My Favorite Film: Spirit of the Beehive

Film Friday

In today’s post I write about my favorite film, one that pulls me into the world of a child’s imagination like no other artistic work. The film is Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (Espíritu de la colmena), which came out in 1973.

The film is set during or immediately after the Spanish Civil War (in the late 1930’s) and features two young sisters, especially Ana (played, in a remarkable performance, by six-year-old Ana Torrent). Their father is an intellectual who writes philosophical musings about (among other things) the bees that he keeps. Their mother may be writing letters to a lover, maybe one imprisoned by the fascists. The parents seem to have withdrawn from the world, perhaps because of their leftist sympathies. There are signs that they have also pulled into themselves, away from each other and away from their children. I have to be tentative about some of the facts because much of the film is unclear. Its mystery is part of its power.

Perhaps because of fascist oppression, the characters seem riveted by darkness, and the film becomes, at least in part, a meditation on death. The children pick up on their parents’ inwardness, and the sensitive Ana finds expression for it through the James Whale film Frankenstein (starring Boris Karloff), which comes to town. Identifying with the little girl that the monster throws into the water, Ana goes out in search of her own monster.

Finding her own monster may be a way of coming to terms with her father, whom Ana sees as a distant and even a frightening figure, one who has special insights into death. For instance, he explains to her about poisonous mushrooms when they go out picking. In his beekeeper’s suit, he even seems like a kind of Frankenstein monster. Meanwhile, her mother is preoccupied with her own private sorrows and longings.

Ana’s monster comes in the form of a man who may be an army deserter or a member of the anti-fascist resistance. (The film is vague about this, perhaps because fascist dictator Franco was still in control of Spain at the time it was made.) He has hurt his foot leaping off a train and is hiding out in a deserted hut. Ana brings him food and clothes.

But even if the family were closer, children still have an imaginary world that is beyond the reach of adults. After her soldier is tracked down and killed—we see nothing but the flash of guns in the night—Ana associates the death with her father and runs out into the mysterious night. There is an all-out hunt for her and the family fears that she may have fallen into the swamp and drowned. In their fears, they realize that they have been inattentive to their daughters and begin to come together.

Ana, meanwhile, believes that she has rediscovered her monster when she sees a flickering light in the swamp water that looks like Boris Karloff. She has come face to face with her monster, and I have a sense that Erice is saying that Spain must face up to its own monsters. When she is found, in shock and dehydrated but otherwise all right, there is a sense that a new day is dawning.

In a film made two years later (when Franco was dying), Carlos Saura picked up on the same theme in Cria, another film starring Ana Torrent. In the very last scene, she and her siblings emerge from their claustrophic house into the sunshine. In both films, the children, like Spain, have gone through trauma but in the end are seen entering into a hopeful new future.

By looking at modern Spain, one can see that the filmmakers’ were justified in their optimism. I’ll write more about Spirit of the Beehive next Friday along with an interesting recent film that is indebted to it, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.