Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Close Your Eyes
2023 · Víctor Erice · Close Your Eyes on Sightlines
Two reels of film in a can. That is all that survives of a movie abandoned mid-shoot, when its leading man walked off the production one day and was never seen again. Thirty-odd years later a television program about unsolved cases wants the footage, because the story makes good television, and the film's director, who has not made anything since, agrees to come on and talk about his lost friend. Keep those two reels in mind. Everything Víctor Erice does over the next three hours is already sitting in that can: a piece of the past, perfectly preserved, complete in itself, and no use at all for getting a person back.
Erice has made four features in fifty years. He was eighty-two here, thirty-one years after the last one. A man who has spent that much of his life not finishing films knows something particular about what an unfinished film is, and he has built this one out of it.
The armature is a mystery, and Erice honors it. There is a search and the search gets somewhere. What it does not get is a resolution, because the thing that was lost is not a location. Gilles Deleuze's name for classical cinema is the movement-image, and its engine is a circuit he called sensory-motor: a character perceives a situation, acts on it, and the action changes the situation. Detective sees the clue, follows it, case closes. After 1945 Deleuze watched that circuit start to fail inside films that still looked like they had plots — people who perceive perfectly well and whose actions no longer close anything. He called it the crisis of the action-image. Erice takes the most circuit-dependent genre there is and runs it on an old man. The friend is found. And then a face on a screen is asked to give a lost self back, and nobody in the room can accomplish that by doing something.
What is left when acting stops working is looking, and Erice gives looking enormous room. Deleuze had a name for the figure this produces: the seer, the voyant, someone who watches and endures instead of intervening. And a name for the images built for him — opsigns and sonsigns, pure optical and sound situations, shots where there is nothing to do but look and listen because no available action fits. Around them sits the long middle of this film, the part people arriving for a mystery call slow: talk in kitchens, hours in an archive, a song sung among friends. Deleuze took the Italian phrase temps mort, dead time, for stretches a film holds that advance nothing. Nothing is dead in them. When people sing a song together, no problem is solved and no one is lost; time passes and is kept in the same gesture. That is the whole film in miniature, and it is why the ending works. Three hours of ordinary duration have trained you to watch a face patiently, which is exactly the skill the last scene will ask for.
Which brings back the reels. A crystal-image — Deleuze's hyalosign — is an image where a thing and its reflection can no longer be separated and begin trading places. A mirror is the simple version. A film inside a film is the rich one. Erice builds his mirror out of a projector: a man sits in a cinema and is shown his own face, thirty years young, moving and speaking on a screen. Which one is the actual man? The film does not decide, and the not deciding is the substance of the scene. The man up there has everything the man down here lost, and he has it in the present tense, at twenty-four frames a second, on demand, forever.
Deleuze noticed that crystals differ. Some are sealed, mirrored worlds with no outside. Some have a flaw, a fault line through which someone slips out into a future that has not been decided yet; he called that the cracked crystal. Erice's is cracked the whole way through, and the crack is the abandoned film itself. His El Sur (1983) was famously left unfinished, and The Quince Tree Sun (1992) spent its length watching a painter lose a race against ripening fruit and shifting light. Incompletion is not this director's misfortune. It is his form, and it is the only opening a totality this closed can have.
His other instrument is a face. He cast Ana Torrent, the child whose enormous unblinking stare carries The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and Cría Cuervos (1976), as the missing man's daughter. Deleuze separates a flashback, a dated postcard from a former present, from what he calls sheets of past: whole layers of past coexisting inside the present image, so you move among them rather than cut away to them. Erice never flashes back to 1973. He puts 1973 in the frame, aged and breathing, in the same shot as now. Fifty years of Spanish film history in a face that is only listening.
This is where a little film theory earns its keep. André Bazin thought photography answered an ancient appetite he called the mummy complex — the wish to defend a body against time by preserving its look — and defined cinema as change mummified. Erice takes that promise into a room with a projector and asks it to deliver. And Beehive is the direct ancestor: a traveling projection of James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), a child in a village hall, a monster whose meaning is authored entirely by her gaze. Erice has said that every film is two films, the one that was shot and the one the viewer completes. Here that stops being a graceful remark about spectatorship and becomes the machinery of the plot. They run a film at a man and wait to see whether he will complete it. The debt to Vertigo (1958) is the same wager from the other side: restage the lost person closely enough and recognition might be manufactured. Hitchcock's man forces it. Erice's can only project and wait.
What this does to narrative is genuinely odd. Most films hide their gaps; this one is assembled from one. And it relocates a climax from event to attention — the drama of the final sequence is people watching a screen. Deleuze, following Artaud, held that cinema's highest power is to force thought, and that modern cinema's real subject became the other half of that: the image's impower, the spiritual automaton that will not start. Erice puts both outcomes in one shot and stops before either wins.
The film is three years old; nothing has visibly grown from it yet. What it has already altered is what stands behind it. Watch Beehive again after this and the child's gaze has an ending it did not have before. That is the argument for its significance, and it is not small: at eighty-two, Erice made the completion of an image by whoever looks at it into an event that can be filmed. Next time the lights go down, notice how much of the film is not on the screen. He hands that part back to you and then, quite deliberately, cuts.
Concepts in play
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — The climactic movie-theater sequence, where a face on screen is asked to restore a lost self: the man in the seat and the man on the reel become indiscernible, each one the other's reflection.
- crystal-cracked — The whole architecture is built from the poetics of the abandoned work — two reels of an unfinished film, inherited from El Sur's famously truncated form and The Quince Tree Sun's artwork defeated by time; the incompletion is the fault line through which anything can still escape.
- the seer (voyant) — A retired filmmaker drawn back into his friend's disappearance who investigates, finds, and finally can only sit and watch a screen — the film's action ends in an audience.
- pure optical and sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns) — The final movie-theater sequence of extraordinary quiet power, where nothing is available but looking and listening at a projected face.
- dead time (temps mort) — The unhurried rhythm the dossier calls the point: conversations in kitchens and archives, songs sung among friends, stretches that advance no investigation.
- crisis of the action-image — An investigation structure inherited from Vertigo that reaches its object and still cannot act on it — the search succeeds and restoration remains beyond any deed.
- sheets of past — Casting Ana Torrent, the child of The Spirit of the Beehive and Cría Cuervos, as the missing man's daughter, so fifty years of film history coexist in one present face instead of arriving as a flashback.
- spiritual automaton (and its impower) — The final screening stages the question of whether an image still has the force to restore a self, and Erice ends without answering — the thought is both forced and blocked.