Interior Gardens

D6nde os vi yo, nostalgicas postales? En qu6 cinema playero al aire libre o en qu6 'lbum de buques lineales? -Invierno postal, Rafael Alberti' Victor Erice's most recent film, Dream of Light (aka The Sun of the Quince [El sol del membrillo], 1992) moves beyond his earlier preoccupation with the periods of transition following the Spanish Civil War to a focus on a subject resembling the still life (the bodeg6n), with its sense of familiarity and mystery. In his first two films, The Spirit of the Beehive (El espiritt2 de la colmena, 1973) and The South (El Sur, 1983), the director's emphasis was on figures who emerge from the light in the manner of paintings by late sixteenthand seventeenthcentury masters like Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velizquez, Francisco Zurbaran, and Bartolome Esteban Murillo.2 In Dream of Light, which won the 1992 International Critics' Prize and the Jury Prize at Cannes, Erice follows the light as it plays quixotically with a different kind of subject, the quince tree in the courtyard of the house of Spanish artist Antonio L6pez Garcia.3 The artistic decisions Erice makes in his third film call to mind decisions made by masters of seventeenth-century still life painting in which each object proclaims its own name and yet no object is a statement capable of standing on its own

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