Víctor Erice Aras is a Spanish film director. He is best known for his two feature fiction films, The Spirit of the Beehive, which many regard as one of the greatest Spanish films ever made, and El Sur.
He wrote film criticism and reviews for the Spanish film journal Nuestro Cine, and made a series of short films before making his first feature film, The Spirit of the Beehive, a critical portrait of 1940s rural Spain. Erice was among other filmmakers, such as Luis Buñuel, who lived in “such restricted societies as Franco’s Spain,” to take aim at the authoritarian rule in power. At the time his first film was released in 1973, Francisco Franco was still in power. One of the things The Spirit of the Beehive is known for is its use of symbolism to portray what life was like in Spain under Franco’s rule. Setting the movie in 1940, at the start of Franco’s rule, was a risk for Erice, given that the film “wasn’t a propagandist effort in which stalwart Francoists won victories against evil, priest-massacring Republicans.” Ten years later, Erice wrote and directed El Sur, based on a story from Adelaida García Morales, another highly regarded film, although the producerElías Querejeta only allowed him to film the first two-thirds of the story. His third movie, The Quince Tree Sun is a documentary about painter Antonio López García. The film won the Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. He was a member of the jury at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival in May. At the 2014 Locarno Film Festival, Erice was awarded with a Golden Leopard award for lifetime achievement.
Critics
Geoff Andrew, in the Time Out Film Guide, praises Erice's contribution to as "quite masterly", adding "it only makes you wish he worked more frequently". Excluding that short film, he has produced only three major works: The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur and Dream of Light. Critic Tony Rayns describes The Spirit of the Beehive as "a haunting mood piece that dispenses with plot and works its spells through intricate patterns of sound and image" and of El Sur it has been said that "Erice creates his film as a canvas, conjuring painterly images of slow dissolves and shafts of light that match Caravaggio in their power to animate a scene of stillness, or freeze one of mad movement".
Legacy
Erice's work portraying children dreaming and their attraction to fantastic worlds during and around times like the Spanish Civil War would go on to influence Guillermo Del Toro and his respective films, including The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth.
