The Spirit of the Beehive is a Spanish Masterpiece

 

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

Directed by Victor Erice

Bocaccio Distribution, 97 minutes, Not-rated

In Spanish with subtitles

★★★★★

 

 

 

It’s intriguing that authoritarian rulers think they can manipulate media to their advantage, especially in their waning days. Spanish director Victor Erice was a bit like the character Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez) in The Spirit of the Beehive, a semi-closeted critic of the regime of Francisco Franco. Erice’s film is now considered one of Spain’s finest and is included in the Criterion Collection of classic films. It debuted in 1973, two years before Franco died and his fascist-style Falangist movement collapsed with him. Before he expired, Franco tried to convince a skeptical global community that artistic freedom thrived in Spain, which is how Beehive got a global audience. I doubt this is what the generalissimo imagined.

 

It was Erice who was the more clever manipulator. First, he set The Spirit of the Beehive in 1940, the year of his own birth, but also when Franco’s troops vanquished the last Republican resistance. Erice filmed in the real-life village of Hoyuelos, a remote village in northern Spain in which the big excitement occurs when film reels are delivered and the local hall becomes an impromptu theater. In this case, it’s the James Whale-directed  1931 version of Frankenstein in which Boris Karloff was the Monster. In that one, the Monster plays with a young girl by the waterside before killing her. Was Erice suggesting Franco-stein? Probably! Why else make the Monster the centerpiece of a horror/drama film whose principal is six-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent)?

 

Ana and her older sister Isabel view Frankenstein and it had a profound effect on Ana’s vivid imagination. The sisters live in one of the few bourgeois homes in the village, though both Fernando and his wife Teresa must hide their sympathies for the defeated Nationalists. Theirs is the age-old strategy of keeping their heads down and only dragging out the crystal set late at night (probably to listen to the BBC). They also hide the photo albums, lest the wrong eyes observe shared comradery with the wrong people. You’d only know this from research, but one such photograph is of intellectual Miguel de Unamuro, a fierce Franco critic who died during house arrest. How did Erice get that past the censors? My only explanation is that the film was too enigmatic to reveal Erice’s intent.

 

The film makes brilliant use of psychological terror. Chekov’s gun is a time-tested dramatic device that introduces a prop that foreshadows its future use. Ahh, but what if you fill the screen with eerie music, flashback Monster images, a remote abandoned cottage, a deep well, school anatomy lessons, dark furniture, windows that blow open and slam shut, poisonous mushrooms, a cheerless painting of St. Jerome, a creaky house, and rumors of a ghostly spirit? Anybody who tried to bring all that to bear in a single denouement would produce a messterpiece, not a masterpiece. But thanks to Luis de Pablo’s atmospheric soundtrack and the carefully angled cinematography of Luis Cuadrado, the film’s real terror occurs in Ana’s point-of-view shots, her dreams, and in the minds of viewers. One tense moment involves Isabel and serves to warn you to watch carefully and assume nothing.

 

Another character is known simply as “fugitive,” an on-the-lam former Nationalist soldier whom Ana tries to help. Is he Ana’s Frankenstein? What do we make of Ana’s disappearance? There has to be a Monster of some sort, right? It would seem so, but who and where does it lurk? And what about the title? In part it references the honeycombed windows that frame some of the screen’s tension, and it’s also a smokescreen for Fernando’s misanthropy, but I suspect we are also invited to consider what resides in the folds and crevices of the human brain. Such probing certainly affected child actress Ana Torrent, who went on to become a well known star in Spain. She is on record with saying that she was figuratively and literally haunted by the movie. 

 

It's stunning to realize that The Spirit of the Beehive was Erice’s first feature. It should be noted that it is so slowly paced that in its day, some audiences booed. Does it drag? Maybe, but it also has the effect of prolonging viewer anxiousness and apprehension. Like young Ana, I have been haunted since I saw it.

 

Rob Weir