Poetic Density, Ontic Weight: Post-Photographic Depiction in Victor Erice’s Dream of Light

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)