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The big paradox of the film image: how it produces permanence while ing a disappearance. Very much a movie suspended in time about a lifetime of thinking, making, and watching other images. It aims very high and sustains itself with so much force. There are lots of great moments and images, both in the larger haunted scenes and the more throwaway ones. It starts with a Von Sternberg reference, sets the finale with a Dreyer joke and includes a lovely rendition of My Rifle, My Pony and Me. What can I say? I’m very much the target audience. The near three hours went very fast.

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I've never seen a film like this with such a definite, deeply considered sense of finality to it - above all about old age, but impossibly sad and yet still the eternal human beauty of sadness. Where life ends up being a pile of unanswered questions, looking back at bits and pieces of the past for those moments of meaning, reconnecting with people that once meant something but aware that it's the last time one may ever speak to them. And still trying to find the answers in the end, knowing they may never come. Close-ups that reach the great emotive power of the silent era, and that this concludes on the subject of the transfixing, transformative power of the cinema itself is more than enough to warrant its value. One of those rare films that finds the cosmos without seeking it.

Review by davidehrlich ★★★★

First released 50 years ago, after Francoist censors convinced themselves that its anti-authoritarian messaging would have little social impact if buried under such a “boring” art film, Victor Erice’s “The Spirit of the Beehive” follows a gullible six-year-old girl named Ana (Ana Torrent), who sees a screening of “Frankenstein” when a mobile cinema arrives in the small Castilian village where she lives with her family in the Spanish Civil War’s immediate aftermath. Confused and horrified by the sight of Frankenstein’s monster accidentally killing a child, and the townspeople then killing Frankenstein’s monster in return, Ana’s elder sister tells her that neither of those things actually happened — that everything you see in films is fake. Later, with the memories of…

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El personaje de Ana Torrent le explica al de Manolo Solo que, aunque le gusta su trabajo como guía en el Museo del Prado, a veces le preocupa reducir el discurso de las obras a unos mensajes repetitivos, predecibles, estables. Fácilmente amoldables a las expectativas del público y por tanto estandarizado por el mercado.

No puedo evitar ver cierta correlación entre esto y el ejercicio de Erice al iniciar su película con esa secuencia y llevarla luego donde la lleva. Esa brillante y enigmática escena inicial (luego retomada con aún más sentido de la maravilla), que pese a ser un nuevo Erice (todavía cuesta creerlo) parece el de siempre, le sirve seguramente para sacarse en parte la espinita por su…

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many years ago, when asked why he makes films, Erice quoted Jean Renoir, "A film is made to create a bridge." what he meant, specifically, was to create dialogue with those we have relationships with, as well as with ourselves. Close Your Eyes is, quite literally, about that. using film to try to bridge the gap between one man and the people once close to him, to bridge the gap between Erice and his viewers and for us to communicate with ourselves.

in the excellent book on Erice edited by Linda Ehrlich, much is made about the importance of time in his body of work -- time as both the very present moment we're experiencing and our relationship to long…

5

Victor Erice and Pedro Costa in conversation, moderated by Paulo Branco:

Paulo Branco: I know Victor and Pedro have been having conversations that we've regrettably not been privy to. Here we have the opportunity to let you speak a bit on everything that you feel like, and on your relation to the work of film-making, and your own works respectively.

Pedro Costa: We've been performing this sideshow at various carnivals, roadshows, in Navarra, Asturias, Spain, Portugal... We always begin by saying that we have nothing to say, that film-makers never talk about cinema with one another, and then we go on and on about it for hours.

Victor Erice: We talk too much about cinema, particularly us modern film-makers who…

Review by mr movie ambassador Liked

a dog wears a backwards baseball cap at one point in this. not something one might expect to see going into this kinda thing

8

Wow, what an intriguing movie that circles around a movie as it's structure. We have an T.V. interview with a former director about a missing actor from that film decades past which unlocks so many inquiries as things happen to open up surreptitiously from book to photo that eventually unfolds to screen.
Really Víctor Erice does an amazing job taking his time with our lead Manolo Solo(Miguel Garay) as he slowly unfolds this quasi-mystery to his lost friend. It really is a story about memory and all it's fallibility all the while trying to retain what we hold dear and care to hold onto.
It's long but not short with poignancy in it's care of it's characters and it's detailed…

Review by Miguel Muñoz Garnica ★★★★½

Igual es porque uno es de natural melancólico, pero no puedo evitar percibir en los últimos años una triste decadencia de la imagen, agravada un poco más ahora por lo que parece venir con las IAs. Tenemos una capacidad ya infinita de producir imágenes, de consumirlas, de acumularlas, de rodearnos de ellas sin descanso. Los mismos códigos dominantes del montaje en el cine contemporáneo parecen haber asumido esa lógica: cada imagen, cada plano, funciona para hacer olvidar a la anterior y atraer una atención fugaz a la siguiente, que a su vez será olvidada. Nos rebasan las imágenes por todas partes, pero seguimos sobreproduciéndolas y con ello devaluándolas.

Ante este panorama, que en 2023 se haga una película como Cerrar…

Review by Miguel Marías

Por alusión de Juan Pablo, con quien creo estar muy de acuerdo, de la que sólo me entero ahora, al volver de Viena (donde vi otra maravilla, la última de Hamaguchi, en la que creí ver un homenaje a "El espíritu de la colmena"), y ya que me apetece hablar sobre "Cerrar los ojos" más que de ninguna otra película reciente (entre las que abundan las que no se merecen ni el trabajo de escribir algo negativo), aprovecho la ocasión y la hospitalidad de Jesús, y diré que no sólo pienso que es modestamente una grandísima película, sin pretensiones, trucos, aspavientos ni autopromoción (y digo esto porque quien no reniega de lo que ha hecho lo arrastra consigo, y sin…

Review by Josh Lewis ★★★ Liked

Had to make room for this in my TIFF schedule the second I found out the director of The Spirit of the Beehive was coming out of retirement, and even if it wasn't quite on that level for me I'm glad I did. The meta component at the center of this very patient, elderly Spanish movie nerd quasi-detective drama—the making of a post-WWII drama The Farewell Gaze, and the subsequent 30-year disappearance of its star that triggers the director go looking for him—sets a pretty lucrative stage of "industry archelogy" at the intersection of ghosts, history, and movies. And there's a palpable regret and nostalgia to this but I can't help but wish I felt the impact of the destination…

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cinema is made and shown in absence: we pretend it's permanent in order that we can negate life's impermanence, we imbue it with fantasies when we don't find them in reality, we let the image live through us so we don't have to live -- yet we also create that which might never have been without us, let it breathe and move. an illusion has weight, and as any good magician knows, it doesn't matter whether something's 'real' or not -- the experience of an illusion can still communicate something important, and it's up to us to move beyond the banality of 'factliness' and see the truth in all things.

erice's close your eyes is centered around the gestures that…