Victor Erice, Full Circle: The Spirit of the Beehive and Close Your Eyes at Harvard Film Archive.

In the fourth stanza of the Rhine Hymn, Hölderlin states: “For as you began, so shall you remain.” The tradition invoked with that verse has practically nothing in common with the world of Víctor Erice (b.1940), except for one essential thing: the nature of poetry. Writing verses is always a silent way of escaping from exhaustive explanation and remaining for a brief time in the uncertain. How long does it take for El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) to combine the sequences of the first act into an intelligible whole?

Erice's first film is beautiful, a little sad, and always enigmatic: in the last scene, the girl says and repeats, “I am Ana.” In Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes), the filmmaker's latest film, no less masterful than the first, Torrent once again becomes (another) Ana and repeats her name twice. This time she is in front of her father, who has lost his memory. The scene has the same intensity as the indelible closing scene of Erice's debut film and functions here as the preamble to the last scene of Cerrar los ojos, whose title becomes image and sound and, once seen, is impossible to forget. What happens is nothing other than a certainty of what cinema was (without a doubt) and can still be (perhaps) in relation to memory and identity: a spiritual supplement of the self, interwoven with feelings made of images and sounds.

In Cerrar los ojos, a filmmaker was unable to finish his second film, entitled La mirada del adiós (The Goodbye Gaze). In the middle of filming, his lifelong friend and the main actor of the film disappeared. He is presumed dead, but his body has never been found. That happened in 1990. The story itself takes place in 2012, and the link between that almost forgotten misfortune and the present of Miguel Garay—now a translator, far from Madrid and the cinema, near the sea and to the south, in Granada—is brought back by a television program that returns to the unsolved case of Julio Arenas, the missing actor.