid. Even though he holds the title of director, Chema does not resemble in the least the type of bureaucrat whom one might expect to fill such a position, and is admired internationally for his broad knowledge of film. Chema is married to actress Marisa Paredes, who has appeared in Almodóvar’s films. Not surprisingly, he counts himself among Erice’s most enthusiastic supporters.
The night that I arrived in Madrid, I checked into my hotel, faxed my contact number to Erice, and then headed straight for the Cine Doré, about a ten minute walk from the hotel. The Filmoteca itself is housed in what was Madrid’s oldest movie theater, and has been completely renovated to include two separate theaters—one large and one small—as well as an outdoor theater for summer use. I scanned the program and made the happy discovery that they were showing Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow (1956) late that night in the outdoor theatre. Like most movie fans, I loved the inclusion of the song Blue Moon that suggests the memories of the middle-aged pair’s romance in this 1956 melodrama. I also recalled Erice’s touching use of the same tune in El sur. The actress who is the secret love of the father Omero Antonutti whistles it when she appears in the black-and-white melodrama shown in El sur. I could recall with great clarity the day when Erice told me how surprised he was when he learned that the actress playing that part, Aurore Clément, did not know the melody of Blue Moon. “So,” he quipped, “I had to teach it to her myself.” Erice smiled with approval when I told him that I had whistled Blue Moon myself as I watched There’s Always Tomorrow in the Cine Doré the night before.
As we strolled amidst the evening crowds on the streets of Madrid, Velázquez’s Las Meninas became a topic of our conversation, partly because I had visited the Prado that very morning and laid eyes on the painting for the first time. I spoke to Erice about the deep emotions that the painting had stirred up in me as I stood alone before it. Another reason that I mentioned the work was I had been curious about a rumor I had heard four or five years earlier that Erice was planning a new film with the suggestive title Velázquez’s Mirror, for which he had completed a script. From the title alone, I guessed that Las Meninas would be the subject. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to include Erice in the Foucault symposium. However, when Jaime Camino’s film Luces y sombras came out, it was obvious that both the idea for the film and part of the plot had been inspired by Erice’s ideas. Most regrettably, Erice’s film never reached the screen, and I had continued to wonder about the aborted project.
As if he had anticipated my question, Erice responded with uncharacteristic eloquence and remarkable calm that betrayed no sign of anger at or scorn for the director who had borrowed his ideas. He had not completely abandoned the project, he insisted, and started talking about his future plans. Even though we had left my hotel with the intention of going to a cafe and having a leisurely chat, the moment I brought up the topic of Velázquez’s Mirror Erice’s pace slowed, as if he had forgotten about our original destination.
Disaster struck the project sometime after he had sent out a synopsis of the film, Erice explained to me, and the story had somehow leaked out. At the very least, Erice said, he was relieved that the director’s approach was much less complex than his own, so he had snatched only a small part of Erice’s idea of introducing contemporary characters into the seventeenth-century setting of Las Meninas. Erice became increasingly garrulous, and started enthusiastically narrating his original plan of making a film in three parts. So absorbed was he in his own explanation that he stepped right out into a busy intersection against a red light and I had to grab his sleeve to stop him from being struck by oncoming cars. By then, I was totally disoriented, and was assailed by the odd feeling that Erice was taking us in the opposite direction of our supposed destination, the Cine Doré.
Part one, he told me, was to be in a documentary style. He planned to film a large variety of spectators as they stood before Las Meninas in the Prado. By including everyone from art historians to people off the street, Erice could record the widest conceivable range of comments about the work. A tour guide would come through and give her set speech about the painting, and then the museum guard would comment and reveal that, though he looks at the painting all day long, he never actually sees it. The director would also have included the opinions of the cleaning woman who comes through with her broom and sweeps the floors of the galleries. In other words, Erice wanted to portray a day in the life of contemporary Madrid, as performed in front of this particular painting. The more I walked along beside Erice, matching my pace to his and discussing the film, the less certain I felt about where we were headed, and the more confused I was about where I was at each moment.
Part two would begin with the same cleaning woman with the broom emerging quietly from the broad area suggested to exist beyond the doorway in the background of the painting Las Meninas. Following this entrance, the film would describe a day in Velázquez’s studio, Erice continued to explain as he rounded the corner. I was about to respond to him, but no words would come from my mouth, and I found myself almost tripping over my own feet, and already well within “Erice time.”
In Velázquez’s Las Meninas, the rectangular white space outlined by the doorway is the only visible source of outside light, and the painter depicts a male figure entering the dark interior of Velázquez’s studio through this doorway. This cinematic approach functions to create a link between the present and the Spanish court of the seventeenth century. In my eyes, Velázquez’s conception of space closely resembles that of director John Ford—but I couldn’t very well say this to Erice at that moment, because it would have interfered with his unexpected discourse on his film. Erice told me that he intended to keep the camera stationary throughout the filming in Velázquez’s studio, so that the audience would see every detail of Velázquez’s room from exactly the same point of view.
Erice doubtless planned to employ this technical restriction in order to evoke in film the dynamic interrelationship of perspective and planar recession integral to Velázquez’s painting. In his adherence to the use of the stationary camera angle reminiscent of that of D. W. Griffith, Erice would succeed in creating a John Ford—like evocation of space. It is useful, though certainly anachronistic, to understand Velázquez’s Las Meninas as a painting that adheres to Griffith’s principles of composition. I wondered if Erice was aware that, if he had succeeded in making Velázquez’s Mirror, he could have clarified the surprising relationship between Velázquez and Griffith’s work.
Because I chose not to share my thoughts with Erice at that moment, he of course was unaware of my participation in a silent dialogue with him. I continued to follow him down the street, wondering all the while where we were headed, as I listened to his description of part three of the film. It differed considerably from the first two sections, partly because the action takes place entirely on a set in a film studio, where everyone involved in making the film gathers and talks about their day in the studio. Abruptly, a man obsessed with Velázquez bursts in and declares that he will be satisfied only when he has the painting for himself. His means of possessing Las Meninas is to destroy the painting. At that point, the film shifts into a wild, fantastic mode.
Perhaps Erice said that the film would evoke the man’s fantasy life, but I am uncertain. Nor can I recall if he said whether or not he planned to show Velázquez’s Las Meninas in part three. It was clear to me that Erice meant Velázquez’s Mirror to start in a very realistic, documentary style, and to conclude in fantasy. In any case, it seemed exceedingly unfortunate to me that no audience could see the film.
But Erice insisted that he had not abandoned the project, and that it was not inconceivable that he might make the film someday. It would be somewhat higher budget than his other films, he realized, because of his plan to include the Velázquez painting. I glanced over at Erice and saw that he had a smile on his face and was once again his usual calm self. And I then realized that we had somehow made our way to the entrance of the Cine Doré.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF OUR CIVILIZATION
In the café located alongside Cine Doré’s impressive bookstore, we sat and chatted over iced coffee. Erice told me about several new books that were recently published by the Filmoteca Española. They were two excellent volumes about F. W. Murnau, with one volume focusing on his career in Germany and the other on his work in Hollywood. They were fairly hefty tomes, packed with valuable information about Murnau, and would certainly be translated into German before long. “I’m sure that Chema will give you copies,” he told me. Indeed, I had heard the advanced publicity about these titles, which had been released in conjunction with a television program about the director. I was familiar with the high quality of the Filmoteca’s publications, and so I relished the idea of such a gift. Erice was also editing a volume about Nicholas Ray to be published by the Filmoteca.
It is widely known that Víctor Erice began his career as a film critic. I asked him if he still wrote about movies, and he told me that he had recently published a piece in a journal about the final scene of Chaplin’s City Lights. An encounter between Chaplin and Erice struck me as a delightful one. In his brief article, he had commented on the way that the final scene of the movie recalled Chaplin’s relationship with his own mother. Chaplin’s mother was sickly and not infrequently unable to recognize her son. She would realize who he was only if he touched her. Erice saw this dynamic as being echoed in the final scene of City Lights, when the blind woman regains her eyesight, but is unable to recognize the tramp until they touch. Erice laughed as he told me that Chaplin’s father also sometimes failed to recognize his son, but that was because he was so drunk that he did not know who anyone around him was.
What Erice most wishes to write about is the relationship between film and painting. This came as no surprise to me, because Velázquez’s Mirror, had it come to fruition, as well as Dream of Light (The Quince Tree Sun), both confront issues of visual representation of the two media. Dream of Light (The Quince Tree Sun) was experimental in its aim of exploring the dynamic relationship between color, form, and light, and considering strategies for representing time in relation to these elements in the media of film and painting. Yet Erice does not align himself with undisciplined “avant-garde” impulses, and instead creates films marked by an extraordinary sense of restraint. The reason for this remarkable success lies in Erice’s insistence on attentiveness to time and its flow, made possible by his disciplined and stringent refusal to embrace the “artistic” spirit that conceives of creativity as existing in an atemporal realm. It is precisely Erice’s sense of time that allows his audience to experience cinema’s true “avant-garde.”
When the “quince tree sun” heralds the arrival of autumn, a painter takes his canvas and easel out into the garden courtyard next to his studio and arranges them with great care before a small quince tree. He decides to paint every day, until the time that the yellow quince fruit is ripe. A film director hears of the painter’s plans and carries his camera over to the painter’s studio. Every day, he returns and diligently films the painter’s posture as he works before the quince tree, as well as the movement of the brush on the canvas. Both the painter and the filmmaker attempt to capture shifting light as it changes with the passing days. The quince tree also changes subtly over time. Erice notes that he wishes to highlight the fact that the painter is not the type of artist who covers the canvas with the muted colors of the impressionists. Antonio López instead embraces realism and is attentive to form, in emulation of Velázquez.
In the film, the audience watches as the painter positions his easel with great care, measures the distance between it and the tree, and deliberates over the exact angle of the canvas. He makes marks on the ground, and uses a plumb hung from the exact middle of a string stretched parallel to the ground to help him determine the composition of the piece. Each day, he stands in exactly the same position, in exactly the same posture. In order to protect the painting and tree from direct sunlight, the painter puts up a tent over both. Erice’s camera records the sights and the sounds of the painter’s daily regime, and the film includes captions giving the dates of filming.
The first date in the film is 29 September 1990, an autumn day that might properly be called a day of the “quince sunlight.” It would be entirely possible for filming to continue until the moment that the painter lays down his brush, but no one can tell when that will happen, and, furthermore, no one can guarantee that will be the moment of completion.
Erice explains that the painter always comes out into the courtyard with a portable radio in his hands, and that he almost always paints while listening to classical music on the radio. Because of recording limitations, the director was unable to use the sound track that he recorded as he filmed. The sound track that he created subsequently, however, faithfully duplicates the sounds heard while filming. For radio and television, Erice hired the same announcers who would have actually appeared on the air on the days in question, and had them record appropriate audio portions for those days in the film studio. He told me that around the same time that Antonio López started his painting, some Polish migrant laborers came to work to repair a wall in his studio. He thought of filming their reactions when they tasted the quince for the first time, a fruit unknown in their native Poland. In the sound track, Erice inserted the radio news reports about the Gulf War and various musical pieces. He also shows the train tracks not far from Antonio López’s studio, and brief shots of the full moon shining in the polluted Madrid night sky.
I suggested that because his earlier movies were set far from the capital city, the shots of the big round moon over Madrid in the most recent one seem somehow fresh and innovative. Erice agreed and said that he made El sur entirely outside of Madrid, with the exception of one scene which he filmed in a studio in the city. Because he had started Dream of Light (The Quince Tree Sun) without a script, he decided that he wanted to record in detail everything that happened around the artist’s studio. From his insistence on a stationary camera and minimal use of the zoom lens, it is evident how severely Erice frames his work, much in the way that a painter never moves the brush beyond the edges of the canvas.
Even with the disciplined approach of the artist who wields his brush as he gazes at the quinces before him, and that of the filmmaker who captures this action on film, is it possible to capture the essence of the quince as it slowly ripens? Certainly, the painter is capable of altering the canvas to account for these changes, but what of the moment when the perfectly ripened fruit falls from its branch? How would the painter possibly depict that moment? Or how could one capture the inner workings of the painter’s mind when he finally realizes the impossibility of doing so?
From the very first frame of Erice’s film, the audience finds itself in an odd state of suspense—a kind entirely unrelated, however, to dramatic suspense. This is the kind of real suspense that charges a film with a strange tension, as the viewer is forced to acknowledge the very limitations of the representational form in question. I will not give away the conclusion to Erice’s film here, but I will mention that there are certain similarities between Dream of Light (The Quince Tree Sun) and the proposed Velázquez’s Mirror. In both, the seemingly realistic documentary of a painter gradually shifts into a decidedly unrealistic, fantastic mode. Not surprisingly, this fantastic mode accentuates the evocation on the screen of the demise of autumn, accelerated by the quince sunlight, and leads the viewer to understand that ripening is not far separated from overripeness, decay, and finally putrefaction.
I found especially revealing the words that Erice attributed to Antonio López. The painter said that movies were invented only after humankind had grown very, very old. Though film is considered a young art, it may in fact be an appropriate medium of expression for humanity which has reached an advanced age. Indeed, there may be some truth to his assertion that movies are an expression of the golden age of our civilization. The title The Quince Tree Sun furthermore identifies autumn with the golden age we live in.
Just as Erice finished his sentence, Chema Prado came over to our table carrying the two heavy volumes on Murnau. He invited us to join him for dinner, and we got up and followed him outside. As we walked away from Cine Doré, I looked up and saw the almost full moon shining in the sliver of the sky between the rooftops. So this was the moon over Madrid, I cried out, and two dark figures, bathed in the moonlight, turned about slowly to look at me.
8 September 1992
Originally published in Japanese in Representation 004 (Autumn 1992): 10–16.
Special thanks to Linda C. Ehrlich, Ann Sherif, Shiguéhiko Hasumi, Alexander Fee, Yuma Terada, and Ryosuke Saegusa
