Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Filmmaker Victor Erice follows Spanish artist Antonio Lopez in his painstaking attempt to paint the image of a tree.
Victor Erice's meditative documentary follows painter Antonio López García's obsessive attempt to capture the light on a quince tree, resulting in one of cinema's most singular contemplations of time, craft, and artistic vision. The cinematography is exceptional — Erice photographs the seasonal light with the same patient precision his subject brings to painting, creating images of rare beauty. Novelty is very high: this is a genuinely one-of-a-kind film, an act of artistic communion between filmmaker and painter that blurs documentary and poetic essay in an unmistakable way. The 'plot' is minimal by design — its meditative pace is a virtue but limits dramatic arc — and the ending, while thematically appropriate (the tree stripped bare, the project abandoned), is quiet rather than revelatory.