Spanish maestro produces another masterpiece

Geoff Andrew witnesses an extraordinary exhibition in Barcelona.

Feb 10 2006

Yes, you heard it here first. Thanks to an extraordinary collaborative exhibition highlighting parallels in the work of Spain's Victor Erice and Iran's Abbas Kiarostami, the former director - regrettably one of the least prolific film-makers in the world - has made, very quickly and very cheaply, a half-hour film that ranks alongside his earlier 'The Spirit of the Beehive' and 'The Quince Tree Sun'.

At the CCCB (Centro de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona) on Thursday, your writer was delighted to be present at 'Correspondences', an exhibition that runs there until 21 May, before moving on to Madrid and, it is hoped for 2007, the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Curated by the CCCB's Jordi Balli and Cahiers du Cinema's Alain Bergals, the exhibition not only investigates existing common ground in the work of the two great filmmakers (who, as it turns out, were born just eight days apart) but has made a point of allowing the directors to explore those shared interests themselves. Hence films, photographs and installations are on display (with Erice working wonders by adding sound and lighting effects to the paintings of Antonio Lopez, the Madrid based artist who was the subject of 'The Quince Tree Sun'), and new movies have been made especially for the exhibition.

There are four short digitally filmed 'letters'- Erice made the first (about Lopez's garden 15 years after he shot 'Quince Tree' there) and sent it to Kiarostami, who replied with a short featuring a cow, Erice responded with a film about Spanish schoolkids being shown and discussing Kiarostami's 'Where Is My Friend's House', to which the Iranian replied with his own film about quinces. Two further letters are currently in the works...

From the above, and to anyone who knows the directors' films, it should be clear that the recurrent shared themes are childhood, landscape, memory and time. And those are at the heart of an extra half-hour film Erice has made, 'La Morte Rouge'. A meditation inspired by his memories of the first film he saw as a five-year-old growing up in San Sebastian - Roy William Neill's Sherlock Holmes mystery, 'The Scarlet Claw'. Seen at the Kursaal Cinema, then a grand palace but now a modern, boxy arts centre - this small, simple, personal soliloquy covers a multitude of themes in a way that can only be described as exquisitely poetic.

Music, image, narration all combine to create a profound and profoundly moving reverie on the relationship between cinema and memory, reality and fiction, place and time, history and art. In short, it may be a modest creation, but it's far richer than almost anything else this writer’s seen in quite a while. A masterpiece, I'd say.

• 
•