The Spirit of The Beehive [DVD]

Victor Erice's hauntingly beautiful The Spirit of the Beehive features one of the most unforgettable child performances in the history of cinema. Hailed as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, Erice's visually elegant "poem of awakening" takes place in a small Castilian village in the early 1940s, as echoes of the Spanish Civil Wart can still be heard throughout the countryside. It is here, in this richly rural atmosphere, that six-year-old Ana (played by six-year-old Ana Torrent) is introduced to alternate world of myth and imagination when she attends a town-hall showing of James Whale's Frankenstein, an experience that forever alters young Ana's perception of the world around her... and her ability to mold reality to her own imaginative purposes. Is she using her imagination to escape what is essentially a bleak reality, or is she protecting herself with an inner world of innocence, to counter the darker worldview of her slightly older sister Isabel?

While her emotionally distant parents go about their mundane daily affairs, Ana's world becomes the film's mesmerizing focus, and The Spirit of the Beehive unfolds as an enigmatic yet totally captivating study of childhood unfettered by the strictures of reason. In Erice's capable hands, young Ana Torrent really isn't performing at all; her presence on screen is so natural, and so deeply expressive, that you almost feel as if she's living in the story being told--a story that retains its mystery and beauty in equal measure, full of visual symbolism and metaphor (including the title, which yields multiple meanings), yet never self-consciously "arty" or artificial. Simply put, this is one of the timeless masterpieces of cinema, produced at a time when Franco's repressive dictatorship was finally giving way to greater freedoms of expression. No survey of international cinema is complete without at least one viewing of this uniquely moving film.--Jeff Shannon

Made under the Franco regime, Victor Erice’s astonishing 1973 feature debut is quite simply one of the most remarkable, influential and purely poignant films to emerge from the 1970s. A bona fide classic of European cinema, the film brought Erice instant and widespread acclaim. An audacious critique of the disastrous legacy of the Spanish Civil War, The Spirit of the Beehive is set in a rural 1940s Spanish village haunted by betrayal and regret. Following a travelling cinema’s screening of James Whale’s Frankenstein, seven year old Ana (a mesmerizing Ana Torrent, later to grow into an international star of some standing) becomes fascinated with Boris Karloff’s monster. Obsessed with meeting the initially gentle creation, she transfers her entracement to a wounded army deserter.

Atmospherically rendered by legendary Director of Photography Luis Cuadrado, it’s impeccably performed by both Torrent and veteran actor Fernando Fernan Gomez in the role of her emotionally scarred, bee-keeping father. Existing in a highly evocative dreamlike state, it’s a powerfully symbolic, richly allegorical tale that is as unique as it is beautiful.

• Trailer
  
• Stills Gallery
  
• Trailer reel

DVD Technical Information:

• Running Time: 97 minutes
  
• Colour
  
• PAL
  
• Language: Spanish
  
• Subtitles: English
  
• Region Code: 2

United Kingdom released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: LANGUAGES: Spanish ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ), English ( Subtitles ), SPECIAL FEATURES: Interactive Menu, Photo Gallery, Trailer(s), SYNOPSIS: "The Spirit of the Beehive," directed by Víctor Erice, takes place in a small, isolated Spanish town in 1940, shortly after the end of the civil war that inaugurated the long reign of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The film was made in 1973, near the end of Franco's dictatorship, at a time when Spanish cinema was just starting to reawaken, and to probe, carefully and hesitantly, the buried traumas of the recent past. Perhaps fittingly, one of Mr. Erice's themes is repression - not so much the stifling of thought by political authority as the willed avoidance of painful experience. The story that emerges from Mr. Erice's lovely, lovingly considered images is at once lucid and enigmatic, poised between adult longing and childlike eagerness, sorrowful knowledge and startled innocence. SCREENED/AWARDED AT: Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain, San Sebastian International Film Festival, ...The Spirit of the Beehive ( El Espíritu de la colmena )