The Spirit Of The Beehive (El Espíritu De La Colmena 1976)
Victor Erice’s “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), believed by many to be the greatest of all Spanish films
In 1972, when Director Víctor Erice made El Espíritu De La Colmena (The Spirit Of The Beehive), Spain was still ruled by General Franco and he film was nearly banned because it broke a long-standing taboo in its depiction of a sympathetic Republican fighter. Only success at overseas festivals — and the philistine censors’ assumption that few people would bother to see such a slow-paced, thinly-plotted and ‘arty’ picture — allowed it to get a release in Spain. An international arthouse hit in the 1970s, The Spirit Of The Beehive is one of those films (Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath Of God is another) that has stuck in the minds of everyone who saw it.
An opening scene establishes the location as “a village on the Castilian plain” and the year as “about 1940”. A travelling showman arrives and projects a film, James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein (dubbed into Spanish), in the village hall, in front of a rapt audience which includes six year-old Ana (Ana Torrent) and her slightly older sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería).
In this vast Spanish plain, harvested of its crops, a farm home rests. Some distance away there is a squat building like a barn, apparently not used, its doors and windows missing. In the home lives a family of four: two little girls named Ana and Isabel, and their parents, Fernando and Teresa. He is a beekeeper, scholar and poet who spends much time in his book-lined study. She is a solitary woman who writes letters of longing and loss to men not identified. The parents have no conversations of any consequence.
Only a few years separate Ana and Isabel , but they form that important divide where Ana depends on her big sister to explain mysteries. The little girl runs carefree all over the farmlands, and in the barn she discovers the wounded soldier. That night, her eyes wide open in the dark, she asks Isabel to explain why the creature drowned the little girl. “Everything in the movies is fake,” she’s told. “It’s all a trick. Besides, I’ve seen him alive. He’s a spirit.” That of course serves for Ana as a possible explanation for the wounded man, and the next day, she sneaks him some food and water, and her father’s coat.
This is one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen.
Its cinematographer, Luis Cuadrado, bathes his frame in sun and earth tones, and in the interiors of the family home, he creates vistas of empty rooms where footsteps echo. The house doesn’t seem much occupied by the family. The girls are often alone. The parents also, in separate rooms. Many of the father’s poems involve the mindless churning activity of his beehives, and the house’s yellow-tinted honeycomb windows make an unmistakable reference to beehives. Presumably this reflects on the Franco regime, but when critics grow specific in spelling out the parallels they see, I feel like I’m reading term papers.
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