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It was told by Ángel Fernández-Santos (critic, teacher and god) in an article published in the newspaper 'El País' in 1983; that is, a decade after the premiere of 'The Spirit of the Hive'. The text was entitled 'Look behind the eyes' and in it, he referred in detail, and with those periods of phrases so long and baroque mark of the house, the gestation of the idea first and the script after the film that had just turned a decade and of which he was co-screenwriter with the director. He said that originally the story that necessarily had to deal with (or refer) Frankenstein ran in two times, past and present, in a kind of Cartesian dualism between reality and consciousness. But something wasn't working. The script was written, ready to roll, but there was no way. It was then that Victor Erice, the director, decided to amputate the entire part, let's say, current. Suddenly, the film stopped running on the surface of the screen, to, in an indefinable and fickle 'tempo' like memory itself, sneak into the consciousness of each viewer. "And this one," the article ended, "does not contemplate the film with his eyes, but with the secret gaze, indebted to an identity and a poetic time also secret, that is behind the eyes of every human being." Better texts have been written about cinema, but, believe me, it is difficult to find them.

Time has passed, it is already 50 years since "that secret look", and Víctor Erice has returned with 'Close your eyes'. He owed it to us. Since we first saw 'The Spirit of the Hive', the memory was, so to speak, damaged. At the precise moment in which Anne discovers with surprised eyes the monster, Frankenstein, the cinema ceased to be something alien projected on a white canvas to become part of the retina of each spectator. The shot of the eyes completely open and surprised of the girl now receives in the new film its replica in the eyes that close of a broken José Coronado.

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San Sebastian Festival.

José Coronado: "Why shouldn't I tell a woman how beautiful she is? With education, it brings joy to life."

  • Writing: LUIS MARTÍNEZ San Sebastián

José Coronado: "Why shouldn't I tell a woman how beautiful she is? With education, it brings joy to life."

Cinema.

Víctor Erice returns to the greatness of cinema with 'Close your eyes'

  • Writing: LUIS MARTÍNEZ Cannes

Víctor Erice returns to the greatness of cinema with 'Close your eyes'

That is the first debt repaid in a narrative composed of pieces of shared memory, all of them arranged in a kind of fiction of chaos as if it were a puzzle. George Perec, the best lover of puzzles, said that the puzzle is a fiction of totality, an artifact whose meaning is to reassure us, to lock us in an order. But he also warned that the puzzle, in its radicality, is a trap: it shows us an ordered image, an apparent unity, behind which is hidden the disorder, the multiplicity, the infinity of options. And it is there, in a constant appeal to fiction as balm that organizes and orders the bewilderment of reality, where the enigmatic and perfect prodigy of 'Close your eyes' lives.

It tells the story of a film director (sober and clear Manolo Solo) who long ago left a film unfinished because of an actor (murky and undone José Coronado) who, suddenly, disappeared. And forever. All this happened in a strange past, that of youth, in the almost sacred space in which everything seemed once possible. Decades later, the mystery returns in all its raw vulgarity when a television program decides to investigate what happened, why and how. The actor who was and faded is now an empty man, incapable of remembering and, therefore, of being. What is elucidated are matters such as memory, identity and time itself.

'Close your eyes' starts with a fragment of that unfinished film that due to its texture and manners could well be a wreck of the adaptation of The Haunting of Shanghai by Juan Marsé that ended in shipwreck when the producer tore the project from the hands of Erice himself at the end of the 90s. And there, in the projection of the film within the film, in the cinema that devours cinema, the first seed of the first mirror is planted. The eyes turn on themselves and everything is reflected in everything: life in the cinema; The flint fabulation of the real, the past in the present. At one point, the daughter of the disappeared to whom she gives life not by chance in an imperial way and very close to the chill Ana Torrent says "I am Ana, I am Ana..." And the fragments of the shared image of time, of the spirit of that hive, acquire the flash of the ineffable. It is cinema turned into everyone's dream, into a common imaginary, into a secret shared gaze.

Erice makes each shot breathe with an unusual parsimony, of old cinema, of cinema that breathes cinema, of cinema that sings 'My Rifle, My Pony and Me' as Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson did in 'Rio Bravo' by Howard Hawks. The images are there to invite doubt, fear, risk; to be composed, decomposed and reassembled while each spectator weaves the pieces of his own memory, of his particular puzzle, from, again, the back of the eyes. 'Closing your eyes' wants to be an invitation to delve into what makes us what we are, which is nothing more than time.

The film within the film makes a reference to an estate named Triste-le-Roy. There, in a decadent mansion, lives the man (José María Pou) who cries for his daughter, also she, like the protagonist, disappeared. Mirror on mirror. Triste-le-Roy was where Borges placed the research of his story 'Death and the Compass'. In it, a man strove to establish the commonalities of a series of supposedly disparate crimes alien to each other. Finally he ended up finding the solution to his mystery, and with it, the name of the one who would be, in effect, his murderer. Right there, in Triste-le-Roy, in the place of death. Look upon look.

The wait of half a century has resulted in a film that is made and unmade in each plane, that hides what it leaves in sight, that retraces the paths of reality from fiction; A film that matches the foreground with the last. Erice himself says that the image of Ana in front of the screen in 'The spirit of the hive' is worth an entire filmography; that it is impossible to put the miracle of life into a script. Some eyes that open and others that close. It is cinema and it is memory; it is the possibility of seeing again everything that has been cried, everything that has been seen, everything that has been suffered and everything that has been forgotten from the place of privilege from which Ángel Fernández-Santos taught us to look, from the back of our eyes. Once again.

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Address: Víctor Erice Starring: Manolo Solo, Ana Torrent, José Coronado, María León, Soledad Villamil, Ginés García Millán, Petra Martínez, Mario Pardo, Josep Maria Pou, Juan Margallo Country: Spain Year: 2023 Duration: 169 min.

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