{"id":1786,"date":"2017-11-04T16:36:06","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T13:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=1786"},"modified":"2017-11-04T16:36:06","modified_gmt":"2017-11-04T13:36:06","slug":"the-spirit-of-the-beehive-life-and-death-in-childhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/1786\/the-spirit-of-the-beehive-life-and-death-in-childhood\/","title":{"rendered":"The Spirit of the Beehive, Life and Death in Childhood"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Spirit of the Beehive, V\u00edctor Erice\u2019s first feature, an atmospheric exploration of a child\u2019s experience in a bleak village just after the civil war, was released in 1973, in the dying days of General Franco\u2019s forty-year dictatorship, and soon established itself as the consummate masterpiece of Spanish cinema.<\/p>\n<p>Unique about The Spirit of the Beehive is its reference to the horror genre. The enigmatic plot begins with two children, Ana and her sister Isabel (Isabel Teller\u00eda), watching James Whale\u2019s 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. Erice recently recounted that when the child actress confronted his re-creation of Frankenstein\u2019s monster on set, she was as deeply disturbed as her character is in the film.<\/p>\n<div style=\"margin:25px 0;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"555\" height=\"416\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ULl_xEg2Gcs?rel=0&#038;autohide=1&#038;showinfo=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>Erice and coscreenwriter \u00c1ngel Fern\u00e1ndez 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\u2019s own birth.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;the fugitive,&#8221; 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\u2019s rebellion.<\/p>\n<p>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. 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n<p>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 offscreen noise and murky shadows cast on the bedroom wall.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s mother calls out to her lost daughter). Dark furniture is matched by gloomy oil paintings, carefully chosen for their themes: in the girls\u2019 bedroom, an angel leads a child by the hand (Ana will become obsessed with death); in Fernando\u2019s study, where he reads and types, Saint Jerome is depicted as a writer, with a skull placed prominently on his desk. <\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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 (\u201cA village on the Castilian plain\u201d) echo the first words of Spain\u2019s national novel, Don Quixote (\u201cIn a place in La Mancha\u201d).<\/p>\n<p>Less evident, but no less exciting and innovative, is The Spirit of the Beehive\u2019s sound design. Spanish films of the period generally used postdubbing 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\u2019s voices, recorded live on location. Indeed, some complained that the atmospheric scenes where the children talk in whispers were inaudible. <\/p>\n<p>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 offscreen (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\u2019s songs (one is called \u201cLet\u2019s Tell Lies\u201d). In the final sequence, Ana looks straight into the camera as we hear her defiant invocation of the mysterious spirit: \u201cSoy Ana\u201d (better translated as \u201cIt\u2019s me, Ana\u201d than as \u201cI am Ana\u201d). Sound and image are perfectly fused.<\/p>\n<p>After The Shanghai Gesture, a long-awaited feature project, fell through in the late 1990s, Erice shot a short in luscious black and white for the portmanteau movie Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002). In his segment, called \u201cTimeline,\u201d a baby is born in a village, once more in 1940, only to die unheeded as the villagers go about their everyday life. In Erice\u2019s own words, \u201cBlood blooms across the baby\u2019s clothes like an endless rose.\u201d The intimate connection between life and death in childhood, the great theme of The Spirit of the Beehive, could not be expressed more lyrically and tragically than here.<\/p>\n<p>______<\/p>\n<p>By Paul Julian Smith, Professor of Spanish at the University of Cambridge, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.criterion.com\/&amp;ttl=CriterionCollection\" target=\"_blank\">The Criterion Collection<\/a>, here edited by Ellopos Blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Spirit of the Beehive, V\u00edctor Erice\u2019s first feature, an atmospheric exploration of a child\u2019s experience in a bleak village just after the civil war, was released in 1973, in the dying days of General Franco\u2019s forty-year dictatorship, and soon established itself as the consummate masterpiece of Spanish cinema. Unique about The Spirit of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[191],"tags":[3988,3987,3982,3984,390,3981,3986,3985,3983],"class_list":["post-1786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema","tag-cinema-of-spain","tag-films","tag-frankenstein","tag-miguel-de-unamuno","tag-spain","tag-spanish-cinema","tag-spanish-films","tag-the-spirit-of-the-beehive","tag-victor-erice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1786\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}