"Spirit of the Beehive" director Victor Erice On the Uncertain Nature of Cinema

"A ghost always carries with it a specific and factual truth: the death or disappearance of someone or something. In the history of cinema, beyond its episodic deaths--real or symbolic: the death of classical cinema, Modernity - there exists a primordial mourning, practically forgotten nowadays: the mourning and sorrow caused by the disappearance of silent cinema in the moment of its maximum splendour, sacrificed for the sake of the spoken word. A premature death, without a doubt; a death of which Manoel de Oliveira is the only active filmmaker who can offer an embodied and heartfelt testimony, a death felt by him as an essential loss. A loss, above all, of a certain specificity of a cinema elaborated under the protection of montage theories, wherein the image worked in favour of an expression that substituted the word."