Dare to digress: cinematic self-discovery in Victor Erice's Dream of Light

Victor Erice's contemplative documentary 'Dream of Light' (1992) begins with a straightforward and unnarrated account of a realist painter, Antonio Lopez, embarking upon a new painting of a quince tree growing outside his home in Madrid. Before long, however, the film digresses along various paths surrounding the painter, branching out from its core subject and exhaling into the lives and activities of others, extending all the way to remote urban environments without any apparent connection to the film's initial identity. What began as a vigilant documentary on the inner workings of painting from life becomes suddenly more exploratory, experimental, perhaps cinematic, upholding Andre Bazin's conviction that films about painting ought to emancipate themselves and expand cinema in some significant way or else risk the mere anecdotal. The decisive shift in mode from documentation to something like experimentation is a philosophically imaginative reply from the filmmaker, expressing itself as a 'reaching beyond the image' towards a more expansive and inclusive sense of reality which the painter's art, in turn, sacrifices for the sake of focusing on a single image and ultimately delving inside his dreams. The dare to digress exposes the film's own process of making and precarious path towards self-discovery.