Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.
Ivana Miloš, Quince Alight (2021), monotype and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cm
AGAINST THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
For see, my friend goes shaking and white; He eyes me as the basilisk: I have turned, it appears, his day to night, Eclipsing his sun's disk
—Robert Browning, “A Light Woman”
Brown rotten quinces. They used to be lushly golden. Now they are decaying on the ground. The camera’s gaze rested on them like a basilisk’s deadly eyes. It asked too much of the quince tree. It would have happened anyway but it catalyzed its death. Like time, cinema always catalyzes death. It’s guilty. At least we have a beautiful image of the Cydonia oblonga now, haven’t we? It depends: Maybe we have, maybe we haven’t.
In Victor Erice’s Dream of Light (1992) we are invited to observe Antonio López García trying to paint the quince tree in his backyard in the magical autumn sun of Madrid. The literal translation of the film’s title, El sol del membrillo, refers to that sun in late September when the quince begins to ripen. It’s a beautiful light people are suspicious of. It was long believed that children should not be exposed to the sunlight at that time of the year. A beautiful light that catalyzes death. The sun, cinema. López García is going to fail to capture it. He declares: “The end result is not as important as being close to the tree. I follow the tree.”
Throughout his career, which began in the 1960s, the painter has repeatedly focused on the sweet smelling quince belonging to the rose family. He has captured its deciduous glory like no one else. It’s the neglected fruit of paradise. Each autumn it appears like a golden miracle. Its skin is layered as if it was exposed to hundreds of years of sun, yet, at the same time, it feels like it was just born, soft and eternal. Fewer and fewer know how it tastes any more. Those who see it, think it’s a lemon or an apple. Oh, those fools! Those who know it, speak with respect as if it was something that belongs to a different world. They are right. Before there was powdered gelatin it was customary to harvest quinces. Today it’s a memory of grandmothers preparing delicious quince jam in stuffed kitchens. Everything smelled like heaven and booze.
Much like Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh or Jacques Rivette’s La belle noiseuse, which appeared around the same time in the beginning of the 1990s, Dream of Light is a film about links between painting and cinema. However, Erice's and López García’s collaboration goes furthest in exploring ontological depths concerning art and its relation to the world. In this case the world is around 10 feet high. It’s a quince tree.
"I have a passionate relationship with the subject; if I don’t, I can’t work. I am not capable of distancing myself, but at the same time I wish to respect what I paint. The object is more important to me than my work, which should reflect a passionate, rather than manipulative, contemplation,” said López García in an interview conducted by Michael Brenson. In Dream of Light he repeatedly declares his love for the quince tree which he planted himself. His eyes look at the fruit and the light affectionately. He is humble in his approach. So is Erice. They both respect the time and space of the tree. Instead of manipulating it, they observe it. Instead of isolating it, they keep it surrounded by whatever surrounds it. People, rain, the city. Memories, songs, and the smoke of cigarettes.
However, they have to do certain things in order to make art possible. It’s always an intrusion. When painter friend Enrique Gran visits, López García immediately warns him from touching the fruits. It’s a very old question. What’s more important: image or reality? The answer seemed so clear but a world polluted by manipulated images ruined our perception of reality. How many shiny, juicy, deep red apples can we see before we forget how an apple looks? Today, it seems like those looking at a real quince (with a camera or with their eyes) are a minority. It’s even interpreted as an act of resistance. Imagine. This should be the norm. At least, it’s what I think cinema is.
From what we can gather, López García is a very patient artist. So is Erice who takes a long time in between films. Theirs is a practice vanishing more and more from contemporary life. There is a demand for sloppiness everywhere. With a tree it shows easily. If you make a film about a tree in less than a year, you have not seen all of it. The tree does not care about a deadline. The tree does not care about the news coming from the radio López García listens to. It cares about light and water. Theirs is a deep time we can’t even comprehend. The filmmaker and painter suffer from that. They want to catch a fleeting event in the life of this tree. Light is always ephemeral. A tree moves. It is alive.
López García works with colors and perspective. For the latter he marks the fruits with white colored stripes documenting their slow but continuous descent towards the ground. As the fruits grow bigger the tree bends over and thus changes the way it looks. Later, his daughters complain about the white marks. “Poor tree,” they say. The tree, which blossoms in spring, is as beautiful as the fruit it bears. There is a symmetry to it that is already perfect. The painter only needs to register how it is built but that’s difficult. He places nails in the ground to mark the exact position of his feet before the canvas. At the same time he constructs a frame around the tree while marking its center with a hanging weight. Erice on the other hand repeatedly looks at López García and the tree from the same angle. He centers the painter who centers the tree. We can’t see the marks for his tripod but we can be sure they were there. To really see we need a structure. It’s work. It’s not a feeling you have and then you make an image with your phone and send it all around the world.
In a brilliant scene of his Diary 1973–1983 David Perlov assesses whether he should eat the soup on the table before him or film the soup. He can’t do both. You can’t film a quince after eating it. In Dream of Light the Polish builders renovating the building in which López García and his wife María Moreno work get to taste the fruit. They are insecure about it and slightly disappointed. It’s not as juicy as a peach, not as explosive as an apple. It’s much too subtle for the dominant taste.
However, Dream of Light asks if you can capture a quince at all. There are different factors frustrating the attempt of López García and ultimately also the film to create an adequate image of what the artists saw in front of them. First, there is an enduring October rain. The clouds change the light constantly. And even after putting up a tent to protect the canvas, it’s threatened by moisture and splashes of mud and rain. In cinema, there are usually two types of rain. One is a fake emotional signal and the other kills production. For a quince tree, rain is essential for survival. For a painter working outdoors, it’s the end of the day. Then, there is the pressure of time itself. López García knows that the ripe fruits will ultimately fall to the ground. Since he searches for a specific light, he has only a couple of hours each day. It’s a limit he sets for himself admittedly, but it is undeniably cruel. When filmmakers talk about their work, they very often stress that they wanted to capture something before it was lost forever. Still, what we see in cinema is only a small percentage of time regained. Most of the time is lost.
There is something that stops us from seeing. Sometimes, while López García is painting we can hear the news coming from his portable radio. It places the film in a specific time but even more, it speaks about what Erice called the weight of the world in which all art exists. It can just be your smartphone keeping you occupied. It can be your fear of not being able to pay the rent. It can be a pandemic occupying your mind. There was never such a thing as an isolated artist. Even if many have tried. It’s always an active decision. Now, I am interested in this tree. Now, I’m going to devote my time to it despite everything else that is going on. It’s more difficult with plants because it’s not only in cinema that they are overlooked. They don’t scream at us. Spending time with a quince tree is not something you can put in your résumé. However, as Mary Oliver wrote in her poem “Invitation”:
It could mean something. It could mean everything. It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote: You must change your life.
In a final revelation it occurs that not only the world weighs heavily on art but that art weighs heavily on the world. In a haunting shot of the camera and light machines facing the rotten quinces, Erice suggests that his tools and especially the artificial light killed the fruits. Cinema is really a basilisk here. Whatever can bring light, can also bring shadow. That is something the quince tree knew long before us.