You could think of Víctor Erice as Spain's Terrence Malick. Since making their debut in the early '70s, each has directed only three feature films, but the similarities don't end there. Like Malick's work, Erice's 1973 debut The Spirit Of The Beehive, a masterful look at a child's discovery of mortality, uses a figures-in-a-landscape approach to filmmaking, measuring human existence against the forces of nature—the eternal rhythms of life and death. Though different in form, the semi-documentary Dream Of Light (Erice's 1992 return to filmmaking after a 10-year break) ultimately shares many of the same concerns. Erice follows Antonio López García, considered by many to be Spain's greatest living painter, in his daily attempts to render the quince tree in his backyard as it appears in autumn's midday sun. By dwelling on the details, Erice makes Garcia's painstaking preparations surprisingly compelling, observing the artist as he surrounds the small tree with an elaborate web of strings and weights to keep his perspective fixed. Every day, he paints tiny marks on each piece of fruit to mark the steady progress of gravity as they ripen, then returns to the two metal stakes that mark the position of his feet. In the background, his wife, also an artist, goes about her own daily routines as the radio announces the imminent war in the Persian Gulf. What begins as a detailed, dramatic look at the artistic process slowly broadens its scope, as Garcia discards one attempt after another, chats with old friends and admiring visitors, and copes with inclement weather. As he reminisces with a fellow painter while admiring Michelangelo's The Last Judgment, painted when the artist was in his 60s, the middle-aged Garcia's thoughts of his own mortality become apparent, his attempts to capture the quince tree revealed as an unstated analog to the relationship all art shares with death. By the time his uniquely moving film draws to a close, Erice reveals another similarity to Malick: Work this unforgettable makes it easy to forgive the long absences. (Facets Multimedia, 1517 W. Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL 60614)