“A country that doesn’t figure on the maps”: Víctor Erice’s La Morte Rouge

Made as part of an extraordinary collaborative exhibition between Víctor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami that was staged in Barcelona, Paris, and Melbourne between 2006 and 2008, La Morte Rouge (2006) is a multifaceted, intimate yet expansive 32-minute video work that hones in on and remembers – if one ever truly can – the birth of Erice’s own cinephilia. It also poetically explores and restages the emerging self-understanding of a five-year-old child’s place in the human world. It positions this moment, precisely dated as occurring in a cinema in San Sebastián on the north coast of Spain on January 24, 1946, in the context of various historical and personal circumstances including the devastating and eerie aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism in Europe, the young boy’s relationship with his 12-year-old sister, the affective spatial consciousness and memories of a child, the fate of the rarely discussed director of the film screening that day, and the insidious spread of cinema as the key artform of the 20th century. It explores a fascination with cinema as a form that vacillates between stillness and movement, absence and presence, death and life, the modern and the primal, the world in and outside of the film. Like most of Erice’s slim body of work, it is primarily concerned with the nature of subjectivity and imagination as well as their formation and expression. It also gives a potent sense of the chilly isolation felt in Spain during Franco’s long reign and the conciliatory and sometimes disturbing place that art comes to occupy in daily life. This is a film profoundly marked by the limited experiences and curtailed possibilities of the long decades of life in Spain during the Franco era – particularly after the defeat of fascism elsewhere in Europe in 1945 – but it also carries universal implications and applications. The sometimes-painful fantasies, realities, revelations, and formative encounters offered up by the cinema are specific but indelible experiences of a “lost” and “recovered” time that many of us share.

In a way deeply connected to that of Kiarostami, Erice’s work explores the porous boundary between the cinema and the world outside the frame. For an important point of comparison – and Erice has sometimes requested that these two films screen together as career bookends exploring the profound implications of such “first” encounters with cinema – just consider how a child’s formative experience during a screening of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) somewhere in rural Spain in 1940 (the year of both Erice and Kiarostami’s births) in El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) meshes with their own emerging identity and sense of reality. Ana’s final declaration of selfhood – “I am Ana” – is shaped by and finds voice in this chance encounter with a travelling cinema, and a specific film’s exploration and interlinking of the primal forces of life and death. The “monster” that Ana encounters onscreen and elsewhere on the Castilian plain is an emblem of cinema itself, the troubled stuff of lost time and death reanimated to give the illusion of life. The first encounter of the young boy with cinema in La Morte Rouge also explores the extraordinary affectivity of childhood. Although the specific film encountered is significant – and always is in one way or another – a broader receptiveness to the porous boundary between fiction and reality, the space of the cinema and what is contained within the film itself, cinematic and everyday time, is essential to the formative repercussions of this experience. After watching Frankenstein – and cinematographer Luis Cuadrado actually filmed six-year-old actor Ana Torrent viewing Whale’s film for the first time – life (and death) will never be quite the same again.

In La Morte Rouge, this first encounter may, initially, seem a little less salubrious. Erice’s first cinematic memory is of the ninth movie in the 14-film series of mostly B-thrillers featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, The Scarlet Claw (Roy William Neill, 1944). Initiated by 20th Century-Fox (on higher budgets) in 1939, the series was taken over by Universal between 1942 and 1946. Although fondly remembered by many – including myself¹ – this series took significant liberties with Arthur Conan Doyle’s source material, often bringing Holmes and Watson – iconically played by Basil Rathbone and a dotty, fumbling Nigel Bruce – into the present day and the cold realities and intrigues of World War II. Of course, the choice of The Scarlet Claw, and its narrative focus on a nondescript postman – a deliverer of “correspondences” – who murders members of the small fictional community of La Morte Rouge somewhere in French Canada, also provides a slightly unsettling correlative to the core theme of the exhibition in which the film was first screened.

Erice’s essay film documents and explores a place of encounter haunted by ghosts, shadows, and memories. Within the ephemeral everyday practice of moviegoing and the spaces and places it occupied, he finds more profound traces and dimensions. Erice provides precisely researched and documented detail about the origins of the cinema that was formative to this encounter, the Kursaal Theatre, after it took over the voluminous and ornate space originally built for a grand casino in 1922. The casino was abandoned not long after its opening due to gambling prohibitions that were introduced by the Franco government. This origin story puts in motion a history of transformation and inevitable demolition that points towards the shared ephemerality of cinema and human existence. La Morte Rouge is, ultimately, a summoning of the past, a melancholy plundering of the wreckage and traces left by memory and history. It opens with contemporary footage of the site now occupied by a series of anonymous modernist buildings. In the process, we are given a visual metaphor that contrasts a set of quickly erased footprints in the sand with the ceaseless crashing of the sea (the first thing we hear over a black screen). In both the physical place of encounter and the more ephemeral domain of the projected image, only small traces and memories remain. La Morte Rouge asks us to consider our own first cinematic encounters in a similar fashion, inviting us to resurrect and restage these ephemeral moments and memories before they are completely lost to time. 

The staging of La Morte Rouge within the Correspondences exhibition – at least in its Melbourne incarnation – placed it firmly within a wider exploration of the specificity and ephemerality of time, place, the past, and history in Erice’s work. It was positioned alongside Erice’s extraordinarily evocative and condensed contribution to the portmanteau film Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002) and just across from the filmmaker’s bold but elemental staging of a painting by Antonio López García (his collaborator and subject on El sol del membrillo [The Quince Tree Sun, 1992]). In a move typical of the profound, situated, and often foundational nature of Erice’s work, he placed López García’s minutely detailed painting of a contemporary urban scene within a glass case, adding a soundtrack and timed lighting to shift our relationship to the work. A painting that had taken many months for López García to complete and distil is given “back” a sense of time and duration that reflects its process of creation but also turns it into a form of cinema. La Morte Rouge stages a formative encounter with cinema that, in turn, transforms it into something like painting or photography, acknowledging the medium’s uncanny ability to animate and resurrect what is past, lost, and lifeless. Towards the end of his voiceover, Erice recognises the double-bind of a cinema that can both reveal and conceal: “if a film had, in a sense, disturbed him, there were others which, little by little, placed balm upon the wound. The double game of pain and consolation, of suffering and joy, that reached him from the screen, was the basis for his contradictory relationship with cinema.” It is within this “contradictory relationship” that all great cinephiles and filmmakers are born.

La Morte Rouge (2006 Spain 32 mins)

Prod Co: Nautilus Films S. L. Prod: César Romero Dir, Scr: Víctor Erice Phot: Valentín Álvarez Ed: Juan Pedro Díez Mus: “Fratres” and “Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten” by Arvo Pärt

Endnote