La ceguera de Cronos. Historia y tiempo en el cine de Víctor Erice

This article elucidates the role of time and history in the cinema of Víctor Erice. Collective history is not exactly opposed to personal life in Erice’s films, because often both are characterized equally by provoking an experience of time as a linear succession of instants leading to destruction or ruins. On the other hand, this destructive time does have a crucial opponent: time mediated by dream and fascination. This fundamental dichotomy of Erice’s work can be better understood by relating it to the following conceptual pair used by Gilles Deleuze in his Logic of Sense: Chronos is time as a succession of causally connected and corporeal presents, and Aion is time as an incorporeal event that is unique but also linked to other events by relations that exceed causality. Erice’s cinematic art attempts to unveil time as Aion (the poetic and non-causal logic of the event) in the midst of time as Chronos (the destructive logic of time as historic or personal loss). In any case, Aion is in itself also a kind of destructive time: it cancels the possibility of attaching events to a present state of things. Erice has often used the idea of light and, in particular, of the light cinema creates, as a metonymy of the destructive power of time as event. However, as the title of his short film Alumbramiento (Lifeline, 2002), suggests, this destruction is also a way of giving new life to the event, a sort of impersonal and incorporeal life beyond any presence.