Passing Light: Víctor Erice’s The Quince Tree Sun

Of all the artforms that represent or evoke reality in various ways, film is the one that speaks the language of memories and dreams: much like those real-life sequences that our minds reconstruct and replicate with counterfeit senses, cinema uses light to paint in motion. The medium of painting, in contrast, freezes what cinema animates, locking the transience of light within the frame.

Few filmmakers have captured light quite in the way Víctor Erice does. Across his four features, from El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) through to Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, 2023), beams of sunlight pour through windows or play across buildings and landscapes, while the artificial lights of projectors hazily illuminate movie theatres. As José Teodoro writes of Erice’s filmography, these four films “are possessed of a heightened awareness of the fleetingness of all things … light always seems to be surrendering to shadow”.¹ It’s natural that painting should be of particular interest to a filmmaker with such preoccupations, and indeed El sol del membrillo (The Quince Tree Sun, 1992),² Erice’s portrait of the artist Antonio López García at work, was not the director’s first attempt to draw from the artform; in the late 1980s, he had intended to make a film conceived around Diego Velázquez’s 1656 baroque oil painting Las Meninas, but these ambitions were thwarted when a film seemingly inspired by Erice’s treatment was released.³

In the summer months of 1990, in preparation for what would become The Quince Tree Sun, Erice accompanied López to various vantage points in Madrid,⁴ filming him with a digital camera as he painted urban landscapes.⁵ As a painter particularly interested in verisimilitude – in 1986, art critic Robert Hughes referred to him as “the greatest realist artist alive”⁶ – López’s work arguably edges closer to the live-action moving image than those in his cohort who pursue a more conceptual approach. This isn’t merely a question of photorealism; as Hughes puts it, the “essential subject” of López’s work “is time – how to use it, how to slow its passage, how to testify about a fugitive world that changes as he looks”⁷

The passage of time, like light – and, of course, the way both are bound up in one another – is a central concern of The Quince Tree Sun. At the beginning of the film, captions announce the place, season, year and day (“Madrid, autumn 1990 / Saturday, 29 September”) as López walks home with the materials for a canvas under his arm. Later, over shots of the city approaching nightfall, we hear the news stories of that time from public broadcaster RNE: renewed diplomatic ties between the Soviet Union and Israel; increased tensions in the Persian Gulf; the reunification of Germany. None of these fleeting global events break through the surface of the film, in which the central struggle couldn’t be further from those of the world; rather, their inclusion as brief news reports insists on the transitory quality of the place and time being presented, and everything dead or alive that exists within it.

Over a series of weeks, as his home undergoes renovations – a process we see occurring in parallel – López seeks to complete a single painting of a tree in his courtyard, hung with nearly-ripe quinces that grow and further sag the branches with every day that passes. “I think I have to paint the sun,” he tells his wife, fellow artist María Moreno. “The light I want … [will last for] maybe a couple of hours in the morning.” Eventually, the weather defeats him: weeks of rain cause him to abandon the partially completed painting and start afresh, this time working from pencil – no colour, no light, just beautifully sketched shapes on a canvas. As more quinces fall and begin to rot on the ground, López picks some of his own to eat and packs up his supplies. On returning to the house, he shifts roles from artist to model, posing for a painting by Moreno in which he lies on a bed fully dressed and appears to be either asleep or dead.  

For much of its running time, both Erice’s film and López’s painting are as naturalistic as cinema gets: López is seeking to capture the shapes, appearance and colours of the tree as they appear, and Erice is using a camera to faithfully document his work with as few elisions as possible. Yet, in their own way, both also modify their shared environment and render it artificial. For the painter, the precision he is seeking requires substantial scaffolding: he secures his standing position by driving rock pegs into the ground at his feet; ties a plumb-bob to a string to establish the vertical line; daubs walls, leaves and quinces alike with white paint for horizontal measurements; and even ends up covering the tree with a canopy so that he can work in all weather.⁸ Likewise, the presence of the camera, invisible to us until the final sequence, is every bit as much of an imposition; because it’s there, López cannot work in solitude as would usually be the case, and, therefore, his “relationship with the tree [is] altered by the presence of a film crew”.⁹ As Erice goes on to describe it, the camera “rots the natural”¹⁰ – in this case, as Jean-Philippe Tessé suggests, perhaps even in a literal sense, by having aged the fruit with its accompanying incandescent light, and thus truncating the time available for López to complete the painting.¹¹

It might seem appropriate, then, that The Quince Tree Sun culminates with images of the camera standing in López’s place, staring at the tree, staring back at us. Insofar as Erice exercises a fidelity to reality in patiently depicting López’s artistic process, his interactions with family and friends, the radio he listens to as he works, and the traffic, streets and buildings of Madrid that surround him, the film also shows us the equipment with which all of this has been recorded – but as if they were somewhat menacing alien beings, seemingly operating autonomously. Paradoxically, in showing this aspect of “reality” that is usually hidden away in documentary films, this sequence takes us out of documentary mode and into something more like abstracted fiction. 

This culminates in a narrated image that is both entirely fictional and entirely true: a dream that López describes in voiceover – one he had shared with Erice months before work on the film commenced¹² – of being in his family home and seeing quinces withering on a tree under an alien light. Like all dreams that we remember or recount to others, it is something of the past that can no longer be grasped. But through cinema and the light it captures, dreams, as well as memories, can live on.

The author wishes to thank Fernanda Valenzuela Bravo for her help in translating Spanish-language sources for this article.

El sol del membrillo/The Quince Tree Sun (1992 Spain 134 mins)

Prod: Maria Moreno, Carmen Martinez Dir: Víctor Erice Scr: Víctor Erice, Antonio López García Phot: Ángel Luis Fernández, Javier Aguirresarobe Mus: Pascal Gaigne Ed: Juan Ignacio San Mateo 

Cast: Antonio López, María Moreno, Enrique Gran, María López, Carmen López, Elisa Ruiz, José Carretero, Amalia Avia, Lucio Muñoz, Esperanza Parada, Julio López Hernández, Fan Xiao Ming, Yan Sheng Dong, Janusz Pietrzkiak, Marek Domagala

Endnotes