El Sur

(Víctor Erice, Spain/France, 1983)

In the World

In The Years of Theory (2024), a fascinating book of transcribed pedagogy published not long before his death, Fredric Jameson insists on a certain through-line of French intellectualism since World War II: we are what others make of us, in the place where we arrive and with the names we are given – processes and situations that we do not get to choose or have any say in. Whether it’s Sartre’s inescapable ‘words’, Althusser’s sinister ideological interpellation, or Lacan’s gazing can floating on the waters, winking mischievously at us with its glint, it all comes down to the same thing: a primal moment of alienation from ourselves. We must work with what we are given: by chance, by history, by destiny. A whole world that pre-exists us.

Víctor Erice’s El Sur – a masterpiece (albeit a broken, incomplete one) that remains as moving and compelling on the 10th viewing as it was on the first, around 35 years ago in my case – creates a special kind of poetry, and spins a particular kind of fiction, from this inevitable fact of the arrival of an individual within a massively given situation.

From the first moments we see Estrella (‘star’) on screen – her image in bed fading up slowly from a darkness punctured only by a high window – we realise (with the prompting of the spare but beautiful first-person voice-over narration) that she is fated – enclosed in a fate that has already been prepared and laid out for her.

Estrella’s father, the mysterious Agustín (Italian actor Omero Antonutti, unforgettable in this role), has left a talismanic object of divination under her pillow on the very day of his suicide. An extraordinary flashback – same angle, same room, same bed, same lighting – shows Agustín sensing, with his unique, cosmic “energy”, the sex of the child inside the womb of the mother, Julia (Lola Cardona). Later, both Estrella and her father will gaze at the daughter’s framed portrait in a photographer’s window.

Like in The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) a decade earlier, the child in El Sur is inescapably caught up in the enigma of the adult world into which she is born. In this case – adapted from the somewhat autobiographical novella of the same title by Adelaida García Morales, Erice’s then-partner – it is especially a matter of the father, and of the deep father-daughter bond (clinched in a magnificent first communion scene of dancing).

A curious, paradoxical term entered my mind as I rewatched El Sur in 2025: the father’s womb. As a scenario, it’s neither Oedipus nor Electra; this father is not brutal, not a patriarch in any standard sense. What he bequeaths to Estrella is warm, rather cosy and all-enveloping – but it marks and shapes her for life. This womb-like quality is especially conveyed in the remarkable scene of her hiding for a long time under her bed as a child (played in this part of the film by Sonsoles Aranguren) – escaping all evident investigation, but spookily ‘answered’ by Agustín’s insistent tapping-bouncing of his cane on the ceiling/floor above … in that private room from which his accumulated energy must never be allowed to exit. Estrella, too, will have a hard time exiting from her father’s influence.

Agustín, as we learn, is a deeply sad and depressed man (he loses or gives up his magic ‘potency’ as a local shaman) – due to the vicissitudes of his political beliefs within the changing tide of Spanish history (i.e., Francoism) and familial conflicts; and to a lost love, Laura, who became, briefly, a second-tier movie actress renamed Irene Ríos (Aurore Clément from Chantal Akerma’s cine-universe), oft-killed on-screen as a femme fatale – the business of imposed names, once again. We won’t see Laura/Irene apart from the lovely black-and-white movie-pastiche Flor en la sombra – shades of Stanley Donen’s Movie Movie (1978) and the subsequent general early ‘80s mania for such re-creations! – just as we never see the mother’s lover in The Spirit of the Beehive.

The only traces shown to us are the words handwritten in a letter (in answer to Agustín’s missive that was simply sent to ‘Sevilla’!) and a spectral voice on the soundtrack – those traces that, in Erice, always form a lacunary, ambiguous spider-web via which the past takes hold of the present. El Sur has at is centre the tragedy of the father’s death: forecast at the very moment of a restaurant date between him and Estrella that reprises – but with a gap, a distance, a crucial difference in mood – the ritual festivity of her first communion. Even the pasodoble music (albeit arranged differently) is the same. And the title of that song? “In the World”.

Agustín has bequeathed Estrella the mirage of an absence – precisely the family place to which he has vowed never to return, ‘the South’. She turns it into an exotic place of myth, fed by postcard imagery and – eternal motif in Erice – photographs. She is not even entirely sure where it’s located, geographically. The film’s ending – not the one planned by Erice, but imposed when the producer Elías Querejeta put a stop to shooting – is, sublimely, simply the moment before she sets out on this voyage to the father’s land. But only after methodically packing in her sole suitcase the principal indices of her father’s myth.

Just about every Erice work, it seems, is about this: the quest for an origin. The origin of an enigma associated with one or both parents; the origin of an image (in The Quince Tree Sun [1992]); the origin of a disappearance (in the magisterial Close Your Eyes [2023]). Something has been lost, sundered, every time, in this long-ago conversion of reality into a tale or a picture. The central character – child or adult, as in Close Your Eyes – most fall into the maze of lost trails, murky traces, photos, letters, recordings.

The quest is, naturally, a kind of detective story – so, no wonder that Close Your Eyes updates the model Ericean fiction to the 21st century world of ‘true crime’, investigative TV. Whenever an authentic fragment of that past is unearthed, however, the characters then face the dilemma that is condensed in the simple but sublime gesture (everywhere in his films) of opening or closing one’s eyes to it: not merely to see it (or not), but to process (or refuse) it, the challenge of taking it fully into one’s ragged unconscious and bruised soul.

As in the œuvre of Abbas Kiarostami (with whom Erice collaborated on a memorable series of video-letters in the mid 2000s), any quest comes with an extra, unforeseen element: encounter. The people met along the trail back to the past bring with them new experiences and sensations in the present – and these reshape and redefine the quest itself. (In the full script of El Sur, Estrella would go on to meet, for instance, Laura’s brother.) As Alain Bergala puts it (specifically in relation to Kiarostami, but the principle applies just as well to Erice): the genuine key to resolving dilemmas, and salving traumas, is found in the unexpected encounter.

This theme of encounter raises an aspect of Erice’s art that some of his champions overlook. When it comes to ‘colourful secondary characters’ such as the wonderful Milagros (Rafaela Aparicio) in El Sur, the classroom teacher in The Spirit of the Beehive, or the various folk encountered in Close Your Eyes, nobody beats Erice in the casting, directing and staging of such warm, plaintive, human encounters. The mode of such scenes tends not to be the ‘high lyricism’ of his most searing image-sound conjunctions (the ones every critic enshrines), but a far more straightforward mise en scène of meeting, relating and parting.

In Close Your Eyes, apart from the incredible opening and closing sequences, this more normal mise en scène predominates – which threw off some viewers on its initial unveiling; they were blind, for a time, to the overall, highly worked structure that clinches the film’s ambience and meaning. (See Cristina Álvarez López’s brilliant analysis.)

Such effects of structure have never been absent from Erice’s work. He carries over from The Spirit of the Beehive a trait which is truly his, and supremely cinematic (in that no other art form can even remotely begin to achieve it): temporal ellipse-transitions on an object, vista or home dwelling where the camera remains rock solid, but the light and the surrounding ambience changes. Estrella as a child vanishes down the road on her bicycle; she returns – from the same camera vantage-point – as a teenager (played by the future filmmaker Icíar Bollaín). El Sur builds its entire poetic system upon the recurrence of such ‘time corridors’.

Could there possibly be a more eloquent way of expressing the fact that his heroes and heroines are born into a world that is not of their devising, but will become the ground for their every negotiation with life as it unfolds?

MORE Erice: Haunted Memory and the Audiovisual Essay

© Adrian Martin 6 February 2025