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| yoke and arrows emblem |
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| 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.
