Abstract
Victor Erice’s El sol del membrillo/Dream of Light (1992) is a documentary about the Spanish realist painter Antonio López García. The film is an ekphrastic project, a treatment of one art form by another; but Dream of Light is more about film than painting, more theoretical than descriptive.1 It thus oscillates between art film and documentary, following the rules of documentary but addressing problems most vexing to theorists of film art. Erice’s choice of painter is crucial to his film-aesthetic agenda. The paintings of Antonio López mine the surface of experience, figure time experienced as duration and revealed in weathering, decay, patina, and putrefaction, all transformations in substance and quality. This temporality is taken up by Erice to forge a new film aesthetic, a new variety of lyrical documentary, at a time of crisis for the film image as photographic celluloid gives ground to digital depiction; but he specifically needs the work of López to explore the limit of filmic depiction established in the European art film. Together then, López and Erice match the contingency of the film shoot with the constraint of academic painting and produce not, as one might expect, a moribund documentary about an apparently conservative artist, but an ambitious and probing meta-film that tests the limits of documentary. Dream of Light combines actuality with a complex mise-en-scène, a lengthy and meticulous editing process, and a carefully designed sound track. The result is more a philosophical work of art than a form of documentation; less a record of a painter at work than a self-conscious proposition about film’s relation to painting and to life.
Now it has been perceived that reality is hugely rich, that to be able to look directly at it is enough; and that the artist’s task is not to make people moved or indignant at metaphorical situations, but to make them reflect (and, if you like, to be moved and indignant too) on what they and others are doing, on the real things, exactly as they are.
Zavattini (1953)
It’s not surprising that these cinema-painting flirtations result in great films … because what they are talking about and what they are exploring, each in their own way, is the limit degree of the human gaze at the end of the twentieth century.
Lajarte (1993)
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Reference
A. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” in What is Cinema? Trans. H. Gray (Berkeley, VA/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1971).
P. Bonitzer, Décadrages: Peinture et Cinéma (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile/Cahiers du cinema) (1985).
F. Calvo Seraller, “Enlightened Reality: The Paintings and Drawings of Antonio López-García,” in Antonio López-García, eds M. Brenson, F. Calvo Serraller and E. J. Sullivan (New York: Rizzoli, 1990, p. 34).
G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
M. A. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
L. C. Ehrlich, “Interior Gardens: Victor Erice’s Dream of Light and the “Bodegón” Tradition,” Cinema Journal 34:2 (1995), 22–36.
L. C. Ehrlich, An Open Window: The Cinema of Victor Erice (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000).
T. Elsaesser, “Rivette and the End of Cinema,” Sight and Sound 1:12 (April 1992), 20–23.
G. A. Johnson, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993).
T. de Lajarte, “Cherchez les fruits,” Cahiers du cinéma, 467: 8 (1993).
V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting. Memorial Edition. Trans. and ed. I. Montagu (New York: Grove Press, 1970).
D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
P. Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
R. Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema (Paris: Editions Dis/Voir, 1995, vol. 1).
C. Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” in Film: A Montage of Theories (1953), ed. R. D. MacCann (New York: Dutton, 1966, pp. 216–28).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 Simon Dixon
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dixon, S. (2012). Poetic Density, Ontic Weight: Post-Photographic Depiction in Victor Erice’s Dream of Light. In: Vacche, A.D. (eds) Film, Art, New Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026132_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026132_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32358-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02613-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)