The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
Erice’s exploration of childhood imaginings and innocent evaporated
Director: Víctor Erice
Country: Spain
Time: 1 hour and 37 minutes
Available: Criterion (free w/subscription) and YouTube (free)
What It Evokes: Childhood wonderment, films, innocent evaporating
Depicting the complex interiority of children—their inner lives, the sheer mystery inherent in a world discovered for the first time, the simultaneous enchantment and disenchantment of burgeoning comprehension—has never been easy. In film, children occasionally emerge as witnesses capable of de-naturalizing adult (read: social) conventions, forcing justifications for patterns of behavior grown accustomed. Often, their innocence contrasts with a fallen world, signaling the compromise entailed by “adulthood.” The Spirit of the Beehive engages these themes by centering its narrative on Ana, a six year old living with her older sister and parents—or, depending on your interpretation, at least one of her parents—in Castile in the wake of the Spanish Civil War. Both of her parents have turned inwards, her mother longing for a partisan who has never returned and her father engrossed in his beehives, writing enigmatic treatises on the species. This is a family consumed by the silence following tragedy, engrossed within the steady dissipation of hope.
While the audience learns of these political and familial contours, Ana remains a child and her experience of the world necessarily remains different. The film’s opening scene captures Ana and her sister watching James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) at a village theater, with that film offering an imaginative through line (as well as central metaphor) for the rest of the movie. Ana’s inability to comprehend why Frankenstein drowns Maria or why Frankenstein elicits such fear from others in the film—a recurring subject of conversation with her sister—inaugurates her own search for spirits within her town. Yet, instead of magical beings, she meets a young civil war fighter on the run—Frankenstein’s end foreshadowing his own death in a world replete with “monsters” that need not defy natural laws. Erice’s film beautifully captures an unfurling understanding of the world through the eyes of Ana, fitting given her possession of some of the most emotive eyes in film history, capable of substituting for dialogue and signaling turbulence, wonder, bewilderment, and knowledge in an emotionally repressive environment. There is much to say about this film, but its beauty and moral clarity beggars too much analysis. It remains well worth your time.
Go Down the Rabbit Hole With:
Víctor Erice —El Sur (1983)
Guillermo Del Toro — Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)