|
Spirit of the Beehive Program Notes
Excerpted from
“Spanish Lessons” by Paul Julian Smith
Released in 1973, in the dying days of General Franco’s
forty-year dictatorship, Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the
Beehive soon established itself as the consummate
masterpiece of Spanish cinema… Although it won the main prize
at San Sebastian on its release, the jury’s enthusiasm was not
shared by all the public. Some of the audience, restless at the
film’s slow pace, even booed. Yet The Spirit of the Beehive
is a classic example of one strand of Spanish filmmaking at that
time. Like many repressive regimes, Francoism attempted to use
cinema to change its negative image abroad and to create the
impression that freedom of expression was permitted. By
producing some internationally successful "quality" films, the
regime also hoped to raise the status of Spanish cinema
generally, which was at that time dominated by crude, mainstream
comedies. By the early seventies, these policies had led to the
production and export of many experimental and even discreetly
oppositional films, although, of course, no overtly leftist
movies could be made. The gaping holes in the plot of The
Spirit of the Beehive and the mysterious motivations of its
characters are typical of this "Francoist aesthetic," a term
used to describe artistically ambitious movies of the time that
made use of fantasy and allegory. These characteristics, which
remain so magical to modern audiences, were used in the period
as a form of indirect critique.
What is unique about The Spirit of the Beehive is its
reference to the horror genre. The enigmatic plot begins with
two children, Ana [Ana Torrent] and her sister Isabel (Isabel
Telleria), watching James Whale’s Frankenstein in an
improvised cinema in the village of Hoyuelos (like the actors,
the location keeps its real name in the film). Obsessed with a
spirit who her sister claims lives nearby, Ana will set out one
night to meet him, with near tragic consequences…
[The father,
Fernando Fernan Gomez] is first glimpsed in the beekeeping mask
that gives him the air of an astronaut (the bare Castilian
landscape is also lent a lunar quality), and this existential
isolation seems similar to that of Erice, who has often spoken
of the intensely personal nature of his cinema and the purity of
his self-expression. Indeed, Erice and coscreenwriter Angel
Fernandez Santos (later a distinguished film critic) based the
script on their own memories, re-creating school anatomy
lessons, the discovery of poisonous mushrooms, and the ghoulish
games of childhood. It is no accident that the film is set in
1940, the year of Erice’s own birth…
The question
of how political The Spirit of the Beehive is has been
hotly debated since the film’s premiere, when leftist critics
attacked its lack of overt commentary. Yet to equate Franco
and Frankenstein as twin masters of horror is too crude. By
focusing not on national conflict but on domestic distress,
what one reviewer called "the war behind the window,"
Erice gives a much more subtle and moving take on the historical
trauma suffered by Spain in the twentieth century.
That trauma is signaled in coded references. The village may
be a playground for heedless children, but its unpaved streets
and ruinous buildings are scarred by conflict and deprivation.
The father, Fernando, listens in secret to a shortwave radio
(surely it is to the BBC, forbidden by the regime), while his
wife, Teresa (Teresa Gimpera), writes letters to an absent loved
one (an envelope is addressed to a Red Cross camp in France,
where Spanish refugees were interned). The character known only
as "the fugitive," whom Ana visits in an abandoned
barn, is presumably a member of the maquis, or anti-Francoist
resistance. More generally, the insistent melancholia, approaching
catatonia, of the household marks it out as one inhabited by
members of the losing side in the war. As the innocent Ana leafs
through the family photo album, we glimpse her father in a snapshot
with Miguel de Unamuno, the famous intellectual who was a brave
critic of Franco’s rebellion.
Erice conveys all this with great economy and reticence. The
script is laconic (many of the best sequences are entirely silent),
and the shooting style says it all [cinematographer Luis Cuadrado].
Each member of the family is introduced separately, in a different
location: the spartan cinema, the teeming beehive, the hushed
room, reminiscent of Vermeer, where Teresa writes her letter
to an unknown man. Not once in the film’s ninety-nine minutes
do they share the same frame. Typically, in the one sequence
when all four are together, a family breakfast, Erice films
each of them on their own. Because Erice rarely gives us an
establishing shot to set up the action in such scenes, we feel
as lost and disoriented as his child protagonist. Framing, too,
is used to suggest existential isolation. In one moving sequence,
when Fernando joins his wife in bed, she feigns sleep. Erice
trains his camera on her watchful, fearful face, while her husband
is reduced to indistinct off-screen noise and murky shadows
cast on the bedroom wall.
The house itself, an authentic location, is perhaps the most
important character in the film. The weathered stone facade,
its large entrance crowned by a timeworn coat of arms, suggests
an ancestral residence gone to seed (there are even battlements
on the roof where Ana’s mother calls out to her lost daughter).
Dark furniture is matched by gloomy oil paintings, carefully
chosen for their themes: in the girls’ bedroom, an angel leads
a child by the hand (Ana will become obsessed with death); in
Fernando’s study, where he reads and types, Saint Jerome is
depicted as a writer, with a skull placed prominently on his
desk. Even the honey-colored light that streams through the
windows, glazed with hexagonal panes, is more ominous than it
first seems. It evokes the beehive of the title, which Fernando
tells us is a society of feverish, senseless activity, one that
has no tolerance for disease or death. Cuadrado’s cinematography
thus cites a tradition of Spanish old masters that sees intimations
of mortality not just in shadows but also in the vanity of everyday
life. Ambitiously aiming his first feature at the heart of Spanish
cultural tradition, Erice even has his opening title (“A village
on the Castilian plain”) echo the first words of Spain’s national
novel, Don Quixote (“In a place in La Mancha”).
Less evident, but no less exciting and innovative, is The
Spirit of the Beehive’s sound design. Spanish films of the
period generally used post-dubbing for dialogue. The many child
heroes of popular pictures were voiced by adult women shrilly
impersonating infants. It is difficult to imagine now the shock
felt by audiences on hearing real children’s voices, recorded
live on location. Indeed, some complained that the atmospheric
scenes where the children talk in whispers were inaudible.
Elsewhere, Erice uses sound to cite the horror genre. As the
children whisper about spirits (a candle flickers perilously
between them), ominous clumping noises are heard off screen (we
later realize that it is just the father pacing the bare boards
in an adjoining room). The original soundtrack, by acclaimed
classical composer Luis de Pablo, combines uncanny melodies
(including a haunting flute motif) with more familiar tunes
taken from traditional children’s songs (one is called “Let’s
Tell Lies”). In the final sequence, Ana looks straight into the
camera as we hear her defiant invocation of the mysterious
spirit: “Soy Ana” (better translated as “It’s me, Ana” than as
“I am Ana”). Sound and image are perfectly fused…
It seems unlikely that Erice, the perfectionist auteur, could
have guessed that his filmmaking career would be so troubled for
the thirty years that followed his miraculous debut. But while
his oeuvre may be slight, it more than makes up in quality for
what it lacks in quantity. Erice has said that he makes films
“against time, to escape time.” It is an aim he has brilliantly
fulfilled in The Spirit of the Beehive, a film that has
left an indelible mark on cinema in Spain and beyond.
Paul Julian Smith
is the Professor of Spanish at the University of Cambridge
To read the full
text of Paul Julian Smith’s essay, please visit the link: http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=351
Beehive Discussion Questions:
In
both the Spanish and the English translations, the term "spirit"
is used to describe the life force of the beehive, but the term
"spirit" is used by the children, very specifically
to delineate the Frankenstein monster as well. He is not a "fantasma,"
a ghost. He is a disembodied spirit that takes visible form
only when he interacts with humans. Both the title and the narrative
are clearly are using "spirit" to evoke a similarity,
but what is it? Discuss the use of the term as it describes
the beehive and the monster. To what extent are they similar
and how do they differ?
When Ana enters
the deserted farm building for the last time, the soldier is
no longer there. She sees his fresh blood on the stones.
She sees her father as she is leaving, and she runs away. Why
does she respond to him in this manner? Her subsequent fantasy
is filled with references to him, but what is the cause? Discuss
Ana’s relationship to her father, or lack thereof, to explain
her flight and the events that follow.
Ana’s experience
with the film Frankenstein is a seminal one. At her age,
the inability to distinguish fiction from reality gives rise
to a set of beliefs that that may perhaps, inform the direction
of her future development. The Spirit of the Beehive,
in large part, is presented to us through the eyes of a child
whose cinematic experience was quite different from that experienced
by today’s child. Thirty years after the beginning of the program
of film screenings at International House, more than sixty years
since the film’s setting in 1940, our children learn about the
world through a medium quite different from Ana’s. To what extent
does the advancement of today’s technology give rise to a different
visual experience for young children, and how does the experience
enhance or impoverish the development of their imaginations?
|
