Death of a Cyclist (Muerte de un ciclista)

 

Director Juan Antonio Bardem

Lucia Bosė

DEATH OF A CYCLIST (Muerte de un ciclista)       A-                                                              aka:  Age of Infidelity                                                                                                             Spain  Italy  (88 mi)  1955  d: Juan Antonio Bardem

After 60 years, Spanish cinema is politically futile, socially false, intellectually worthless, aesthetically valueless, and industrially paralytic. Spanish cinema has turned its back on reality and is totally removed from Spanish realistic traditions as found in paintings and novels.     —Juan Antonio Bardem, in Salamanca, Spain, 1955

An interesting relic from the Franco era in Spain that is memorable on several counts, as the writer/director Juan Antonio Bardem is the uncle of modern day actor Javier Bardem (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, No Country for Old Men, Before Night Falls) and the film won the Fipresci prize at Cannes in 1955, a time when the director was actually serving time in prison for political offenses.  Public outcry led to his release, but he was arrested several more times in his lifetime.  The director was a Communist and ardent anti-Fascist who never left Spain during the Franco regime, so certainly this social realist film may be seen through his politicized eyes examining the complacency of the Spanish bourgeois society under Franco, where fear is a common denominator that keeps people silent and in lockstep, and might be seen as his version of Buñuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962), filtered through the psychologically paranoid lens of Hitchcock, giving it the feel of a horror film.  It features beautiful Italian actress Lucia Bosé, the winner of Miss Italy 1947 (which included other contestants Gina Lollobrigida, Silvana Mangano, Eleonora Rossi Drago and Gianna Maria Canale) and star of Michelangelo Antonioni's THE STORY OF A LOVE AFFAIR (1950).  Her beauty alone is striking and is central to the film as she plays María, a pampered and spoiled socialite who is comfortably married to a rich industrialist Miguel (Otello Toso) whose wealth allows her to live a life of extravagance and luxury while she is secretly having an affair with an unambitious assistant college professor Juan (Alberto Closas), whose influential family arranged for his position.  Their wealth gives them the ability to hide their secrets. 

In the opening scene, on a flat country road that extends endlessly across an empty landscape, a lone figure on a bicycle is struck by a car driven by Juan and María who quickly decide to scurry away like rats rather than help the man, Muerte de un ciclista (J.A Bardem, 1955) [HD] | FlixOlé YouTube (1:52).  The rest of the movie revolves around this single event, where the two choose to conceal their affair rather than save a man’s life, a decision that haunts them when they learn the man died on the side of the road.  In one of the strangest possible changes in mood, they immediately find themselves at a swank, upscale party where the mysteriously strange piano player, Rafa (Carlos Casaravilla), claims he saw her with Juan on the road that day and seems to relish the idea of playing a song entitled “Blackmail,” where the interplay between the two of them is choreographed like a song.  The subsequent dread at the thought of being exposed and “losing everything,” which plainly means their privileged position in society, starts gnawing away at each of them, but in a different way.  Juan visits the working class village where the dead man lived, a striking contrast of Italian realist poverty to the protected palatial estates of the wealthy, and in this manner seems to reconnect to the world around him, perhaps seeing for the first time the role social divisions play in Franco’s society, while María is seeking protection from the man she sees as an extortionist, growing more hysterical at the thought of what she stands to lose, especially from a vile bottom feeder like Rafa, who is a repulsive, Iago-like figure that dwells in a cave-like world of rumors and “dirty little secrets.”  Also an art critic, he seems perfectly at home in the dreamlike atheistic dissonance of modern art, where he finds nothing remotely peculiar or understandable in the harsh abstractions or formless expressions, but his blood curdles at the idea of always being treated as an outsider, so using devious, underhanded means to expose the hypocrisy of the rich comes natural to him, as this represents a new breed of Franco citizenry that spies on and exposes the moral ills of society, keeping the public safe from itself. 

This all comes to a head in a superb nightclub scene of Flamenco singing, where Rafa, drunk from liquor, seems to be setting the trap whispering in people’s ears, while María grows more frantically suspicious by the second, becoming a feverish montage of close ups shown with a maniacal energy that suggests madness or delirium, 🚩 Recordando a JUAN ANTONIO BARDEM YouTube (5:58).  The film benefits greatly from unusual cuts and a modern sound design, not to mention faces accentuated by white light, turning Bosé’s face into a highly fragile porcelain figurine.  Bardem elevates the hysteria of fear to unseen heights, turning this into a Hitchcock homage to horror, as everything that follows slowly unravels from its hinges, as Bosé’s María turns into a woman-in-black femme fatale who senses only the darkest ulterior motives.  It’s an unusual bit of movie hysteria, all shown in a taut 88 minutes, where the finale was altered due to the concerns of the national censors, where we’ll perhaps never know the original intentions of the director.  Shot by Alfredo Fraile, the clarity of the image is superb, where it has been suggested Bardem may have had the only 35mm camera in all of Spain.  As it is, it’s a startling social critique using sharp jagged edges shining the light on some of the darkest days in recent Spanish history, using a scathing noirish melodrama to expose how the wealthy will cling to any corrupt or immoral means to hold onto their privileged status in life, where greed and selfishness are their birthright, and supporting Franco allowed their opulent lifestyles to continue unabated.   

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.