No Substance #180: Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes
1.
I watched Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes a while back. Erice is the director of The Spirit of the Beehive, perhaps his most well known film, as well as El Sur and Dream of Light. Each one of those films had a ten year break between them, but the last of them, Dream of Light, was released in 1992. After that, it would take Erice thirty years to release another film. Close Your Eyes is about a filmmaker whose friend and star disappears suddenly while they are making a film and the TV show that makes a special about him, years later.
2.
The most heartbreaking thing about art, or at least I think the most heartbreaking, is how much work you lose because the opportunities weren’t there, or you didn’t have access to them. Lost work can’t really be avoided, not in general, if I’m honest. There’s family, there’s health, there’s all kinds of considerations that come into your day to day life, all of which take a bit here and a bit there from your artistic output, but which is simply part of life. You accept those. It’s the practical ones, the ones that exist around your work, such as funding, publication, that hurt because you were capable and willing, but no one believed in you, or you didn’t know the right people. Those are the ones that hurt, because that work feels as if it is lost needlessly.
3.
Close Your Eyes isn’t about lost work. Miguel Garay, the film’s central character, is a solitary man filled with loss, not just for his film, or his art, but for his friend and his son, who died some years earlier. Garay is played by Manolo Solo, who does an excellent job of carrying this loss with a sort of crumbling dignity as he lives on the edge of a community with his dog in a caravan. He translates books to get by and grows his own vegetables and his car hasn’t worked for years. He lives in a sort of limbo, I guess you could say, a figure of indeterminate needs and desires, who could easily be lost himself. He has few friends, less family. After the TV show about his incomplete film and lost friend airs, he receives a phone call saying that his friend has been found living in a retirement home run by nuns. He has no memory of who he is and so Garay takes his incomplete film to show it to his lost friend in hope that it returns his memory.
4.
The lost film bookends Close Your Eyes. It’s called The Farewell Gaze and it is about an old, dying man who hires a detective to find his missing daughter who might be, perhaps, in Singapore somewhere. The detective tells him it will be difficult to find the girl. He says, in fact, that he might not be able to find her. The man believes he will. The second bookend takes place when the detective returns with the daughter. At the sight of her, the man is overcome, and dies. This scene takes place while the characters in Close Your Eyes sit in an old, shut down theatre and watch the film besides the actor who played the detective, the actor who later disappeared, only to be found some twenty years later without his memory, but carrying the photo of the girl in the film, a prop he believed was real.
5.
I don’t know too much about Víctor Erice, but I do know that Close Your Eyes is a great film. I haven’t heard many people talk about it, but that might just be me and my almost cave like existence, and it might be just one of those things. Last year, when the film was released, Erice talked about how he hasn’t been inactive in the last thirty years, that he has made short films, done art installations, and worked on a number of projects that haven’t worked out. He almost sounded like he was apologising. Still, it’s a great shame to think that Close Your Eyes is his fourth film, and that Erice, now in his eighties, will make one more film at most, if the timelines of his previous films are anything to go by.
6.
A small piece this week. I’ve spent a lot of it thinking about new work, working things around in my head, pushing at projects I’m working on. This new novel I’m writing changed somewhat, but for the better, I think. I am writing it on index cards at the moment. I’ve never done that before, but I thought the change would be nice. I am one of those authors who doesn’t write very good first drafts, so it’s interesting to see bits and pieces boiled down on small cards, as if I could stick them later on the wall and draw strings through it, much like a serial killer. I also write bits and pieces out of order, something I rarely do. I mostly write linearly. I always have. I like the way it unfolds in my head, the way it would for a reader. I am still mostly doing this for the new book, but I jump back and forth occasionally.
Still, the work goes along. Work must, after all. I think, next week, I will have a new story out in Lightspeed, so that will be another piece of work, and I’ve got some other pieces out, trying to find homes. And more ideas, of course. More than I can possibly write, though I suppose that hasn’t yet been tested.
Anyhow, you all keep safe.
Ben
(Ben Peek is the author of eight books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His ninth book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)