Dream of Light

The painter Antonio López García sets up his canvas in the garden of his house in Madrid. The subject is a quince tree. So that the light will fall at the same angle at the same hour each day he marks the tree and the ground, drives nails, stretches string. Autumn advances. The quinces ripen, grow heavy and pull the branches down; his marks no longer hold. Then the rain begins. Víctor Erice directs. The film is not a documentary and not fiction either. López García really is painting and Erice films him across three months; the scenes are not written, and the framing and light are built with great care. The friends, repairmen and neighbours who come to the house while he works are in the film too. The idea is defeat. Nature is faster than painting; the tree will not wait and the painter cannot keep up. In the end he abandons the canvas and moves to drawing the same tree. Erice presents that not as failure but as the nature of the work. It won the Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes in 1992. Erice made very few films. After The Spirit of the Beehive and El Sur this was his third feature, and he made no fiction film for over thirty years afterwards. Who it is for: viewers who like films that show the making of art from inside, and patient cinema. Who it is not for: genuinely nothing happens, it runs over two hours, and it reaches no conclusion.