And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
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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Close Your Eyes (2023)
The opening twenty minutes of “Close Your Eyes,” the third fiction feature from Spanish director Victor Erice, and his first film in thirty years (his documentary, “The Quince Tree Sun,” came out in 1993; the debut feature that made his reputation was 1973’s “The Spirit of the Beehive”), are as quietly spellbinding as anything you’ll see this year, or decade, or century.
The time is 1947, shortly after the Second World War, and the Spanish Civil War as well; the setting is an estate outside of Paris called Triste Del Rey—the sadness of the king—and the characters are an older man and a Spanish man in middle age. “Chess is a reflection of the world,” the older man says before he tells the younger of his plight, the disappearance of his now-teenage daughter, thought to now be in Shanghai. He refers to a movement made by this loved one as her “Shanghai gesture,” and real heads will know. This movie is threaded through with cinematic allusions. And this scenario isn’t even the actual movie—it’s two-thirds of the extant footage of a never-finished movie called “The Farewell Gaze.” Its lead actor, Julio Arenas (José Coronado, a relatively assured figure when we first see him), walked off the set one day after a cut was called, and was never seen again.
This, we learn, was in 1990; the movie cuts ahead to 2012, and its director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo, whose deep-set eyes convey universes of worry and sadness) is approached by a Spanish television series called “Unresolved Cases”—yes, the “Unsolved Mysteries” thing is worldwide—to discuss the movie and his missing friend. He’s not sure about working with these people, but they seem to have integrity and they’re offering him some money, which he can use. The “Farewell Gaze” experience put him off directing—you can see why it might—and after writing a novel or two he’s barely scraping together a living as his dotage approaches. Researching on behalf of the program takes him into some storage facilities, and even another part of Spain altogether (the movie begins in Madrid). He consults his adult daughter (played by Ana Torrent, the little girl beguiled by the image of the Frankenstein monster in “Beehive”), an old girlfriend, and his former film editor. All through his journeys the movie retains a quiet tone, one that grows ever more contemplative as the story inches forward. This nearly three-hour film is likely to be checked off as “slow cinema” by some, and the descriptor is correct. But Erice’s deeply personal style isn’t tied to anything resembling a trend.
