Sun eye. Juan Bufill’s cinema

The programme includes a minimalist piece made in the seventies (Colorespacio); a rhythmic, fragmented work from the eighties (Ver piedras/Signos de sol); three visionary works from the twenty-first century (Invisible visible, Sunny Swing and Signaturas, chosen to form part of Xcèntric’s touring cycle of “From Ecstasy to Rapture. 50 years of another kind of Spanish film”); and another three, previously unscreened: a biographical and autobiographical evocation of childhood and summer holidays (Villa Dionisia) and two portraits from the Architecture series (Museo and Pirámide). The eight pieces that make up this selection were filmed in Super 8, in colour and silent, and then digitally edited.

The title of the session refers to an intuition of Plotinus that the poet Juan Eduardo Cirlot included in his Diccionario de símbolos: the eye would not be able to see the sun if it were not also, somehow, a sun. Sufi mysticism also sensed that only the water eye can see water. Perhaps the film camera can be considered as another sun eye, capable of discovering and understanding, by fragments of space and time, a material and existential reality that is fluid and is transformed.

Colorespacio, 1979 (film)-2014 (video), 5:38 min

Ver piedras/Signos de sol, 1988 (film)-2014 (video), 14:31 min

Villa Dionisia, 2003 (film)-2019 (video), 5:56 min

Invisible visible (la luz animal), 2004 (film)-2014 (video), 9:26 min

Arquitectura 1: Pirámide (Guiza, Egipto), 2002 (film)-2019 (video), 6:36 min

Arquitectura 7: Museo (Guggenheim Bilbao), 2003-2005 (film)-2019 (video), 5:51 min

Signaturas (síntesis), 2006-2007 (film)-2008 (video), 6:42 min

Sunny Swing, 2010 (film)-2014 (video), 2:45 min

All filmed in Super 8 with digital editing.

Copies courtesy of Juan Bufill.