José Luis Guerín shows his fondness for John Ford's classic The Quiet Man by traveling to County Clare, Ireland, where Ford's film was made. Exploring The Quiet Man's myth and aftermath among local residents, Guerín finds unexpected consequences connecting the film to local history and culture. "With an imagined Maureen O'Hara, Innisfree charts the interval between memory and history... "—Harvard Film Archive. (José Luis Guerín, 1990, 35 mm, 110 minutes)

A quiet meditation on long-forgotten lives, Train of Shadows mingles antique home-movie footage with a mock documentary to ponder the disappearance of an amateur filmmaker in rural France in the late 1920s. Loss and decay, cinematic archaeology, and illusion versus reality are a few of the themes that Guerín considers. (José Luis Guerín, 1997, 35 mm, Spanish with subtitles, 88 minutes)

In the short Miró l’Altre, Catalan artist Joan Miró paints a mural outside an exhibition, only to see it disappear. (Pere Portabella, 1969, 35 mm, Spanish and Catalan with subtitles, 18 minutes)

Introduction by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Film historian and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum provides a context for the work of Pere Portabella, whose associations with the surrealist and dadaist-influenced avant-garde movements in Spain affected his filmmaking. After founding his company Films 59 in Barcelona, Portabella produced early films by maverick directors Marco Ferreri, Carlos Saura, and Luis Buñuel (for example, Buñuel's notorious 1961 Viridiana).

Cuadecuc, Vampir, writes Rosenbaum, is "a black-and-white documentary on the shooting of hack director Jess Franco's Count Dracula with Christopher Lee....More than a documentary, the film displays a kind of poetic alchemy in which Portabella converts a horror movie into one of the most beautiful films ever made about anything." (Pere Portabella, 1970, 35 mm, 67 minutes)

Portabella's most recent work is a musical experiment as well as a film, a meditation on music's social history that "creates a dialectic between sound and image," writes J. Hoberman, "and exciting, new contexts for Bach...not so much reinvigorating the music, but placing it in unfamiliar territory to emphasize its nuances." (Pere Portabella, 2007, 35 mm, Spanish, German, and Catalan with subtitles, 102 minutes)

Slyly undercutting his own eccentric narrative, a love triangle set in contemporary Barcelona, Portabella creates a tale with mise-en-scène clearly inspired by Luis Buñuel and reflects on architecture, landscape, music, food, and painting (in an homage to the bathers and odalisques of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres). "An anthology of his own interests," notes Jonathan Rosenbaum. (Pere Portabella, 1990, 35 mm, Spanish with subtitles, 85 minutes)

Playback documents a Carles Santos recording in which the chorus of the Liceu of Barcelona converts a musical text into a verbal and physical performance. (1970, 35 mm, 8 minutes)

A romantic young artist spends three days in the city of Strasbourg searching for a young woman named Sylvie whom he thinks he met there years before. The haunting sadness of his situation is underscored by Guerín's beautiful virtuoso photography, casting, editing, and musical scoring. (José Luis Guerín, 2007, 35 mm, ambient sounds, some French and Spanish, 84 minutes)

José Luis Guerín in person

An essay in the style of French avant-gardist Chris Marker, Some Photos in the City of Sylvia juxtaposes still photographs from Guerín's In the City of Sylvia with other stills to create a context for a much broader theme—the "unattainable woman" in poetry, art, and filmmaking. (José Luis Guerín, 2007, 35 mm, Spanish with subtitles, 67 minutes)