To complement Rembrandt-Velázquez: Dutch & Spanish Masters exhibition, Sin Fin Cinema & Amsterdam Spanish Film Festival in collaboration with Rijksmuseum presents Going Back to the Golden Age, Portraying Spanish masters on the canvas in motion, a series of screenings and talks about the films taking place at Eye Filmmuseum, OBA Amsterdam and Rijksmuseum.
“Film has to be thought of as a contemporary stage of painting.”
“Cinema began at the end of the 16th Century with the works of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rubens and Velázquez, where all the elements of film such as movement and even sound were already present.”
The programme brought the audience back to the Golden Age, a flourishing artistic and literary period in Spain. Showing not only its luster and glaze but also – in the second half of the 17th Century – how a global power went into decline and almost collapsed.
Some of the films immersed the public directly in the paintings, literature, aesthetics and historical context of that period. Therefore, the main section of the film programme explored the constant search for a dialogue between cinema and painting.
In Lighting dialogues, we will dive into the relationship between cinema and painting, through Víctor Erice’s filmography. Exploring both the formal and poetic points of view around light and composition, the use of silence combined with minimum movement evokes the tableau vivant of a Baroque painting.
In this section we aim to convey the historical context of this period with two films that are based on literary works, Alatriste and El perro del hortelano.
Thanks to our partner Air Europa, Víctor Erice was in Amsterdam to present his three feature films in this programme and to give a Master Class on Cinema and Painting, the latter directly related to El sol del membrillo at the Rijksmuseum, where he will speak about the relationships between cinema and painting and the specific relation to this film and the painter Antonio López.
Víctor Erice, visited us this year in Amsterdam for the Going Back to the Golden Age program, in which he shared with us his knowledge in a masterclass about painting and cinema.
Spain’s National Prize-winner of Cinematography in 1993, entered the Spanish School of Cinema in 1961. With a complete education in visual arts, Erice has not only worked as a film director but also as a screenwriter, film critic, and lately he has been involved in teaching activities through different workshops on Cinema and Painting.
In these workshops and lectures he explores the relationship that these two mediums have shared since its origin. Yet it is from a poetic point of view through the use of pictorial references that – according to the Spanish director – painting will help cinema to free itself from the literary and theatrical artifice inherited from its origin.
