The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

Reviewed by: Marty

Director: Victor Erice

Screenplay: Victor Erice, Angel Fernandez Santos

Cast: Ana Torrent, Fernando Fernan Gomez, Isabel Telleria, Teresa Gimpera

Music: Luis de Pablo

I’ve been taking a weekly film appreciation course for the past 10 weeks or so, and as an assessment we had to write an essay – not really with any salient direction – on one of the films we were shown over the duration of the course. A lot of good films were shown, especially some satirical Luis Bunuel, but it was The Spirit of the Beehive that captured me the most. We were told to explain in the essay why we thought the film was good or bad, and because of this review-esque mood of the essay I thought I might share it here. A word of warning – though the film doesn’t have much of a narrative, there are what some would consider spoilers within the essay.

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The Spirit of the Beehive, Spanish director Victor Erice’s 1973 debut feature, is a film of many facets. At once a political allegory, a statement on the breaking down of familial structures, and a ghost story through the eyes of a child, appreciation of the film’s layered, complex yet simple depth can linger in the viewer’s mind long after it has enchanted them with its beautiful visuals. Meditative and dreamlike, the film’s arresting imagery, cinematography and composition – alongside the laconic and sparse, yet savoured and ethereal lines of dialogue – creates a vivid, luminescent recreation of a world through the eyes of a young child, and establishes itself as an intensely alluring ode to the fantastical nature of the imagination, presented amongst the isolation of a country in the aftermath of internal unrest.

As the film opens, detailing the setting as an isolated – yet strangely beautiful – rural village ‘somewhere on the Castilian plain’, the primary characters are introduced in much the same manner as they are developed throughout the story. While sisters Ana and Isabel sit closely together in the makeshift movie theatre, whispering with wide eyes to each other, their father Fernando is first seen disguised by a beekeeper’s outfit, as he calmly tends to numerous boxes of bee-ridden honeycomb. Despite the metaphorical representation of Fernando the beekeeper, watching and exercising a kind of patriarchal position over his beehives as a father might over his family, father and daughters are rarely filmed in the same frame, creating an illusion of rifts amongst their family. Similarly, neither do Fernando and his wife Teresa share the screen together; Teresa’s first appearance shows her alone, writing a melancholic letter to an unnamed loved one, thoughts evidently far away from the confines of her family household. In one immaculately crafted scene, the camera focuses on Teresa in bed, who feigns sleep while Fernando rustles about the room, before lying down next to her – the latter never having been seen in the shot. Of all the instances in the film, only one involves the entirety of Ana and Isabel’s family: a breakfast of coffee and soup, while they sit facing each other at the table; however, Erice films each member separately, on their own in each shot. As the film continues this manner of displaying the characters in a state of isolation, it creates an affecting comment on the inner destruction of family units.

Alongside this portrayal of a family in the throes of separation, Erice, continuing his omnipresent metaphor of the nature of bees and the beehive, invokes a critique of post-civil war Spanish society in the throes of an oppressive dictatorship; an element that whilst remains relevant for Spanish audiences, can often be lost on foreign viewers. At the film’s core is a monologue that is narrated by Fernando as he paces his ornate room, staring into a glass case containing a hexagonal nest of bees, farming their honeycomb. The monologue mentions the beehive structure as being full of ‘relentless yet ineffectual toil’ and ‘repose of death’, while stating that anyone being presented with the image of this structure and its spirals of principles is bound to ‘recoil in horror’. Here Erice is comparing the suffocating, somewhat hopeless life inside an artificial beehive to living in Spain under the Francoist regime, a dictatorship that held Spain in oppression for several decades; this motif is implicit even deeper in the inclusion of a yellow stained-glass window with large hexagonal shapes adorning some of the doors in the family household. In one scene, Ana flips through her father’s scrapbook, and focuses upon a photo showing him with a figure of the Spanish resistance – a man who bravely opposed Francoist ideals. To Spanish audiences, this particular fragment, represented without any dialogue pertaining to who the man is or why he is significant enough to yield a close up on camera, would likely resonate with the history of internal bloodshed and societal poverty of Spain following the chaotic civil war of the 1940s; to international audiences, or the less educated, many allusions and indirect references such as this have an alienating effect. However, this does not necessarily diminish the quality of the content of the film, as it does not stand up only as a Francoist critique; it provides an example of the layered effect Erice achieves with the narrative. For instance, it is never made entirely clear whom the fugitive that takes refuge in the barn is, or what side of the government he is on, yet his character is important in both the political dimension and the narrative through the eyes of Ana, who sees him only as a mystical creature that haunts the abandoned building.

Perhaps the most evocative aspect of The Spirit of the Beehive comes from the deep gaze of Ana’s eyes, which linger on many things around her, often in states of wonder, curiosity, and gradual comprehension. The film is very much an attempt to bring back the viewer to his or her early childhood; to evoke their own personal recollections of how it felt to use imagination to such extent that it created images, connections and meanings in or outside reality that invite utmost belief and faith. From the moment she gasps at the footage of Frankenstein’s monster descending toward a little girl during the screening of James Whale’s silent film, Ana becomes a character that embodies this spirit of imagination, just as her imagination embodies spirits that she believes to be alive. It should be noted that in the film the term ‘ghost’ is meaningfully avoided in favour of ‘spirit’: there is close ties between life, death, spirituality and mysticism presented over the course of the narrative, and it seems the fulcrum of all these concepts, that which ties them together, is the term ‘spirit’. There is prayer in the bedroom at night as well as in a maths class at Ana and Isabel’s school; as a golden candle burns slowly in front of a religious image, Ana and Isabel discuss the existence of Frankenstein’s monster, or at the very least, the existence of his ‘spirit’. The juxtaposition of spirituality and Ana’s make believe ‘spirits’ – one in the frightening embodiment of Frankenstein’s monster towards the film’s close, one in the injured figure of the political fugitive, and, arguably, one in the eerie eyes of Don José, the anatomical mannequin at Ana’s school, which causes Ana to speak not a word – comes to a remarkable climax right before the film ends, as Ana wakes from her sleep to gaze up into the moonlit sky, and follows her sister’s spirit-awakening instructions to close her eyes and whisper, ‘It’s me, Ana’ – a perhaps irrevocable dichotomy, or paradox, of prayer and belief in that which does not exist in reality.

On surface level, however, what is at first so alluring about The Spirit of the Beehive is its mosaic of senses and atmosphere. Bathed in a warm yellow tinge, and exhibiting a musical score made up of traditional Spanish childrens’ tunes played on guitar and flute, the film is as rich with rusticity as the broken stone buildings it displays. Erice presents an overwhelming sense of spatial contrast between the claustrophobic, dankly illuminated confines of Ana’s family household, and the enormous open spaces of the Castilian grasslands. In the family manor, footsteps, particularly that of the father Fernando, thunder throughout the hallways in a low bass tone, often accompanied by silence. By candlelight, Ana and Isabel have many conversations at a barely audible whisper, but during the day, they scream and yell to fill the rooms of the large house with their spirits. When the shot cuts to images of the sisters outdoors, traversing the wide steppes, the sound of the wind, akin to the silence between the vacant stares and hard echoic floorboards of the childrens’ house, takes on its own character in the film, and becomes as meaningful and intentional as the smallest of gestures: a small grin on Ana’s face; Isabel gracefully applying blood as lipstick in a small mirror; the enigmatic sound of Fernando’s music-box pocket watch; or the erupting sound of a rock hitting water as Ana inspects the depth of the barnyard well.

On first viewing, one easily appreciates these often otherworldly scenes of serenity and isolated beauty, both full of and devoid of sound, but as the images linger in the mind, so do the subtle messages of the tumultuous consequences of war and the pain of a family that is as a torn photograph. Erice’s quiet, graceful masterpiece is art that not only presents a narrative interpretable in several ways, but a sensory experience that evokes a time and a childish joy that each of us recollect but seldom remember.

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