The Quince Tree Sun (1992)

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(El sol del membrillo)


Country: SP
Technical: Eastmancolor 137m
Director: Victor Erice
Cast: doc.

Synopsis:

In the autumn of 1990 a Madrid painter makes two unfinished attempts to capture the effect of the sunlight on a quince tree in his yard. Friends and interested parties drop in to discuss art, while immigrant builders from Eastern Europe work on one of the flats in the building.

Review:

A document, if not a documentary. Its news flashes about Iraq and scrupulous tally of the passing dates upon which the work filmed took place leave little doubt that this was an attempt to film a real artist at work, and to analyse the principles that guided him: his painstaking objectivity and determination to be little more than the medium through which nature's beauty might be transmitted and preserved; his marking of the ground and the tree in order to maintain perspective and scale. But here also is his weakness, for the weather and passage of time needed to accomplish the work mean that the fruit is constantly changing, the branches sagging that much more under the weight, so that the picture must be revised continually. His first attempt, a painting, is beautiful but somehow incomplete; his second, a drawing, necessarily more accurate, is so detailed as to be a virtually indecipherable jumble of lines. Erice's extraordinary film, some of which appears to have been made on video, is desperately slow but equally absorbing if you surrender to its fascination with its subject.

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(El sol del membrillo)


Country: SP
Technical: Eastmancolor 137m
Director: Victor Erice
Cast: doc.

Synopsis:

In the autumn of 1990 a Madrid painter makes two unfinished attempts to capture the effect of the sunlight on a quince tree in his yard. Friends and interested parties drop in to discuss art, while immigrant builders from Eastern Europe work on one of the flats in the building.

Review:

A document, if not a documentary. Its news flashes about Iraq and scrupulous tally of the passing dates upon which the work filmed took place leave little doubt that this was an attempt to film a real artist at work, and to analyse the principles that guided him: his painstaking objectivity and determination to be little more than the medium through which nature's beauty might be transmitted and preserved; his marking of the ground and the tree in order to maintain perspective and scale. But here also is his weakness, for the weather and passage of time needed to accomplish the work mean that the fruit is constantly changing, the branches sagging that much more under the weight, so that the picture must be revised continually. His first attempt, a painting, is beautiful but somehow incomplete; his second, a drawing, necessarily more accurate, is so detailed as to be a virtually indecipherable jumble of lines. Erice's extraordinary film, some of which appears to have been made on video, is desperately slow but equally absorbing if you surrender to its fascination with its subject.

(El sol del membrillo)


Country: SP
Technical: Eastmancolor 137m
Director: Victor Erice
Cast: doc.

Synopsis:

In the autumn of 1990 a Madrid painter makes two unfinished attempts to capture the effect of the sunlight on a quince tree in his yard. Friends and interested parties drop in to discuss art, while immigrant builders from Eastern Europe work on one of the flats in the building.

Review:

A document, if not a documentary. Its news flashes about Iraq and scrupulous tally of the passing dates upon which the work filmed took place leave little doubt that this was an attempt to film a real artist at work, and to analyse the principles that guided him: his painstaking objectivity and determination to be little more than the medium through which nature's beauty might be transmitted and preserved; his marking of the ground and the tree in order to maintain perspective and scale. But here also is his weakness, for the weather and passage of time needed to accomplish the work mean that the fruit is constantly changing, the branches sagging that much more under the weight, so that the picture must be revised continually. His first attempt, a painting, is beautiful but somehow incomplete; his second, a drawing, necessarily more accurate, is so detailed as to be a virtually indecipherable jumble of lines. Erice's extraordinary film, some of which appears to have been made on video, is desperately slow but equally absorbing if you surrender to its fascination with its subject.