Spirit of the Beehive [VHS]

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.

To fully understand 'The Spirit of the Beehive' (El Espiritu de la Colmena), one has to understand the context in which it was made. Although the film is set in 1940 it was produced in 1973, two years before the death of Franco, the end of his dictatorship, and the political and cultural repression which characterised it.

Erice manages to brilliantly depict the traumas of a family of republican sympathisers, struggling to come to terms with life under the fascist regime. What is special, is that he creates a powerful critique of the regime, and a call to arms to all those who believe in democratic values to prepare for the dictators then-imminent death, without saying anything that could actually be censored.

As a result, 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.

The performances are masterful, particularly young Ana Torrent and the great Fernando Fernan-Gomez, whose much later film 'The Butterfly's Tongue' has echoes of 'The Spirit of the Beehive' in it. What is more, the mood and atmosphere of repression are extraordinarily well recreated.

This work is not the easiest film I have ever watched, but it is without doubt one of the most rewarding

Many filmmakers use children, but few understand them; even fewer can remember what it was like to be a child themselves; virtually none can communicate that feeling. Erice's feature hums with the magic and awe of childhood. Every adult should see it at least once; whether you can bear to experience more than once the sense of loss that comes when it ends is another matter.