El Sur (Erice, 1983): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm
This film is also screened on June 22nd at Close-Up Cinema. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review:
On the surface, despite the presence of a different fictional source (a
story by Adelaida Garcia Morales) and scriptwriter (Jose Luis Lopez
Linares), Victor Erice's second feature seems to bring back some of the
haunting obsessions of his first, the wonderful Spirit of the Beehive
(1973): the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the magical spell
exerted by movies over childhood, and a little girl's preoccupation with
her father and the past. But as English critic Tim Pulleine has
observed, a reference to Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt in El sur (South,
1983) points to an elaborate system of doubling and duplication that
underlies the film's structure as a whole, operating on the level of
shots and sequences as well as themes (north and south, father and
daughter, real and imaginary). Although this subtle spellbinder ends
somewhat abruptly, reportedly because the film's budget ran out, it
seems to form a nearly perfect whole as it is: a brooding tale about an
intense father-daughter relationship and the unknowable past, mysterious
and resonant, with the poetic ambience of a story by Faulkner.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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