Víctor Erice

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Víctor Erice (born 30 June 1940) is a Spanish film director.

Víctor Erice Aras was born in Karrantza in Bizkaia (Basque Country). He studied law, political science, and economics at the University of Madrid also attended the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografia in 1963 to study film direction. He wrote film criticism and reviews for the Spanish film journal Nuestro Cine, and made a series of short films before making his first film, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), a critical portrait of the rural Spain of the 40s.

Ten years after, Erice wrote and directed The South (1982), based on a story from Adelaida García Morales, considered a masterpiece although the producer Elías Querejeta only allowed him to film the first two thirds of the story. His third movie, The Quince Tree Sun (1992) is a documentary about painter Antonio López García.

[edit] Critics

Geoff Andrew, in the Time Out Film Guide, praises Erice's contribution to Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (Lifeline) as 'quite masterly', adding 'it only makes you wish he worked more frequently'. Excluding that short film, he has produced only three major works:

El espíritu de la colmena (1973, The Spirit of the Beehive), El Sur (1983, The South) and El sol del membrillo (1992, The Quince Tree Sun). Although snubbed by David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and underappreciated by the anonymous critics of Halliwell's Film Guide, the critical reception of his work both inside Spain and internationally has been almost unanimously enthusiastic, with many hailing his sparse contributions to cinema as visually poetic masterpieces. Critic Tony Rayns describes El espíritu de la colmena 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.' Cinéastes' hyperbole aside, it is clear that Erice is an important master of the cinema, creating pure pieces founded on image and light, that interpret the artform not primarily as a vehicle for narrative (though this remains important), but as a means of showing interesting things in beautiful ways.