Cinema
The Spirit of the Beehive
El espíritu de la colmena
Víctor Erice · 1973
Synopsis
An isolated village on the Castilian plateau, in the aftermath of the civil war. Ana, six years old, lives in a large house with her elder sister Isabel, their father Fernando, absorbed in his beehives and in what he writes about them, and their mother Teresa, who writes to a distant lover. A travelling cinema screens Frankenstein in the village, and Ana is gripped by it. Isabel assures her that the monster is not dead, that he is a spirit and that one can speak to him by calling him. Ana begins to look for him in an abandoned sheepfold, where she one day finds a wounded fugitive.
Context
The project was at first to be a genre film around the Frankenstein myth; for lack of means, Erice and his co-screenwriter Ángel Fernández-Santos made it into a story seen at a child's height, produced by Elías Querejeta. It was shot at Hoyuelos, in the province of Segovia, and the cinematographer Luis Cuadrado bathed the house in a honey-coloured light. Ana Torrent was seven years old; as she confused names, the four main characters bear the first names of their performers. The title takes up an expression of Maurice Maeterlinck's about the enigmatic force that governs bees. The censors, worried by certain allusions, let it be released after its success abroad.
Who it is for
A slow-paced film, made of long shots and silences; what postwar Spain kept unspoken comes through a child's gaze.
Prizes and reception
Best film at the San Sebastián festival in 1973, Silver Hugo at Chicago; often regarded as one of the greatest Spanish films.