Until very recently, when his latest film „Cerrar los ojos” finally premiered at Cannes, the most recent title of maestro  Victor Erice was „El sol del membrillo”, a ravishing film that came out back in 1992.

On paper, El sol del membrillo is a film about the vain attempts of painter Antonio López to create a portrait of the quince tree in his backyard. But it only takes a short time to realize that Erice’s project, contained within the kernel of this fruit, is much larger than that. So large that it encapsulates the very mission of cinema (one should dare): to film the workings of death, Both an insurmountable limit, one that art rebels against at all times, and a barely-whispered ideal of any creator, this death fixed onto film reel is the horizon towards which El sol del membrillo advances with implacable cadence, perfectly content with its destiny.

With its spherical shape, and its full and knotty texture, the quince can end up symbolizing the universe itself, to the same degree – and here lies the film’s wonderful lesson of balance – to which it remains a fruit destined to turn into jam. In a splendorous scene at the ending of the film, at the end of this fall that has seen the all-too-fast ripening of fruit, from the peak to the pits, the painter takes a quince from the tree, brings it close to his face, and smells it in a mysterious and voluptuous gesture. Is there any scene, throughout the entire history of cinema, that is heavier with pain and sensuality, gripping each other in a sensorial embrace? Certainly so, but it seems to me that none other starts like this one, from a small, even minuscule drama – only for it to then open up the cosmic trajectory of life cycles.

This theatre of being has, within its centre, a man a a tree that Erice puts into a dialogue, from equal positions. In my favorite sequence, the camera transits from the painter’s intimate garden to its surroundings, expired with the eye of a distracted, nostalgic tourist, while the sound of the news playing on a cassette recorder accompanies us on the way. It’s a moment when the film seemingly remembers that the world goes beyond the branches of the quince tree: the voice of a radio announcer speaks, on a flat tone, about bilateral treaties between countries, about the dissolution of the GDR, or about the negotiations with Saddam Hussein. Here, we see a reverence in front of the world’s beauty, one that is not at all sugar-coated, which makes a man capable of putting all of his effort into an act that is both feeble and useless, while on the outside, a magnanimous historical turn is loudly taking place. Thusly, López becomes the agent of an act that is truly transcendental, which turns the quince tree into the receiver of what is a form of love: in the precision of his line, in the mania with which he writes down, à l’ancienne, the tree’s physical transformations, and in the pathological care that he takes of it, one can find an almost shocking faithfulness towards the world’s archaic rhythms.

This is the humanity that Erice works with: the one that knows it can never win anything aside from the moment, because the moment costs nothing. There is a beauty of the film that proves itself to be fully un-monetizeable, since its spiritual wealth lies in the light, the atmospheric front, the rain, the fruit of nature – a small deposit of ineffable goods that is in the possession of all. In a way, El sol del membrillo is the most precious of films, since it constructs itself with a matter that is impossible to quantify and is terribly ephemeral, a matter which it struggles – still, out of auteurial grace – to keenly document. This matter is the connection between painting and cinema: arts that mobilise the visible – frame, color, stroke – onto the white of the canvas or the black of the inactive camera, due to light. It would be easy if things just remained like this for all eternity – but they have an obligatory ending. For López, that is the ending of the day, when the nuances of the rays fully extinguish themselves; or the end of falltime, when the cold strikes these golden globes to the ground, after having been the suns of his life for a few months. Fir Erice, he is the ending of the film, the conventional “THE END” that both fascinates and terrifies, because it feels like it invokes cinema’s tango with death all too brutally, always prolonged for yet another shot, yet another day.

A filmmaker, just like a painter, works both with time – its effects, the texture that leaves a trace, uniquely and unrepeatably, onto the fiber of any being – and against it, delaying as much as possible the moment when it will have to give up, helplessly, in front of what is evident, and say “Stop”. In a ravishing shot at the end, Erice shoots his camera as it pensively – a cold, inhuman technique – regards the fruits on the ground. The drama pertains to the fact that these are the same fruits that, with morbid complicity, the same camera had recorded a few days prior as they were in the process of decomposing, fixating them within time and thus anticipating their future death. 

One cannot fight against this inherent sadism. El sol del membrillo expresses the tragic destiny of cinema, called upon to assist from the sidelines of any event as if it were an essential witness, yet one that is prevented from being able to save anything, save for memory. Erice radicalizes the Bazinian metaphors that saw the “seventh art” as a possibility of embalming time, conserving it for eternity – but the optimism of the critic makes space, in the case of the director, for a bitter-sweet observation. Because there is intrinsic violence to the act of turning quinces into the actors of their documentary on the illusion of immortality. In its colossal attention to the rebel tempo of life, this minimalistic masterpiece hides within itself such intensity, that it is capable of single-handedly extending our cinematic vocabulary toward the landscape of the vegetal world.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.