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THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE

The Spirit of the Beehive is less a narrative film than it is a painting created by a great artist. Landscapes are given loving brushstrokes by the cameras and shots are allowed to linger on the land as the characters move through them. In a scene where the children Ana and Isabel approach an old abandoned barn, almost three minutes pass with only three small cuts of close ups to the little girls. The remainder of the three minutes is simply the camera sitting in the distance and watching quietly in an extreme long shot of the land framing the barn and the well to its left. The little girls are simply small figures moving in a solitary background that might have well been a painting by cinematographer Luis Cuadrado.

The fact that Cuadrado was going blind while the film was being shot makes the picture an even more amazing accomplishment. The fact that Victor Erice has only made two feature length films since this amazing debut is a tragedy. The Spirit of the Beehive takes place in 1940 Spain, shortly after Francisco Franco took over power. The film, made near the end of Franco’s reign, was made in a time of censorship by the Spanish government. Films during this era were forced to use allegory and fantasy to disguise any political messages. While The Spirit of the Beehive does not assert an overtly political agenda, the lives of the people affected by the Spanish Civil War are presented in a way to show the feelings of the director towards the regime.

“Once upon a time …”

The beehive in the title might refer to the beekeeper status of Fernando, the father of the tale. When we first meet Fernando, he is tending to his beehives. Later we witness him in his study where we see his own small beehive as he spends much time writing about it, trying to find the meaning to life that might be encompassed by the hives. However, to see the true meaning of the title, one only need look at the house in which they live. Filled with stained glass windows, the light emitting through these windows a honey texture, symbolizing that within this house, and possibly within the culture of Spain at the time, they live in their own personal beehives. Just as Fernando traps bees in their hives to study and extract what he needs from them, the individuals living in Franco-controlled Spain were kept just the same.

However, this story is not so much about Franco’s Spain, although the effects surround everyone just the same. The story is one of two little girls, Ana and Isabel, and their experiences as they learn about life and death. This would seem to be a strain, as young Ana is only 6-years old. What can a child that age truly know about life and death? The poignancy of the story rests in the face of Ana and what she experiences in the film’s 90-minute running time. The story begins as a truck arrives in a small town, carrying the latest cinematic film to show the community. The movie is Frankenstein, and everyone gathers to watch the film in a small auditorium.

The beauty of the filmmaking style on display is Erice simply placing his cameras around the room and letting them take in the expressions and reactions of the people as they watch the movie for the first time. Using the form of cinema known as neorealism, Erice preferred to get genuine reactions from the group of non-actors he employed for the film. As young Ana watched the film, he had his cameraman sit on the floor in front of her and aim the camera at her face. The reactions she supplied could never have been accomplished by giving the six-year old instructions. They were so pure and so beautiful that they could only have been achieved in the heat of the moment. When she watches Frankenstein befriend the young girl and then end up dead, her shock is filmed in a way that could never be repeated.

As she left the theater, she asked why Frankenstein would kill the small girl and why the townspeople killed Frankenstein. She did not understand the concepts of life and death and needed to have them explained to her. Unfortunately, her source of knowledge was her ten-year old sister who filled her full of rubbish about spirits and how Frankenstein was a spirit that could be called upon. She then explained how she had seen such a spirit and all you needed to do was call out your name and they would come to you.

We then view small snippets of Ana’s life as she tries to piece together the strange concepts of life and death. Her father takes the girls mushroom hunting and explains the dangers of eating the wrong sort of mushrooms. Her teacher brings out a large mannequin missing certain body parts and organs and has the kids put them back where they belong, possibly mimicking the creation of the Frankenstein monster. Her sister takes her to an old barn to show her where a mysterious spirit supposedly rests.

It is at this barn that Ana encounters a fugitive soldier on the run from Franco’s forces. She believes him to be a spirit, her own figurative Frankenstein, and helps him. She feeds him and even gives him her father’s coat and pocket watch before returning one day to find him gone, only blood remaining where he once lay. Her life, in her mind, was taking the mysterious form of the Frankenstein story. When her father finds her at the barn, she runs away and while hiding in the woods finally encounters her own spirit, in the form of the actual Frankenstein monster. It would then kneel by her, mirroring the scene from the movie.

After being returned home, we see her in the final scene as she retreats to her window and calls out her own name, asking for the spirit to return for her. The small girl, at such a young age, was confronted with death both on the movie screen; with her older sister, who faked her death preying on the gullibility of her younger sibling; and finally with the soldier who she befriended. Yet, with no adult seeming to notice her long enough to explain the significance of such topics, she is left to her own devices, her own imagination and her own fears.

It is a world without adults we are witness to in this film. The father is too preoccupied with his own aging and the confusion of the society in which he lives. The mother writes letters to a mysterious loved one that was lost in the war. Every day she rides her bike to the train station to see if this person has returned. The splintering of the family unit is shown through the mise-en-scene, as the four never share a frame together. The small girls share many scenes together until the sister steps over the line when faking her own death. There is an early scene with the father and his girls as they hunt mushrooms and a second scene where the mother is combing Ana’s hair. However, the mother and father never share a frame together, and even when they share a scene they are filmed separately. In one scene, the mother is already in bed and the father joins her. The camera rests on the mother’s face while only the shadow of the father is seen on the wall behind her. In another scene she puts a coat on him as he sleeps at his desk, but you only see her hands, their faces never shown on the screen at the same time. Even when the four are having dinner together, the one time they all share a scene together, it is only single shots of them individually. The family is splintered and the children are left to their own devices.

When the film was released, it was criticized for being unbearably slow, intellectually ponderous and simply unwatchable, never in a hurry to reach its conclusion. While the film may move too slowly for some, it is one of the most beautiful films you could ever dream of seeing. It is comparable to a beautiful poem, shot with loving care using camerawork as masterful as you will ever see. The camera holds on subjects for longer than may be needed but gets the reactions from viewers the scenes deserve. The young Ana is filmed in a way, in an almost documentary style, you experience the wonder and fear that she felt in a way that is not seen much today. Recent filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro and Pedro Almodóvar have carried the torch that Erice mastered, but none have yet reached the immense beauty and perfection that Erice achieved telling the simple story of a little girl coming to grips with the world in which she lives.

“Soy Ana. Soy Ana.”