El espíritu de la colmena
Victor Erice (1973)
I’d seen The Spirit of the Beehive once before, fifteen to twenty years ago, and was impressed at the time. Ahead of this second viewing, I was puzzled that I remembered next to nothing of Victor Erice’s celebrated work (the greatest Spanish film of all time, according to Sight and Sound’s latest poll – in fact the only Spanish film in the top 100). I’m less puzzled now. The one thing I did recall – that The Spirit of the Beehive was made in black and white – turns out to be wrong. Having seen it again, I can understand that false memory, too.
Erice’s story – an original screenplay, which he wrote with Ángel Fernández-Santos and Francisco J Querejeta – takes place in a Castilian village shortly after the end of the Spanish Civil War. A mobile cinema arrives in the village, to the excitement of the local children. The film to be shown is James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931); six-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent) and her elder sister, Isabel (Isabel Terreria), are among the audience. The film makes a powerful impression on Ana, particularly the scene in which the Monster and a little girl called Maria contentedly play a game together, during which he accidentally kills her. Ana doesn’t understand why this happens or why the Monster is then killed by the people of the Bavarian village where the tale is set. Isabel explains that the Monster didn’t really kill Maria or get killed by the villagers: what happens in films is made up. She also tells Ana, however, that if she closes her eyes and calls him, she’ll be able to talk to the Monster – advice that Ana takes to heart.
Whale’s Frankenstein wasn’t, of course, made in colour. I think it’s simply because its effect on the young protagonist drives The Spirit of the Beehive that I’d got it in my head that Erice’s film was also black and white. Forgetting everything else isn’t so easily explained. It partly reflects my dependable cinema amnesia but there’s more to it than that. Watching The Spirit of the Beehive again, I didn’t find moments or images in it familiar (as I often do, returning to films I know I’ve seen but haven’t remembered). The essentially realistic style of Erice’s early scenes gradually gives ground to a more confounding narrative. Ana and Isabel live in a manor house with their parents but at a remove from them – as the parents are from each other. The girls’ late-middle-aged father (Fernando Fernán Gómez) is preoccupied with his beekeeping (the panes of glass in the windows of the house are honeycomb-shaped). Their much younger mother (Teresa Gimpera) spends most of her time thinking about and writing to a faraway lover. Although Ana is the film’s centre, she doesn’t appear in every scene. What happens to her and what she imagines are remarkably intertwined – for example, in sequences that involve pretending to be dead and actual death. But when Ana isn’t on screen, it’s hard to work out whose point of view is being shown: is Erice switching from Ana’s subjectivity to objectivity, or to something else?
The film, shot by Luis Cuarado is beautiful and mysterious; you sometimes feel the beauty depends on the mystery. It’s compelling to watch – Erice directs the children, especially Ana Torrent, with great skill – but hard to retain because you’re often unsure quite what you’re seeing. There were sound practical as well as artistic reasons for elusiveness. The Civil War had been over for decades when The Spirit of the Beehive was made but the Franco dictatorship was still in charge of Spain. As Erice told Sight and Sound in an interview marking his film’s twentieth anniversary in 1993:
‘I didn’t set out to solve the problem of censorship: I was mainly concerned to find my own voice, and since lack of freedom is something that people of my generation carry within us, I assumed my voice would reflect that lack of freedom in a natural way. I have always believed that artistic language – and particularly poetry – is a language that is not socially codified and that censors understand only what is socially codified. So the censor was unable to cut a single metre of The Spirit of the Beehive: they [sic] sensed it wasn’t a film that was favourable to their ideas, but they couldn’t find the arguments to destroy it.’
19 January 2023
