The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Historical drama

DIRECTOR

Victor Erice

WRITERS

Victor Erice, Ángel Fernández Santos, Francisco J. Querejeta

STARS

Fernando Fernán Gómez, Teresa Gimpera, Ana Torrent, Isabel Tellería

BEFORE

1961 In British movie Whistle Down the Wind, a little girl finds a fugitive in a barn and believes he is Jesus.

AFTER

1976 In Carlos Saura’s Cría Cuervos (Raise Ravens), Ana Torrent again plays a little girl haunted by visions.

1983 Erice’s second movie, The South (El Sur), is about a girl fascinated by the secrets her father left in southern Spain.

Even though he was going blind, cinematographer Luis Cuadrado shot every frame of The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena) in honey-colored sun and earth tones, rich in texture and deep, soft hues. Yet the movie’s true beauty lies in the way director Victor Erice immerses us in the imagination of a six-year-old child, unforgettably played by the wide-eyed Ana Torrent.

The movie is set in 1940, the year after the Spanish Civil War ended in victory for Franco’s Nationalists. It was a violent period of bloody retribution, about which it was still not possible to talk openly in Spain, even in 1973. General Franco was still in power, and censors strove to curtail any criticism of the regime. Erice’s movie not only depicted a controversial era, but also contained coded messages about the state of the nation. Yet the movie made it past the censors, possibly because it is so slow-moving and enigmatic that the censors believed it would never find an audience.

Finding the monster

The movie opens with the arrival of a traveling cinema in a village. The movie playing is James Whale’s 1931 monster flick Frankenstein. The child Ana is thrilled by the monster, but baffled by the scene in which he appears to drown the little girl—thanks to a misleading cut made by Spanish censors, who were showing the movie as propaganda that equated the monster with socialism.

Obsessed by visions of the monster, although not afraid of him, Ana goes home. Here, in echoing, shadowy rooms behind honeycomb-shaped windows, her bookish beekeeper father and her far younger mother seem impossibly far apart, literally and emotionally, as her mother Teresa (Teresa Gimpera) writes sad letters to an unknown young man.

Ana’s sister Isabela fuels Ana’s visions, telling her to close her eyes and call the monster, like a spirit. When Ana closes her eyes and calls, “It’s me, Ana,” she finds, hidden in the outhouse, a haunted-looking young man, presumably a Republican on the run, who she believes is the monster. They develop a tender relationship, but the Francoist troops are never far away. Ana has more visions of the monster, although the doctor reassures her mother that the delusions will pass.

Ana (Ana Torrent) offers an apple to the fugitive she finds hidden in the family outhouse. She believes he is the monster.

“Little but the walls remain of the house you once knew, I often wonder what became of everything we had there.”

Teresa / The Spirit of the Beehive

Political allegory

The movie ends with an image of Ana at the window, her eyes closed again. When the movie was made in 1973, Franco’s regime was already faltering; its end would have felt very near to a Spanish audience. Telling a story from the past, The Spirit of the Beehive also gave Spain a glimpse of its future.

Ana and her sister Isabel talk with their father (Fernando Fernán Gómez). He keeps bees, and writes of his revulsion for their mindless lives, one of many allusions to Francoist Spain.

Victor Erice is regarded by many as Spain’s finest movie director. Yet he has made few movies. Indeed, his high reputation rests on just two poetic works, The Spirit of the Beehive and The South, both of which are period pieces centering on rural childhoods.

Erice was born in Karrantza in the Basque country (Spain) in 1940, around the same time The Spirit of the Beehive is set. He studied economics, law and politics at the University of Madrid before going to film school in the early 1960s. He worked for almost a decade as a film critic before making a series of short movies.

The Spirit of the Beehive was Erice’s first feature-length movie, but he did not make his second, The South (El Sur), until almost 10 years later. Ten years after that, he made a beautiful documentary, The Quince Tree Sun, about the painter Antonio López García. While Erice has contributed to other work, these have been his only feature-length movies.

1973 The Spirit of the Beehive

1983 The South

1992 The Quince Tree Sun

What else to watch: Pather Panchali (1955) ✵ Whistle Down the Wind (1961) ✵ Cria Cuervos (1976) ✵ Fanny and Alexander (1982)