Of Time and Light: The Films of Víctor Erice

‘My life and work have always been about watching films, analysing films, writing about them, and making them. It’s a total, lifelong relationship, not just a career.’
– Víctor Erice

Though the perfectionist Erice has completed few features since winning international acclaim for his first – The Spirit of the Beehive – in 1973, he is surely one of the most impressive filmmakers of the last half-century. While his career is littered with fascinating projects that sadly never came to fruition, the consequently relatively modest body of work that has reached our screens is utterly distinctive, both thematically and stylistically. His films are contemplative, measured, mysterious, allusive, delicately nuanced and subtly beautiful; they focus on specificity of time and place, exploring how individual lives are inflected by history, politics, family, culture… and film. Memory, longing, change, growth, decay, loss – and how we as humans cope with them (or not) – are central to his work, investing even the shorter films with emotional complexity and philosophical depth. Cinematic gems, all.

Geoff Andrew, season curator