The Spirit Of The Beehive [1973] - DVD (Fernando Fernán Gómez, Teresa Gimpera, Ana Torrent, Isabel Tellería, Ketty de la Cámara - Dir: Víctor Erice)

Victor Erice's hauntingly beautiful The Spirit of the Beehive features one of the most unforgettable child performances in the history of cinema. Hailed as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, Erice's visually elegant "poem of awakening" takes place in a small Castilian village in the early 1940s, as echoes of the Spanish Civil Wart can still be heard throughout the countryside. It is here, in this richly rural atmosphere, that six-year-old Ana (played by six-year-old Ana Torrent) is introduced to alternate world of myth and imagination when she attends a town-hall showing of James Whale's Frankenstein, an experience that forever alters young Ana's perception of the world around her... and her ability to mold reality to her own imaginative purposes. Is she using her imagination to escape what is essentially a bleak reality, or is she protecting herself with an inner world of innocence, to counter the darker worldview of her slightly older sister Isabel?

While her emotionally distant parents go about their mundane daily affairs, Ana's world becomes the film's mesmerizing focus, and The Spirit of the Beehive unfolds as an enigmatic yet totally captivating study of childhood unfettered by the strictures of reason. In Erice's capable hands, young Ana Torrent really isn't performing at all; her presence on screen is so natural, and so deeply expressive, that you almost feel as if she's living in the story being told--a story that retains its mystery and beauty in equal measure, full of visual symbolism and metaphor (including the title, which yields multiple meanings), yet never self-consciously "arty" or artificial. Simply put, this is one of the timeless masterpieces of cinema, produced at a time when Franco's repressive dictatorship was finally giving way to greater freedoms of expression. No survey of international cinema is complete without at least one viewing of this uniquely moving film.--Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews of The Spirit Of The Beehive [1973]

brendoclarke
Edinburgh
28th November 2008

Whistle Down the Wind
Technically, this film Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive is excellent, and the acting is on the button. The story is powerfull, and well told.

Can I recommend it? Not a chance. Films try to infect the viewer with a certain mood. A case in point is any Terrence Mallick movie. Malick pulls the viewer in with heart-breaking stories and brilliant direction all to the backdrop of great music.

This Spanish movie is a bore. The film aims for tedium and it succeeds too well. Worth watching, if you aren't looking for fun, thrill, action, romance, comedy, sadness, scares, horror....

A well known Director recently said he thought this Spanish movie is close to magic.
"It is one of the most beautiful and arresting films ever made in Spain, or anywhere in the past 25 years or so."
I am of the opinion that Terrence Malick movies are beautiful and arresting and engaging. I find The Spirit of the Beehive to be dull as dish water.

The film is cloaked in quiet and sadness, through which its children move almost as if in a dream world of their own and nothing really happens.
It will never find a permanent place on my DVD shelf. No doubt about that.

"Much of the imagery used in the film can be hard to grasp, and indeed is open to multiple interpretations - what is the significance of the beehives, of Frankenstein's monster (many say Franco but I disagree), the railway etc.? -I will leave it for you to theorise and debate on these and other aspects..." amazon reviewer.
Yeah, yeah ...yeah. Pretentious film reviewers. This movie is like an empty Christmas tree, you can hang all your dumb metaphors on it, and good luck to you.
yadda yadda .....shut up. Be courageous, go against the tide if you feel the urge.


Made during the last few years of Francisco Franco's dictatorship, and set in 1940, the film apparently criticises post-civil war Spain. It is memorable for its sympathetic portrayal of a young child's world, and for Ana Torrent's presence and thats why it gets 2 stars. Great performance.

She watches Frankenstein at the local cinema and can't understand why Frankenstein kills the little girl he meets by the lakeside. Her elder sister, Isabel, explains that nobody actually dies in movies. But she adds that the monster is really a spirit who can take on human form and can be summoned up by closing your eyes and calling out: "I'm Ana". She has seen him in a deserted outhouse near the village, or so it goes.

Ana is obbsessed with the spirit. Going across the fields to the empty farmhouse, she finds a republican fugitive gypsy and brings him food. For her, he is Frankenstein. The film can be construed as a perfect summation of child hood imaginings. It is also about the pall Franco's long shadow left over Spain.

Film critic for The New York Times, reviewed the film and lauded the direction of the drama, writing, "The story that emerges from [Erice's] lovely, lovingly considered images is at once lucid and enigmatic, poised between adult longing and childlike eagerness, sorrowful knowledge and startled innocence..........

I will be checking this review on a regular basis to see how many negative opinions it will attract. I guess it will be in the hundreds by 1 Jan 2009. Selah,
Send any hate mail to:
Brendan Clarke, C/o caravan 17, Peebles Bay, Edinburgh.

mgcs
Newcastle, UK
20th June 2008

Not Pan's Labyrinth - but then....
I won't repeat much of what's been said. This is a beautiful and moving and understated and enigmatic work.
On reflection, it seems to me like a strange mirror that can be held up in contrast to Pan's Labyrinth.
Both are Franco's Spain and war, but here, instead of total, full-on war, barbarity and magical realism, we have quiet, emptiness and the constant feeling that everything is happening somewhere else. One is full-in-your-face, the other at a distance. But at their heart they have the innocence and imagination of a young girl to centre and drive them - in which to escape the present and usher in ultimate freedom of spirit and its victory. Both films now sit side by side in my mind, like sisters with totally different characters, but born of the same impulse and dysfunction of a nation-family held captive by its rotten father.

Robert D. Lee
Enlgland
5th May 2008

Dire Is Not The Word!
Ignore all the arty-farty analysis because this is one truly dire film. The only consolation that can be had from watching this film is if you do so with lots of snacks. While you slowly empty your head at least you will be able to fill your tummy.

The Franco and fascist references are both irrelevant and nonsensical. They become a lame excuse for those seeking to be pretentious. Reference to the photographer going blind and eventually committing suicide are also meaningless within the context of the film. If a film is, as one reviewer comments, 'hard to grasp' then it has failed in its purpose. This film does this with aplomb.

There is a scene where the young girl feeds a man in a barn. A direct lift from the remarkable "Whistle Down The Wind". Technically the film has lots of faults, least of all a shot of the hill which is green and then becomes brown. The saturated colours contrast against that which is the spirit of childhood - bright and joyful.

Long shots is a misnomer, they go on and on forever and there is little action in each of the scenes to offer continuity. At some juncture the film takes on a little life such as the classroom scene only to fall back into rigor mortis shortly afterwards.

There is nothing to redeem this film. If you want a film that is about children and the horrors of adults then "Jeux Interdit" is the template.

Spirit Of The Beehive - 10

Dennis Littrell
SoCal
20th April 2008

Through Ana's eyes: a masterpiece of childhood
Every once in a while I stumble upon a masterpiece. This is a masterpiece of childhood set in Franco's Spain in 1940. There are political allusions and asides that somehow escaped Franco's censors, or maybe they were indulged. It matters not because the bleak landscape surrounding the house with its honeycombed windows and its honey colored light says more than words could.

I would compare this favorably with two other masterpieces of childhood, the French films, Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games) (1952), and Ponette (1996) What is explored in all three of these films is the reality of childhood that we have forgotten, the intensity of first knowledge, of things experienced for the first time, the wonder and the horror that such experiences may contain. But more than that there is the unconditioned sense of life that the child experiences. When Ana sees the fugitive (from Franco, one imagines) who has injured his leg jumping off the train, she immediately knows what is essential in this situation. The man is hurt. He is hungry. He needs help. She gives him an apple from her lunch pail, which he eagerly devours. Although she has been scared by a Frankenstein movie and her sister's pretence of death and gloved hands around her face, she is not afraid.

This is the most laconic of films. Almost everything is done with the camera and the events. The children laugh and play and watch the world with wonder. They say a few words, direct and to the point. Six year old Ana (Ana Torrent) has dark eyes as big as saucers which she trains on the world as if to bore into the very nature of existence. Her older sister Isabel's eyes sometimes form slits of mischief or delight as she tests reality or teases her sister.

The pace of the film is deliberately slow. The essay by famed Spanish film expert Paul Julian Smith contained in the booklet accompanying the Criterion Collection two-disc set includes Smith's remark that when the film was first shown in San Sebastian in 1973 where it won the main prize, "Some of the audience, restless at the film's slow pace, even booed."

There is a technique in the theater, not so much observed today, that also works well in movies. Slow it down, begin with everyday, mundane events, and play them long like honey slowly oozing, so much the better to contrast with the events to come, and give those events the contrast they deserve as they have in real life. Director Victor Erice does this to fine effect. How drawn out seem the lessons at school, and how tedious. But such is the life of a child when every day is a little eternity, where so much happens that when the lights go out, the child falls into a deep, dreamless sleep for many hours at a stretch. We have forgotten this world of the child, but Erice reminds us.

I was not restless because, although the pace is indeed slow, the cinematography by Luis Cuadrado and the terse silent events of innocence set against the background of the late Spanish Civil War portended events to come. Just what those events might be it was impossible to guess; however it was clear there would be no compromise with audience expectations or any catering to any sort of correctness, political or otherwise. And this is part of what makes a great film.

Character, story, suspense, an important theme, beautiful visuals, truth--artistic truth of course, psychological human truth--and attention to detail: these are also what make a great film. And they are all here in El espíritu de la colmena.

Erice plays with our emotions of course. We are nearly terrified that something is going to happen to these beautiful little girls, and indeed once or twice it appears that our worst fears are realized. Are they or are they not?

It is said that Ana was traumatized by viewing the Frankenstein movie and by her sister's horrid joke, and then by the blood she sees in the old building by the well where the fugitive had rested. But I think it would be better to say that Ana was challenged by new-found knowledge of the ever close proximity of death, and in reaction she ran away into her own world to find an answer. Notice how the scene from James Wales' Frankenstein in which the monster kneels beside the water with the little girl is repeated in Ana's fantasy, and how she looks at the monster with big, wide-open, questioning, waiting eyes. What is life, and what is death? And, know this: I will always live in fear and dread if I do not know what they are and if cannot face them.

When she encounters the Frankenstein monster at the water's edge she has only her beauty to protect her. But that beauty resides in our head--in Frankenstein's head--and so she is safe. This is part of the deep psychology of the film, wondrously achieved, perhaps part by art and part by happenstance.

I believe that is what Ana experienced in her mind. But we do not know. We do not know the mind of the child. And we have forgotten what it is to be a child. Erice's masterpiece helps us to remember.

There is a documentary about the film on the second disc with interviews with Erice and with Angel Fernandez Santos who worked with Erice on the script, and others. We see Ana Torrent all grown up, which is what I most wanted to see. And we learn how the film was made. A masterpiece, it is my belief, whether it is in cinema or literature, in chess or music, or in some other art form always brings together unconscious elements that fuse with conscious intent. It is only later that we recognize what happened.

pepper flower
Gulf Coast of FL, USA
21st April 2006

Deeply Moving Spiritually ... Subtle, Artistic
This film is based on some interesting phenomenon that occurred during a specific historical time in Spain, just prior to World War II. The beginning scene is idyllic and peaceful, where Fernando is tending beehives. The fact that there is no musical accompaniment, just the sounds of nature and life makes the film more unique, a tad eerie and very remarkable, creating emotional expectations and a depth that is subtle but very intense. The best acting is by Ana, a young girl about 6 years of age. She is perfectly cast in her role. Her innocence and charm are real and natural. Everyone who views her will return to aspects of their own childhood on certain levels. The innocent times when, no matter what happened, life was good, the world was new, exciting and filled with first discoveries. In this film ... one comes to expect ... a certain awakening or shocking event ... something surprising with a huge emotional impact ... coming out of the clear blue.

The family lives in a two story stone villa that looks almost like a mansion except for the stones which look hewn from the local soil, despite the large iron gate, there is an earthiness to the building. It has an overly large foyer ... The second level is where the family lives. Ana and her sister, Isabel who is about 10 or 11 years old share a bedroom which has single twin beds in a lovely room furnished with antiques. Fernando has a study, there is no electricity, he uses oil lamps and candles. He has marvelous big wooden bookcases and a huge desk where he writes poetic lyrical verse about his beehives which he lovingly tends. The beehive may be the metaphor for their lives in a subtle sort of way.

The camera slowly rolls over stone buildings and dirt roads in the nearby village where one building is used as a movie theater. There is excitement in the air when an old truck pulls up which delivers this weeks film. Inside, adults set up wooden chairs, outside the children excitedly ask the driver whether the film is good. He reassures them, it is the best. The camera is used effectively to film the faces of many villagers of different ages ... people who work hard, they are simple but dignified, ready to view the film of the week, one of the few sources of entertainment in the town. As the film starts, there is an introduction by an announcer who advocates the miraculous discoveries of science and compares that with the creation of life by God. Yet in this film, a scientist did just that, brought to life a man-like creature he had made. Ana is fascinated by the monster, who is given a flower by a littl girl in the film but we learn later, the monster named Frankenstein killed the girl. Ana puzzles over why he did this as clearly the little girl liked him as she handed him the freshly picked flowers in her hand.

At bed time Ana can not get the film out of her mind and discusses Frankenstein and his behavior with Isabel. Isabel fabricates a story that satisfies Ana by stating Frankenstein is a spirit who can take on a body if human beings pray and sincerely believe in him, somehow twisting their religious beliefs to make this seem plausbible. Only those who truly have faith can do this. From this point forward, Ana wants to conjure up a spirit with a body and Isabel takes her to an abandoned old stone building far out in the fields, telling her a spirit lives there who might appear in bodily form if Ana believes strongly enough in him. Ana is shown to visit this farmhouse often ... alone ... looking down the well and walking around the building ... Until one day, she does find a man inside the building - fulfilling Isabel's story ... What happens afterwards,for good or bad needs to be viewed to be appreciated. The artistry and beauty of the film are beyond word descriptions at this point.

On some levels the family seems disconnected, the children do not often interact with the parents, surprisingly not even with the mother which seems unnatural. There are scenes where the family is eating and amazingly everyone at the table is silent, except for the sounds of eating. The sisters giggle and communicate with smiles and body language as children often do. Isabel pulls a trick on Ana pertaining to Frankenstein. It is heart-stopping and gut-wrenching but just what children often do. Amazing but the parents are nowhere nearby when this occurs.

Sadly, at times the creative subtle artistic approach obscures the intentions of the director; they are totally lost on the viewer ... Fernando, the father takes the girls on an outing to pick mushroom, he points out which are edible and which ones are poisonous. Toward the end, the whole town gets involved in the actions related to something that happens to Ana ... I will leave the reader to ponder what that might be hopefully there is enough information in this review to entice the reader to want to view this film. This is a highly recommended film, somewhat more complicated than it should be however appreciation for its beauty grows on the viewer long after it is viewed.
Erika Borsos (erikab93)