COUNTLESS FILMS have been made about painters: Flamboyant, womanizing, megalomaniacs wielding paintbrushes provide all the ingredients for juicy, sweeping period pieces. (If that’s what you’re in the market to see, rent The Agony and the Ecstasy.) Victor Erice’s quasi-documentary (a.k.a. Quince Tree of the Sun) is none of those things, and painter Antonio L� Garc��has the most diminutive film presence imaginable. The modest, quiet artist “plays” himself—the 1992 film is staged, but unscripted—while painting, not getting into trouble. His model is a simple fruit tree, not some tempestuous nude.
DREAM OF LIGHT
directed by Victor Erice with Antonio L� Garc��runs September 22-28 at Grand Illusion
The two hour and 18 minute movie documents, in excruciating detail, the execution of a single canvas. Though large portions of Dream are in real time, nearly half a year passes during the project. The rub is that the painting is never actually completed. Erice follows L� in a diary format of his day-to-day routine, watching him prepare a canvas, set up an elaborate system of strings and markers (to create lines of perspective and points of reference around the tree), and finally daub the first paint onto his pristine canvas. Gradually, we, too, begin to embrace the elderly artist’s meditative, methodical pace. But, by and by, L� becomes frustrated by autumn’s changing light and the fact that the very fruit he tries to capture shrivel and drop from the tree. He finally abandons his canvas altogether—though certainly not without considerable existential chagrin for the audience.
Painter and filmmaker also share a kindred hyperperfectionism. Erice has made only two other feature films since 1973 (Spirit of the Beehive and El Sur—which returns to the Little Theatre September 28). He glories in the artist’s acute attention to detail and great technical precision, implying points at which filmmaking and painting intersect. L�’s works are essays on time, inertia, and death. Erice has crafted an appropriately cinematic reflection of these themes, a stunning meditation on autumn and the life cycle it represents.
