The Spirit of the Beehive (El Espíritù de la Colmena)

yoke and arrows emblem

 

Director Victor Erice

 

THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (El Espíritù de la Colmena)         A                                     Spain  (97 mi)  1973  d: Victor Erice

“It's me, Ana...It's me, Ana.”   —Ana (Ana Torrent)

Something of a memory play, a poem of awakening, a reconstruction of a past that’s been stolen from an entire generation, that needs to rediscover itself through this slowly realized, hauntingly beautiful Spanish film set in the shadow of Franco during the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in 1940 (the year of the director’s birth), showing how the world of adults and the world of children intersect, told from the point of view of a young 6-year old girl Ana (Ana Torrent), who like Linda Blair in THE EXORCIST (1973) has been haunted by this role ever since.  Having earned a living writing film criticism, directing television, and filming commercials, this is a project co-written with Ángel Fernández-Santos, shot in the small town of Hoyuelos on the open plains of Segovia, told without any narrative, but from an abstract series of impressions, where the strength of the film is its refusal to explain exactly what anything means, as the adult lives of her mother and father are in quiet turmoil, where they barely speak to one another and instead remain totally isolated in the rural countryside with little contact from the outside world.  Her intellectual father (Fernando Fernán Gómez) obsesses over the inner workings of his beehives, keeps a scientific journal, and remains sequestered in his study, often seen alone pacing in his room lost in thought, while his wife Teresa (Teresa Gimpera) narrates a letter she is writing to a long lost lover in exile, indicating that “the news we get from the outside world is so scant and confusing,” Spirit Of The Beehive, The (1973) -- (Movie Clip) My Constant ... YouTube (4:35), basically preventing any cultural contamination from the democratic world.  Their mutual indifference leaves the two children, Ana along with her older 10-year old sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería), alone to their own devices most of the time, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) by Víctor Erice, Clip: Ana and ... YouTube (1:26).  Much of this feels like personal recollections, where during the Franco era, people were afraid to open their mouths for fear of political reprisals and instead lived secret lives, turning this into an eloquently hushed experience, so simple, quiet, and dreamlike, yet utterly compelling.  Accentuating the silence immediately after the war, released two years before the death of Franco, when his health was already failing, this was the first Spanish film to portray a freedom fighter, someone on the losing side of the Civil War, with any degree of sympathy.  Much of the film is wordless, or is spoken through whispers, where the muted exterior world has an impact on an equally disturbing interior world which at times resembles the horror genre, tapping into our deepest fears, using Ana’s personal journey to parallel that of the Spanish people, where the director has a habit of making quick cuts away from scenes that haven’t yet played out, leaving the audience to wonder, like Ana, as if stuck in a perpetual dream state not being able to recognize real life from an imaginary world.  This has become a familiar metaphoric representation of the Franco era, more recently expressed through Guillermo Del Toro’s PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006), which is a much more violent and sadistic portrait lacking some of the poetry of this film.  If you look closely in the opening shot after the credit sequence, a truck drives into town carrying cans of film, where you can observe an emblem of the fascist Falange with the yoke and arrows symbol decorating the wall of the first building as you arrive into town, an unmistakable reality in a world precariously balanced between “Once upon a time…” and “Somewhere on the Castilian plateau, around 1940…”   

Erice offers no clues about what’s going on until well into the picture when we see Ana paging through a family album and deliberately leaves much to the imagination of the viewer.  Their home is a manifestation of the beehive, with its honeycomb-shaped stained glass windows and the golden-hued light filtering through.  In one of the more traumatic sequences, Ana finds her sister lying on the ground, possibly dead, which is highly disturbing when no adult can be found.  Perhaps more than any other scene, this slowly calibrated revelation is fraught with menace, shot almost like a ghost movie, where the world becomes a shadowy existence.  Ana is not amused when she discovers her sister has been playing tricks on her.  Adults and children alike are excited when a truck arrives bringing an exhibition of cinema, which for most is their first exposure to moving pictures, and happens to show James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931), where an indelible image of Frankenstein and the little girl sticks in Ana’s mind, completely identifying with her, wondering why he killed her (both girls are told by their parents to be good and follow expected behaviors), while a ringing line of dialogue from the film can auspiciously be heard, “What if we never went beyond the limits of what’s known?”  When she asks her sister, Isabel reminds her that everything in movies is fake, that no one was actually killed, but takes her to an abandoned stone hut in the middle of an open wheat field where she claims she can conjure up images of a spirit that can take human form if she closes her eyes and identifies herself.  Ana returns there regularly, as fantasy begins to mirror reality when she is pleasantly surprised to find a real partisan holed up there with a wounded leg, so she befriends him and brings him clothes and food, sympathizing with a societal outcast, believing he is a manifestation of Frankenstein.  When he later disappears, having been hunted down and shot in the middle of the night, the police inspector discovers items belonging to Ana’s father.  In terms of the fugitive’s death at the hands of others, the FRANKENSTEIN film and reality coincide, where his corpse is even laid out in the same building where the movie was shown.  When Ana finds that he’s disappeared, finding blood in the location where he had been, it causes such confusion that she runs away from the presence of her watchful father, blatantly disobeying his paternal authority, undermining the patriarchy associated with fascism.  Without any family connection left, Ana is out on her own lost in the countryside for several days and nights, having to fend for herself as the FRANKENSTEIN scene with the little girl replays itself, where the real and the imagined become inseparable, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973 Victor Erice) YouTube (6:55).  The original music by Luís de Pablo is playfully childlike, a mix of flute and guitar, with luminous cinematography from Luís Caudrado (who discovered he was going blind from an inoperable brain tumor during the shoot and killed himself a few years later), also an unforgettable child performance by Torrent, who’s so bewildered and confused that we rarely get to see her smile.  A treatise on the transformative power of the imagination, the evocative mood is delicately elusive and quietly mesmerizing in this impressionistic vignette of secrecy and lost innocence.  

The use of such a young girl to lead viewers through the trauma of turbulent times has been done before with 6-year old Scout (Mary Badham) in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), whose innocence stands in stark contrast to the prevailing lynch mob mentality of a segregated society hellbent on railroading an innocent black man for a crime he didn’t commit.  The evils of the world are man-made, like the depiction of a Frankenstein monster causing panic, yet in each film both Scout and Ana have a defiantly uncompromising commitment to understand the unspoken dangers that lurk under the surface, with Scout discovering that the socially reclusive neighbor next door, Boo Radley, is not the monster she thought he was, that all the other kids believed him to be, but was just extremely shy and different, making him unmistakably human, while Ana has an unquestioning belief in the existence of the mythical monster and refuses to turn a blind eye in her quest to find “the true spirit” of the creature whose onscreen presence projects so much fear.  The children in the film perceive the world as an enigma, with Erice unlocking a magical vision of the mysteries of the world, where the title apparently comes from a book by Maurice Maeterlinck, a Belgian poet and playwright and author of the 1901 book The Life of the Bee, where the swarm of a bustling beehive is described as “the mysterious, maddened commotion,” which the father views as a monotonous, mindless, and well-organized collective that works continuously, void of any imagination, much like the power that had taken hold of his country.  There is also a tribute to 19th century Galician poet Rosalía de Castro, a remarkable woman with a strong social conscience, whose eloquent poem is read aloud in class, Rosalía De Castro's poem in The Spirit of the Beehive YouTube (36 seconds).  At the time the film was made, it was impossible to tell the true tale of the devastatingly harmful effects of living under such a heavily repressive dictatorship, given a steady drumbeat of fear, propaganda, and helpless despair, so Erice cloaks the film in allegory and creates an innocent who bears witness to hidden catastrophes, who tries to make sense of it all, becoming an ode to the dream world of childhood.  Winner of the top prize at the 1973 San Sebastián International Film Festival, coming on the heels of Javier Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist (Muerte de un ciclista) (1955), and currently listed at #85 on the 2022 BFI Sight and Sound Poll for The Greatest Films of All Time, the spiritual awakening of a new artistic vision mirrors Ana’s own astonished viewing of the film, utterly enraptured by what she sees, given a newly sparked imaginative engagement with the world around her through cinema, subjectively seeing things in a completely different way, as revelations will play out in a world beyond cinema.  Ana is in the act of discovering, a powerful and visually poetic message in a fascist society that represses all creative thought, leaving a society divided and intimidated into silence in the years following the Civil War, not altogether different than the impact of Russian director Mikhail Kalatazov’s The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli) (1957) after the death of Stalin, following the Stalinist purges and the gulag labor systems, publicly revealing information that was previously forbidden, which opened up new doors, bridging the gap between art and life, coinciding with the filmmaker’s desire to transcend the creative limitations that had been imposed by the Franco regime.

Lonely Are the Brave

 

Director David Miller

Kirk Douglas and Gena Rowlands

novelist Edward Abbey

Dalton Trumbo at work in the bathtub

LONELY ARE THE BRAVE           A                                                                                         USA  (107 mi)  1962  ‘Scope  d: David Miller

God help me, I will never sacrifice a friend to an ideal.  I will never betray a friend for the sake of any cause.  I will never reject a friend in order to stand by an institution.  Great nations may fall in dusty ruin before I will sell a friend to save them.  I pray to the god within me to give me the power to live by this design. —Edward Abbey on a student Fulbright scholarship in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1951, Edward Abbey, Anarchism and the Environment – Anthropogenic ...

Following the recent loss of actress Gena Rowlands at the age of 94 (How Gena Rowlands Redefined the Art of Movie Acting), it might be interesting to look back at one of the best of her more obscure performances, a small part in just her second movie role, cast only a week before shooting started, yet she does so much with it, adding tons of personality, known as an actress of lacerating intensity mixed with extraordinary warmth, where her outspokenness and endearing Midwestern charm really stand out.  Following in the footsteps of John Huston’s The Misfits (1961), yet also John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), this is the end of an era in Westerns, the waning years of the frontier American West, a portrait of the last of a dying breed, men who live outside the laws of civilization and literally make their own rules, refusing to accept boundaries in their lives, living on their own and embracing a lifestyle of independence and freedom, where the open frontier remains as far as the eye can see.  Certainly no genre has had a greater impact on American film than the Western, where the primary subject is the conflict between wilderness and civilization, embodied by the figure of the Western hero who balances the two extremes.  In the 60’s and 70’s, under the influence of modernist European films, the American Western began to change, growing darker and more existential, where one of the most profound manifestations of this evolution was the demythologizing of the Western hero, which may have begun with John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards character in John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS (1956), whose vicious racism made him the ultimate Indian hater, where his maniacal obsession is his ultimate downfall, as he’s thoroughly unredeemable, a pathological outsider forever excluded from home, condemned to wander in the wilderness alone.  Like Paul Newman in Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963) and HOMBRE (1967), both displaying modernist influences that deliberately subvert the romanticism and idealism of an American West defined by Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), Gary Cooper in HIGH NOON (1952), and Alan Ladd in SHANE (1953), this is a portrait of the death of the Western hero, men who live and die as outcasts.  In this brilliant, yet little-known film, Kirk Douglas, in what he describes as his favorite role of all-time (Kirk Douglas names his "favourite movie" of all time), stars as an anachronistic modern cowboy, a non-conformist misfit who’s a throwback to a different era, still living by the code of the Old West, caught up in the rules and conventions of a rapidly developing society that no longer has any use for him. While he is a wild and rootless cowboy whose only real home is on the range, the other secondary characters all shed light on or draw comparisons to him, yet the mix of dry humor with drama is refreshing amidst an otherwise downbeat outlook.  These familiar themes were widely explored in ever greater depth by American authors Sam Shepard and Cormac McCarthy, who were products of the same time.  Falling off the radar, the film languished in obscurity and was basically unseen for 45 years until a DVD release in 2009, when Stephen Spielberg, of all people, went searching through the vaults for film clips to use and ended up championing the film’s preservation.  The film was a box-office disappointment, though a critical success, made by a relatively undistinguished journeyman director, offering a surprisingly indie and arthouse feel, where it was viewed in the White House a decade apart by both Presidents Kennedy and Nixon.  Adapted from Edward Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy, an Old Tale in a New Time, originally published in 1956, with Douglas securing the film rights, where the screenplay was actually written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the infamous Hollywood Ten, just emerging from the McCarthy era anti-communist Hollywood blacklist, becoming an elegy to the Western.

Opening with a man and his horse out on the open prairie, the sounds of jets flying overhead offer an immediate contrast to any expectations of a traditional Western, with three military Air Force jets leaving contrails across the sky, lonely are the brave 1962 YouTube (26 seconds), as modernity has raised its ugly head on Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) and his trusted mare Whisky, offering one of the best and most realistic portrayals of the deep bond that can develop between a horse and their owner, where they comprise a team as memorable as Newman and Redford in George Roy Hill’s BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969), as he affectionately chats away with his temperamental horse throughout the picture, with their mythical personas and destinies intrinsically linked together, becoming an uncommonly endearing pair.  As they set out across the vast landscape of the open desert, they come to a barbed-wire fence with a sign that reads “closed area” by order of a water and power company, with the fence spanning in both directions for miles, leaving him no recourse but to cut the wire, an apt metaphor for finding himself fenced in by the encroachments of civilization.  A cowboy in a contemporary setting instantly raises questions about whether the untamed, free spirit of the open frontier can abide by the rules of a modern society.  The storyline is spare, but gripping, as it’s one man alone on his Odysseus-like journey through unimaginably beautiful terrain marked by unexpected pitfalls and landmines ready to force him off his lonely path to freedom.  As they plunge into the Rio Grande River (another boundary to cross), the Jerry Goldsmith musical score, Lonely are the Brave (Suite) YouTube (5:11), turns upbeat, like the heroic theme song from John Sturges classic western THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960), representing a crossing over into urban civilization.  But getting across the highway into the heavily populated town of Duke City (Albuquerque), New Mexico proves challenging, having a difficult time as they attempt to cross a busy four-laned highway with eighteen-wheeler trucks barreling by, which almost ends in disaster, as a skittish Whisky is confused and disoriented by the noise and speed of unfamiliar traffic, freezing in the middle of the road with several near misses, but they make it safely across, finding themselves in the middle of a junkyard of wrecked, rusted out automobiles which are no longer of any use, broken artifacts of the modern world, just as Jack and Whisky are the last vestiges of the Old West.  They seem to have no business being in the same shot, filmed in crisp black and white by Philip H. Lathrop, who also shot Lee Marvin with French New Wave aesthetics in John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), demonstrating impressive location camerawork under harsh conditions, with Douglas claiming that the location was the most challenging of his career, doing all of his own stunts.  What follows is completely refreshing, as Burns pays a visit to his best friend’s wife, Jerry Bondi (Gena Rowlands), who is delighted to see him, as her husband Paul (Michael Kane) has just been sentenced to two years in prison for aiding undocumented Mexican immigrants, not to cross the border, but to help them find food and work once they got here.  Apparently offering a touch of humanity is a crime.  This border crossing parallels Jack’s having to cut the fenced barbed wire, boundary lines that have been imposed by government or local authorities.  Jack is framed in the doorway with the open landscape and mountains looming behind him, while the more domesticated Jerry, in a kitchen with all the modern conveniences, is reeling with disgust that her husband ignored all the warnings and put himself in harm’s way, jeopardizing his wife and young son, who will now have to manage on their own.  Burns tries to tell her that as a transplanted Easterner she doesn’t understand the ways of the West, embodied by individual freedom and unlimited access to open spaces.  But her response is gut-wrenching.  

Jack, I’m going to tell you something.  The world that you and Paul live in doesn’t exist.  Maybe it never did.  Out there is a real world, and it’s got real borders and real fences, real laws and real trouble.  And either you go by the rules or you lose.  You lose everything.    

Jack’s cockamamie idea is to get thrown into prison on drunken disorderly, find Paul, and help them both break out of prison, valuing friendship and self-respect, thinking freedom is the ultimate salvation.  His plan goes a little haywire when he meets a one-armed Okinawa veteran in a cantina, a man filled with spit and vinegar who hates cowboys (Bill Raisch who would go on to star as the one-armed man in The Fugitive, running on TV from 1963-67), as he wants to fight to prove his manhood, believing his impairment is no detriment.  The bruising barroom brawl is grimly realistic and well-choreographed, with an explosive combustible energy (Douglas was actually injured in the scene), with Burns also fighting with one hand behind his back.  As the prisons are crowded, the police are willing to let him off scot-free, so he assaults a police officer, earning himself a one-year sentence for his troubles.  It’s important to point out that screenwriter Trumbo was also thrown in prison for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, not recognizing the authority of an absurd government witch hunt to root out communism when in fact there was none to root out, where the sole purpose instead was to generate Red Scare headlines, something Trumbo refused to be a part of, serving almost a year in prison for his individual beliefs, an example that mirrors the strong moral fiber we find in both Paul and Jack, predecessors to a 60’s counterculture that clearly stood against immoral or misguided trends in our society.  Inside he does run into Paul, smuggling in two hacksaw blades in his boot, wasting no time to plan their escape, but a sadistic prison guard (George Kennedy) wants a piece of him for giving him back talk, mercilessly handing out one hell of a beating, but it’s no deterrent.  Ready to get the hell out of there, Paul doesn’t want to risk what he has with Jerry, having assumed the responsibilities for a wife and a child, preferring to stay put, knowing she’ll be out there waiting for him when he gets out, and he doesn’t want either of them to continually have to look over their shoulder at someone chasing them.  Dumbfounded by his surprisingly mature outlook, Jack decides to go it alone, making one last stop with Jerry, offering scintillating dialogue that is unusually long for a Western, featuring world class acting in a relaxed, low key register, where the film excels in showcasing real human values.  While she had minor appearances on Bonanza and The Virginian for television, it is rare to see Rowlands in a Western, making this such a singularly distinctive occurrence, playing a 1960’s woman in transition, becoming a virulent critique of the consumer society that has become self-absorbed and callous, having become distanced from the natural world, imposing extensive rules to try to ensure order, rules that Jack ignores.  Dismissive of macho pretensions and fed up with all men in general, seeing how stubbornly headstrong and foolish they can be, she angrily reminds him, “Believe you me, if it didn’t take men to make babies I wouldn’t have anything to do with any of you!”  However, the seriousness of their goodbye embrace suggests that they were once lovers, filled with passion and regret, where his self-reflective explanation to her is a core theme of the film, convinced that he was never right for her, which is powerful stuff.   

‘Cause I’m a loner clear down deep to my guts.  Know what a loner is?  He’s a born cripple.  He’s a cripple because the only person he can live with is himself.  It’s his life, the way he wants to live.  It’s all for him.  A guy like that, he’d kill a woman like you.  Because he couldn’t love you, not the way you are loved.

Once he’s out the door there’s no turning back, as the rest of the film is devoted to a long chase sequence across the desert and high into the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico, with Mexico on the other side offering freedom, a reversal of that earlier migration across the border.  Split between a suspenseful adventure tale and a probing, psychological character study, the film poses the question whether the open border and open road that Jack envisions is actually part of the American ideal, and whether it has a chance to survive in this commercialized, technologically advancing world.  Adding personality to the chase, Sheriff Morey Johnson is played by a humorously sarcastic, gum-chewing Walter Matthau, who empathizes with Burns, showing understanding and patience, but does his duty in trying to track him down, aided by his robotic and somewhat dim-witted right-hand deputy Harry (William Schallert), using the best of modern technology, a helicopter, a short-wave radio, and even the Air Force, as well as manpower placed along the top of the ridge searching for a lone man on a horse, which you wouldn’t think would be that hard to find, but Burns is an elusive figure hiding under the brush.  The simplicity of the film is outstanding, with viewers continually fascinated by and identifying with Burns and his horse, as if they have a lot invested in the outcome, where there’s an element of nostalgia in cherishing the values that he holds dear, epitomizing the postwar spirit people once grew up with, where a man gets by on his wits and what he can do to benefit others, like a Golden Rule code of ethics, personified by President Kennedy’s immortal words in his 1961 Inaugural Address, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country,” which became the guiding principles of his generation, and the ethos of Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), voted by the American Film Institute as the greatest hero in any American film, 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains - AFI.  As a result, Burns and his non-violent, live-and-let-live principles are infinitely more appealing than the legions of police dotting the landscape armed with rifles, where the arrival of a helicopter seems like overkill for a man who served in Korea with distinction, even earning a Purple Heart and a Distinguished Service Cross for his valor in battle.  The labyrinthian escape speaks volumes even today, brilliantly eluding his pursuers, as Douglas charms his way into our hearts, where he and his horse feel like old friends.  Due to the steepness of the cliffs, it’s clear Burns could easily make it on his own, but his loyalty to his horse causes complications, refusing to selfishly abandon her.  No one, not even the Sheriff, really want to see him caught, which is why the finale is so heartbreaking, brilliantly rendered, with deep emotions, filled with the pathos of a forgotten era, yet Douglas brings so much intelligence, dignity, and inner conviction to the role, completely embodying the character, reminding viewers just what freedom and not having to answer to anybody used to look like, as it was a beautiful thing.  Nothing about this film is outdated, as it’s a modern day Western, with few others capturing the loss of that era and the shifting attitudes shaping America’s modern West any better, with Rowlands and Douglas, so vulnerable, such acting legends, capturing the essence of a nation in transition, given such a natural setting, where the physical struggle to lead his horse up a series of breathtakingly steep mountainside switchbacks is such a monumental effort, showing enormous willpower, where nothing about it looks like anything but an extremely daunting challenge.  Impossible not to struggle with this film afterwards, as it touches the core of our being, tapping into the spiritual nature of the individual alone who faces up to the dehumanizing effects of a contemporary America defined by closed borders, bureaucracy running amok, uncaring institutions, escalating militarization, and ever-increasing government control, reminding us that what’s so essential in our lives is a capacity to see what’s in front of us, to stop and look around and admire the beauty in all directions.