The Remains of a Shipwreck: Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes

I

At the origin of all our lives is the mystery of what came before: the circumstances and events that led to our arrival. This mystery remains. It inhabits the memories we have of the people who cared for us and that have passed out of this world. It shapes the stories told by these people, stories that connect us to places whose histories whisper of what might have been. It occupies the houses we shared. It even leaves its mark on the furnishings that made these houses into homes. Saved from oblivion by feelings of attachment, these furnishings point back to the past and forward to a time that is still to come.

For the Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice, the cinema is bound to these mysteries. Made in 2002 as part of an omnibus project, Alumbramiento (Lifeline) begins with a shot of a newborn child asleep in a cradle. In the bed alongside, the exhausted mother has also fallen asleep, rendering her oblivious to the blood stain that is slowly spreading across the child’s bright white cassock. Rather than remaining with the mother and child, the film cuts to some of the activities occurring elsewhere in the village farmhouse: a young boy in a barn drawing the face of a watch on his wrist; an old man sitting at a parlour table playing solitaire, while his younger companion, the baby’s father, dozes on a settee; a woman using a sewing machine to embroider the baby’s name, “Luisín,” onto the front of a garment; a slightly older woman in a kitchen, hard at work preparing dough. Next to her on the kitchen table is a newspaper dated June 28, 1940, the day the German swastika was raised at the Hendaye bridge connecting France and Spain. The headline announcing this development is accompanied by a photograph of a group of smiling German soldiers. The child, whose cries eventually awaken his sleeping mother, is the inheritor of this world. Poised between the violence of a devastating civil conflict and the cascading effects of a larger global conflict, this is a world where the flow of blood across the child’s cassock keeps time with the ticking of a clock nestled among the photographs of distant relatives. Each oscillation of the clock’s pendulum a reminder of the limits and governing conditions of this world.

Lifeline

Running for just over ten minutes, Alumbramiento tells a story that dominates Erice’s films, a story about being born into a world that is generationally layered and whose mysteries precede our arrival. In each of his films, this story coincides with a reflection on cinema. In El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) and El sur (The South, 1983) the cinema operates across multiple levels: as a specific place, as an engagement with images and sounds that escape their moorings and, most profoundly, as the index of something unknowable in our lived existence. In The Spirit of the Beehive, this involves the struggles of the central character, Ana (Ana Torrent), to clarify the nature of the monster in James Whale’s 1931 version of Frankenstein – real or fake? spirit or phantom? Her struggles are viewed through the prism of the silences and repressions that characterised Spanish society in the dark years immediately following the end of the Civil War. In El sur the central character’s attempt to comprehend the forces that drove her father’s decision to leave his home in the South is embodied in the figure of Irene Ríos (Aurore Clement): the co-star of Flor en la sombra (A Flower in the Shadows), a fictional black and white melodrama playing at the local cinema, and the name that appears written over and over again on an envelope in her father’s study. Like the monster that fascinates and terrifies Ana in The Spirit of the Beehive, Irene Ríos is an embodiment of cinema’s capacity to animate figures whose purpose is to reacquaint us with what remains still to be understood in our relationship to the past.

In El sol del membrillo (The Quince Tree Sun, 1992) Erice documents the labour of the renowned Spanish painter Antonio López to capture the ripening of quinces on the tree in the courtyard of his studio. The use of title cards tracks the progression of this endeavour – from its commencement on the 29th September 1990, when the artist began by constructing his canvas, establishing a plumb line in front of the tree and hammering survey nails into the ground to mark the exact spot from where, each day, he would stand in front of the canvas, to its end on the 10th December 1990. Despite these efforts, time gets away from him, and the fallen quinces are left to rot at the base of the tree. The implications this failure has for Erice’s own practice is alluded to when the film cuts to a shot of the shadow cast by an unmanned camera on one of the walls in the courtyard. The tilt of the camera’s lens down at the fallen quinces suggests that it has been set up to record the drama of decomposition occurring at the base of the tree – that its gaze both reveals the world and affirms its passing. 

Erice’s most direct reflection on the mysteries that drive our engagement with cinema occurs in La morte rouge (Soliloquio)(La Morte Rouge: Soliloquy, 2006), a short documentary that was produced as part of the exhibition Correspondences: Víctor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami first staged at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. In this film, the director’s voiceover recalls how the experience of watching Roy William Neill’s 1946 murder mystery The Scarlet Claw triggered an encounter with mortality. “And thus it was, in the midst of what the vast majority thought of as a pastime, that the boy discovered people die and furthermore that men were able to kill other men.” Searching for a way to process this grim realization, he scans the faces of the adult spectators seated around him in the auditorium. Instead of seeing a reflection of his own fear, he encounters something more puzzling: a type of attentive passivity. “This fact awoke a suspicion in the boy: the unanimous attitude of the adults had to be the consequence of a pact they’d all agreed to, consisting of saying nothing and carrying on watching. Because all of them possessed one feature in common: they knew something he didn’t know, a secret that explained everything.”

Cinema as a place where mysteries are exchanged, identities are rendered permeable and the line between the living and the dead is confounded and affirmed. The release of Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, 2023), just his fourth feature-length film, affirms that the cinema still drives Erice’s thinking. The question that we must address is how has this thinking changed? On what basis does he sustain the intimacy that defines his relationship to cinema?

II

During the opening moments of Close Your Eyes a subtitle identifies the ivy-covered chateau shown in the distance as Triste-le-Roy, located on the outskirts of Paris. The date is Autumn 1947. When the film cuts to inside the house, a Chinese servant (Kao Chenmin) announces the arrival of Monsieur Franch (José Coronado), an exiled Spanish Republican. The owner of the chateau, a Sephardic Jew named Levy (José María Pou), has a proposition for Franch: if he can find his daughter, Judith (Venecia Franco), who was taken by his estranged wife to live with her in Shanghai, and return her to him he will help him to rebuild his life. “You’re tired of fighting and would like to live a normal life,” he tells Franch. To assist him in this mission, Levy hands Franch a photograph of Judith, dressed in a traditional Chinese costume. “I want to see that gaze one last time before I die,” he explains. “Her gaze. Nothing more.” As we watch Franch leaving the grounds of the chateau, a voiceover narrator conveys two pieces of information that are crucial to the story to come: first, that these images, shot in 1990, represent the last time that the actor playing Franch, Julio Arenas, was seen alive, and second, that the film we have been watching, La mirada del adiós (The Farewell Gaze), was never completed.

Julio Arenas (José Coronado) in the role of Monsieur Franch.

The film then jumps forward twenty-two years to show Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), the director of The Farewell Gaze, arriving at the offices of a television production company working on an episode of Casos sin resolver (Unsolved Cases), a real-life mystery series, investigating the circumstances of Julio’s disappearance. Later, Miguel admits that his motivation for agreeing to be interviewed for the program is financial. But the more we learn about the impact that Julio’s disappearance has had on his life, the more it becomes clear that the program has brought to the surface a range of unresolved feelings about the past that weigh heavily on his present. The same can be said of all the other people – family members and former friends – that Miguel reaches out to in his efforts to shed light on the circumstances of Julio’s disappearance. One of the first people he talks to is Julio’s daughter, Ana (Ana Torrent). For her, Julio was, at best, a spectral figure, whose presence in her life was mediated by his on-screen appearances. “Movies are strange in that sense,” she tells Miguel. “You see a character and you are told he’s your father . . . His face was almost that of a stranger, always dressed as someone else, always in character. He would appear and disappear . . . I’ve discovered I have nothing left of him. How’s it possible?” Ana’s recollections forefront two issues that are central to the film’s thematic intentions: the fragile nature of our connections to others and the cinema’s capacity to bring this fragility to the fore. Ana no longer watches her father’s old movies, not because they create the illusion of reconnecting her to someone lost, but because they reveal an absence that was always present in their relationship. For her, Julio was always a missing person.

Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) and Ana (Ana Torrent).

Ana’s reflections echo Stanley Cavell’s assertion that the cinematic audience’s absence from the events projected on screen encapsulates a broader experience of absence that is part of modern life. “Movies allow the audience to be mechanically absent,” he claims. “In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It is as though the world’s projection explains our forms of unknowness and our inability to know.”¹ This aspect of cinematic experience informs a powerful strand of modernist filmmaking. “People disappear all the time,” David Locke (Jack Nicholson) tells his unnamed female travelling partner (Maria Schneider) in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975). To which she replies, “Every time they leave the room.” In Antonioni’s films the fragility that characterizes human relationships is rendered through the gaps and elisions that determine our understanding of the characters and their connections to the places they inhabit. “We cannot supply the missing piece with confidence,” writes Gilberto Perez about these gaps. “The missing piece is truly missing, not merely a rhetorical omission but a felt lack in our knowledge.”² 

In Close Your Eyes the gaps and absences are less a consequence of disjunctions operating on the level of the film’s structure and more an outcome of the histories of its characters, their migrations and struggles. In an interview coinciding with the film’s release, the director aligns this with the matter of names.³ He notes that, during his conversation with Franch, Levy confesses that over the course of his life he has taken on four different names. In the same conversation, we learn that Judith now goes by the name Qiao Shu. This multiplication of names also characterises Julio’s history, both prior to and after his disappearance. Even Miguel is referred to by his Andalusian neighbours as Mike. This mutability alerts us to the displacements that mark the lives of the film’s central figures. Equally, it raises the matter of what, if anything, might underpin these names. If names are, like memory, a way of drawing out of the contingent circumstances of life an identity, then what remains of this identity once the name becomes changeable, bound not to the person, but the situation in which the person is immersed?

The film counterposes the unsettling implications of this question by acknowledging that viewing identity as contingent might offer a way out and the possibility of starting over. In his conversation with Lola (Soledad Villamil), a former lover that was also romantically involved with Julio, Miguel admits that there is something exhilarating about this way of thinking. He wonders if this might have something to do with Julio’s disappearance: the desire to break from the stranglehold of the past. “The idea of changing his identity, of starting a new life somewhere else,” Miguel muses. “What the three of us dreamt about when we were young.” 

In Antonioni’s The Passenger this is what spurs David Locke to leave behind the trappings of his life as a journalist and adopt the identity of David Robertson (Charles Mulvehill), a man he has only recently met and whose dead body he discovers in the hotel room adjoining his own. “He is drawn by the enterprise of the dead man as if Robertson were alive to magnetize him,” Penelope Gilliatt writes in her review of The Passenger. “[F]or there is nothing more attractive to the burnt-out than the spectacle of purpose.”⁴ Miguel does something similar. After his meeting at the television studios, he retrieves from a storage locker a cassette player and tape recordings of Julio rehearsing his lines as Franch as well as a jacket and tie that he will wear during the filming of the interview. Just before he leaves, he also removes from the clothes rack the raincoat worn by Julio in The Farewell Gaze. The downpour that greets him when he steps out of the storeroom provides narrative justification for his decision to don the raincoat. But it doesn’t prevent us from reading his action as an indication that, at this moment, as well, motivation comes from taking on the identity of another. Franch’s quest to locate Judith and bring her back to Triste-le-Roy is superimposed on Miguel’s quest to discover his missing friend, or, at least, to pull together the circumstances of his disappearance.

That Miguel is taking on an identity enfolded in the trappings of a role ensures that we align this action with the operations of cinema, and, in particular, the movement in and out of different roles that is essential to the work of the actor. In La Morte Rouge, the narrator recalls his horror at discovering that the murderer in Neill’s film is the seemingly inoffensive Potts (Gerald Hamer), the village postman, who is not actually Potts, but Alister Ransom, a resentful actor bent on revenge. The actor’s deception unleashes in the young boy’s mind a conundrum: “What he deduced was that an actor was someone who didn’t have a soul of his own; that, furthermore, by means of false beards, hairpieces, and moustaches, changes of clothing and of voice, he was capable of choosing an identity at will. And if Potts could be everybody, then everybody could be Potts.” Potts’ deception underlines a fundamental mutability that lies just below the surface. In Close Your Eyes this echoes what Ana finds so confounding about her relationship to Julio: that a person can be both there and not there, that existence can be affirmed as a form of absence. 

III

In the final third of the film, Miguel returns to the caravan that he has fashioned into a home on the Andalusian coast and his life fishing, tending his orchard and working on translations of books about the cinema. Without a television of his own, when the episode of Casos sin resolver airs, he watches the opening moments at his local bar. But he is obviously discomforted by what he sees and turns the television off. And for a time, this marks the end of the matter. His desire to find out what happened to Julio is reignited when a phone call from the program’s producer informs him that a person matching Julio’s description has been identified working as a handyman at a nursing home. During his stay at the nursing home observing the amnesiac that the nuns running the home have conferred the name Gardel – in honour of the Argentinean singer and actor Carlos Gardel – Miguel assists his former friend with his work and gently prods him to discover what, if anything, he remembers of his former life. He reminds Gardel of their time together in the navy by demonstrating some of the sailor’s knots taught to recruits. Encouraged by how quickly Gardel masters the sequence of movements, Miguel shows him a photograph of the two of them in their sailor’s uniforms. After scrutinising the photograph, Gardel insists that he is not the person in the photograph. Furthermore, neither is Miguel. 

He is right, of course. Between the two aged figures looking down at the photograph and the two young men in their sailor’s uniforms gazing at the camera, a lifetime of experiences stands in the way. The question the film seems to be asking at this point is: what remains of the past when the binding operations of remembrance no longer function?

The photograph that Miguel shows Gardel (José Coronado).

Gardel’s denial that he is one of the figures shown in the photograph is a rebuttal of Miguel’s efforts to reconnect him to his former life. More broadly, the moment when he gazes down at the photograph takes its place alongside other moments in Erice’s films when the presence of a photographic image marks an encounter with something lost. Near the end of The Spirit of the Beehive the camera scrutinizes a collection of photographs of Ana’s mother and father. The matter of to whom this scrutiny belongs is only clarified half-way through the sequence when we are presented with a low-angle shot of Ana leafing through the pages of a large photo album. The first three photographs are hand-coloured images of Ana’s mother, Teresa (Teresa Gimpera), as a schoolgirl. These images are then replaced by a series of portraits of her as a young woman that appear in the album alongside photographs of Ana’s father, Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez), at a similar age. “To my dear misanthrope,” reads the dedication written on the front of one of the photographs. On one level, these images provide a glimpse of an earlier period in the lives of Ana’s parents, one less burdened by a sense of loss. But on another level, the camera’s scrutiny of the photographs prior to Ana’s appearance marks a subtle disruption in our relationship to the narrative that coincides with a renewed investment in the image’s photographic properties. 

“Think of any film in which the cinema represents itself,” Raymond Bellour proposes. “Such films do not produce the same disquieting strangeness. When film looks at itself, it never sees itself as it does in the photograph.”⁵ In Erice’s films the presence of a photograph lends weight to a vision of cinema that is bound to the afterlife of things. In an essay on the films of Manoel de Oliveira, Erice claims that the Portuguese master’s work is driven by an idea of cinema as capable of bringing the dead back to life: “Ghost and, at the same time, redeemer of reality, cinema is capable of resuscitating the dead; it is within this dialectic that Oliveira’s films have moved.”⁶ In their own way, Erice’s films are bound to the same dialectic that pairs what escapes and passes into history and what returns to us in a ghost-like manner. This is why, despite what might at first seem the case, Julio’s role in Close Your Eyes is not to mark a mystery that must be resolved. Rather, it is to embody an experience of something that remains enigmatic, that, like the two remaining sequences of The Farewell Gaze, lives on in a state of ruin. Like the Monster in The Spirit of the Beehive, Irene Ríos in El sur and Potts in La Morte Rouge, his presence designates a border, crossed in both directions, between cinema and an experience of the world that confounds our best efforts. 

IV

By the end of Close Your Eyes, several explanations have been offered about what motivated Julio’s disappearance: his heavy drinking, the repercussions of another disastrous love affair, his inability to deal with the pressures of everyday life. During the television interview, Miguel is pressed for his own theory. He evokes the desperation of a man slowly drowning: “There was a time when Julio couldn’t stand life anymore. He tried to keep his head above water with movies, but it didn’t always work. That’s all.” Miguel’s explanation is echoed by his old friend and former editor, Max (Mario Pardo): “Knowing how to get old. That is the question. In that respect Arenas was a man overboard.” These explanations have a double valence: as an account of one’s man’s inability to deal with the depredations of encroaching old age and as a reflection on the challenges facing cinema. When Max hands Miguel the metal cannisters containing the remaining reels of The Farewell Gaze, he describes their contents as “The remains of a shipwreck.” “The industry has gone down the drain,” he complains as they peruse the shelves of a storeroom housing rows of film cannisters. “I don’t know what to do with all these copies . . . It was never a business as you know. It’s completely ruinous . . . It’s industrial archaeology. Archaeology, Miguel, like you and me.” 

Max’s pessimism echoes statements that Erice himself has made about the transformations that characterize cinema’s history.⁷ That his understanding of the significance of these transformations differs from the view expressed by Max is evidenced by his decision to bookend the opening and closing moments of Close Your Eyes with an image of the Roman God Janus sitting atop a plaster column on the grounds of Triste-le-Roy. Represented as a single figure with two-faces gazing in opposite directions, Janus embodies the two faces of cinema. “It has always been both art and industry,” Erice explains. “A form of language but also a spectacle.”⁸ In keeping with this view, Close Your Eyes is sprinkled with references to Hollywood directors whose careers embody this vital duality: Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and Josef Von Sternberg. Julio’s amnesia suggests that we have reached a point in the history of the medium in which this duality is under threat. This interpretation is given further weight if we recall that, in Roman religion, Janus presides over periods of transition: from peace to war, from youth to old age, from the passing of one generation to the coming to prominence of the next. Miguel’s efforts to restore Julio’s memory is thus also about a desire to restore an idea of cinema operating at the intersection of different forces – not just industry and art, life and death, pain and consolation, but also obsolescence and renewal.

The statue of Janus.

The film’s conclusion takes place in a disused cinema that Miguel has hired to screen the finale of The Farewell Gaze. He believes that showing Gardel the scene in which Franch returns to Triste-le-Roy with Judith might spark a connection to his previous life. “I think in your Dad’s head, there’s something that connects the photo he kept for so many years,” he explains to Ana: “Triste-le-Roy, the setting of the movie we shot together.” The finale culminates with Levy, having overcome Judith’s resistance to acknowledging their relationship, dying at his daughter’s feet. The concluding shot of the unfinished film is an extended close-up of Judith and Franch, shoulder-to-shoulder, looking directly at the camera. Erice’s editing of these closing moments alternates between the events occurring at Triste-le-Roy and a series of close-ups scrutinising the expressions of each of the figures seated in the auditorium watching the film — the journalist who interviewed Miguel (Helena Miquel), the two nuns (Petra Martínez and Ana María) who have looked after Gardel, the social worker (María León), who identified that he might be Julio Arenas, Ana and, of course, Miguel and Gardel. 

This gathering brings together the various threads of the film’s story and reminds us of other moments in Erice’s films when the camera takes its place in the audience at a screening: most famously, the scene near the start of The Spirit of the Beehive when the film cuts between the scene from James Whale’s film that shows the first meeting of Frankenstein’s monster (Boris Karloff) and the little village girl (Marilyn Harris) who befriends him and a hand-held shot of Ana gazing intently up at the screen. For Erice, the stunned reactions of the young actress watching the movie for the first time were indistinguishable from the reactions of the character that she plays. “I sincerely believe that it’s the best moment I’ve ever captured on film,” he confesses to an interviewer. “It was an actual screening. She was really seeing the movie. [Luis Cuadrado, the film’s cinematographer] captured her reaction to the encounter between the monster and the little girl.”⁹ Erice’s account of the young actress’ reaction forefronts a fundamental aspect of his understanding of cinematic images: their capacity to impose themselves on our thinking. 

The feelings of wonder and trepidation that inform Ana’s response to the image of the monster are also present in the concluding scene of Close Your Eyes. But now, it must be said, they coincide with a nagging sense of anachronism – a sense that what we are witnessing is not the awakening of a new kind of knowledge, but the afterlife of something that may have passed. This is what has changed in Erice’s thinking about cinema – less the refutation of a previous belief, than an acknowledgement of the conditions and challenges that determine the medium’s persistence. 

In the concluding shot, Gardel lowers his gaze from the screen, looks directly at the camera and then slowly closes his eyes. As the screen fades to black, the sound of the tail-end of The Farewell Gaze passing through the gate of a projector prompts the appearance of the film’s title. As the credits start to roll, the screen divides into two: one side listing those involved in the production, the other showing the head of Janus on the plaster column. It’s impossible to state what’s occurred during these closing moments – if Miguel’s plan has succeeded or failed. Between the memories, emotions and affects stirred in the viewers gathered in the dusty auditorium and the images on screen something takes place that the film keeps secret.

Gardel (José Coronado).

This sense of enigma provides a clue to Erice’s continued investment in cinema. “What constitutes the defining core of a medium is the way it activates our senses, our reflexivity and our practices,” writes Francesco Casetti. “In this context, what identifies a medium is first and foremost a mode of seeing, feeling, reflecting and reacting, no longer necessarily tied to a single ‘machine.’”¹⁰ Cinema’s continuation depends not on the continuation of particular technologies, he affirms, but on its capacity to provoke our thinking about the world. The final scene of Close Your Eyes evidences an arrangement for the viewing of motion pictures in which the darkened space of the auditorium and the presence of a screen on which images are projected are determining elements. But the film’s interweaving of the events occurring at Triste-le-Roy with the expressions of the viewers gathered in front of the screen directs our attention towards something more elusive: the medium’s ability to confound our habitual ways of thinking. Between the ornate rooms of Triste-le-Roy and the humble auditorium in which Gardel sits looking up at his younger self, a connection is forged. But it is one that has its basis in the capacity of cinematic images and sounds to index a part of our existence that is not – or never was – recognisable as our existence. 

V

“That which lies here in ruins, the highly significant fragment, the remnant, is, in fact, the finest material in baroque creation,” Walter Benjamin concludes in his study of the German Trauerspeil or Mourning Play.¹¹ In Close Your Eyes this way of thinking takes as its subject the afterlife of an unfinished movie. Unsurprisingly, the understanding of cinema that emerges is one in which ruination does not characterise a particular phase in the medium’s history but is fundamental to its continued claim on our thinking. “Close your eyes . . . Don’t think about anything,” Estrella’s (Sonsoles Aranguren) father, Agustín (Omero Antonutti), tells her near the start of El sur. He is demonstrating how to use a silver pendulum as an instrument of divination able to discern the presence of things that are hidden from us. The significance of this endeavour is elaborated in the closing sequence of The Spirit of the Beehive. It’s nighttime. The house that functions as the film’s principal setting has fallen quiet. On the wall of the bedroom shared by Ana and her older sister, Isabel (Isabel Tellería), the shadows cast by the branches of a tree just outside the window move back and forth. In another part of the house, Fernando is asleep at his desk. Appearing behind him, Teresa drapes his coat over his shoulders and, without disturbing her husband’s slumber, gently removes his glasses. Such is the feeling of quietude that it comes as something of a shock when, a few moments later, we discover that, in the bed next to Isabel, Ana is wide awake. 

Having recovered from her encounter on the riverbank with the monster, Ana drinks thirstily from the glass of water on the bedside table, walks over to the balcony, opens the doors and whispers the advice provided by her sister about how to entice the monster out of the darkness: “If you’re his friend, you can talk to him whenever you want. Just close your eyes and call him. . . It’s me, Ana. It’s me, Ana.” Speaking to the situation faced by both the characters in Erice’s films and the audience of these films, the call to close one’s eyes is a call to open one’s thinking to the presence of all that remains unknown. In a short reflection on his method, the director describes the elisions that structure his films as an attempt to suggest “what may lie behind those holes which the action of time gradually makes in personal memory and the annals of History, both. In short, to draw attention to the other face of what is sold to us as reality; or what amounts to the same thing, to show the other scene.”¹²

Ana (Ana Torrent) in The Spirit of the Beehive

Forty years after it was first uttered, the injunction to close one’s eyes in the title of Erice’s most recent film allows us to identify the shifts and continuities that mark his thinking about cinema. Just as important, it illustrates the recursive nature of this thinking. The replaying of certain scenarios, tropes and even lines of dialogue uttered by the same actor – for example, when the much older Ana Torrent, once again playing a character named Ana, looks directly at Gardel and repeats the invocation: “It’s me, Ana . . . It’s me, Ana” – recalls the history that binds the director, his films and the audience of these films and ensures that this history remains open or still-to-be-understood. For Erice, cinema is where we confront all that remains necessarily incomplete in our thinking. 

“I have always understood cinema as a means of knowledge,” Erice reiterated when he accepted the Donostia Award for career achievement at the 2023 San Sebastián Film Festival. “That is why I never stop learning from it.” In Close Your Eyes, the cinema still functions as a generator of knowledge. But more than ever, this knowledge is inseparable from an encounter with something lost that nonetheless continues to shape our horizon – the remains of a shipwreck.

Endnotes