Cerrar Los Ojos
In 1990, Julio Arenas, a celebrated actor, mysteriously disappears during the shooting of a film: the sea, the final take, a body never found. The years pass, the case seems forgotten, archived. But then, in a present steeped in nostalgia, a television program decides to reopen the story: an echo of the past surfaces, filmed fragments of the last scenes — the images Arenas had entrusted to his close friend, director Miguel Garay. What emerges is not so much an investigation as a ritual: Garay is called to confront himself, memory, and the limits of what remains when life unravels. The film moves between the shadow and the light of the lost image, questioning whether cinema can not only recount the past but make it live again — not fully, but in its absence, in its void that is already a presence.
Every film is an attempt to embrace the irreversible with the words of the image.
— André Bazin
— André Bazin
With Cerrar los ojos, Víctor Erice enacts a return that is not only cinematic but ontological: a re-entry into the territory of memory, absence, and mystery, which takes shape through cinema itself as a device of resurrection. The film does not settle for narrating the enigmatic disappearance of an actor during the shooting of a perhaps unfinished work; it transforms that absence into an opening to question the relationship between the image and what remains, between life and its shadow.
Memory is what remains when the rest has vanished into the darkness of the screen.
— Andrei Tarkovsky
— Andrei Tarkovsky
The plot — which might seem the pretext for an investigation — becomes instead a meditative journey: fragments of films shot but never completed, photographs that resurface, television interviews that reopen old wounds. Each element leads not to a solution but to an encounter with the fragility of existence. The missing actor is not merely an absent character; he embodies what cinema stubbornly tries to preserve: the persistence of a face, a gesture, a voice, even when life has already moved elsewhere.
To live is to hope that someone will remain to record who we are as we change.
— Federico Fellini
— Federico Fellini
In this sense, Cerrar los ojos is a work that reflects on cinema within cinema, on the act of filming as a practice of survival, as a gesture of gratitude toward an art that, while knowing it cannot restore life, insists on making it perceptible. It is a film that offers itself as a sensitive archive, as an act of love toward the gaze, as an acknowledgment that fiction can harbor the most authentic experience.
Framing the story is the enigmatic and solemn image of a statue of Janus, which opens and closes the film. A symbol of irreducible duality — past and future, presence and absence, memory and oblivion — Erice’s Janus becomes a figure of cinema itself, an art that lives by looking simultaneously toward what has been and what will be, holding the instant within the eternal movement between the two poles. The work thus takes shape as a bridge, a threshold, a double gaze that never fully closes.
The question running silently through the film — and which the spectator inevitably makes their own — is whether it is possible to continue making cinema about cinema while living through cinema, and while cinema, in turn, lives within us. Perhaps this is precisely Erice’s gesture: an intimate and unrepeatable dialogue with his own art, a form of resistance to the passing of time, a final gift offered to those who watch.
The contemplative rhythm, the silences that make room for the invisible, the images unfolding like memories confer upon Cerrar los ojos the quality of a poetic testament. Not, however, as closure, but as opening: the confirmation that cinema, as long as it exists, can safeguard absences, transform them into presences, and restore to life its most fragile yet most luminous reality.
The film ultimately leaves a message that is at once humble and radical: our existence, in its absolute incompleteness and apparent senselessness, can find fulfillment through the cinematic language. It is in cinema — in its power to hold and at the same time disperse — that the protagonist remains trapped, perhaps by choice, as if he could not exist outside that space where life and image merge.
Framing the story is the enigmatic and solemn image of a statue of Janus, which opens and closes the film. A symbol of irreducible duality — past and future, presence and absence, memory and oblivion — Erice’s Janus becomes a figure of cinema itself, an art that lives by looking simultaneously toward what has been and what will be, holding the instant within the eternal movement between the two poles. The work thus takes shape as a bridge, a threshold, a double gaze that never fully closes.
The question running silently through the film — and which the spectator inevitably makes their own — is whether it is possible to continue making cinema about cinema while living through cinema, and while cinema, in turn, lives within us. Perhaps this is precisely Erice’s gesture: an intimate and unrepeatable dialogue with his own art, a form of resistance to the passing of time, a final gift offered to those who watch.
The contemplative rhythm, the silences that make room for the invisible, the images unfolding like memories confer upon Cerrar los ojos the quality of a poetic testament. Not, however, as closure, but as opening: the confirmation that cinema, as long as it exists, can safeguard absences, transform them into presences, and restore to life its most fragile yet most luminous reality.
The film ultimately leaves a message that is at once humble and radical: our existence, in its absolute incompleteness and apparent senselessness, can find fulfillment through the cinematic language. It is in cinema — in its power to hold and at the same time disperse — that the protagonist remains trapped, perhaps by choice, as if he could not exist outside that space where life and image merge.
Cinema is not a place where life is told: it is a place where life continues to tell itself after us.
— Ingmar Bergman
— Ingmar Bergman