Un rare : Victor Erice Retrospectives 2002

The Quince Tree of the Sun

El Sol del Membrillo

Víctor Erice

Spain

1992 Fiction 2h18

For his third feature-length film, Erice presents the work of painter Antonio López Garcia, who tries to capture the ephemeral light of the sun on the quince tree he planted a few years ago in his garden.

With : Antonio López, María Moreno, Carmén López, Elisa Ruiz ; Amalia Avia, Lucio Muñoz, Esperanza Parada, Julio López Fernandez
Screenplay : Antonio López, Víctor Erice inspiré d'un travail d'Antonio López García
Image : Javier Aguirre Sarobe, Angel Luis Fernandez, José Luis López Linares
Music : Pascal Gaigne
Editing : Juan Ignacio San Mateo

Production : Maria Moreno
Distribution: Films sans frontières

"Erice filmed with as much attention to objectivity as did the painter: long static shots, fades to white that make the screen seem like the surface of an empty canvas, shots of the sun in the cloudy Autumn sky. Death and the sun cannot look each other in the face, a moralist once said, and this film is perhaps a perfect example of "death at work" according to the formula with which we have defined the image that cinema makes of reality (...). There is nothing macabre or morose, nonetheless, in this rare and precious work, a work that requires a attentive complicity with the spectator who cannot be otherwise if he is interested in the artistic process." (M. Martin) "It's also for this that painting and contemporary cinema now follow the same path: more than ever, the question is how to make visible – whether one paints or films – the image." (V. Erice) Quince Tree of the Sun won both the Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Award in Cannes in 1992.