FILM In Which We Disturb The Spirit Of The Beehive
Tuesday, October 1, 2013 at 11:29AM 
Monster
by ALEX CARNEVALE
The Spirit of the Beehive
dir. Victor Erice
98 minutes
Victor Erice's first film. It begins with all the kids in the street, greeting the man who brings them film reels from Madrid. This month it's Frankenstein. In the audience is young Ana.
Ana possesses a mother and a father who can barely be in the same room with each other. We do not know for certain, but it seems the reason for this is that both prefers to have another life in addition to the one that occupies their days. Their two daughters — Ana and the older Isabel, 7 — are the least of their concerns.
The scene that has always haunted me from The Spirit of the Beehive is the one where Isabel jumps through a fire she lights with a friend. Ana watches on, perched like an owl. The expression on her face is a cross between bemusement and utter fear. On the set of The Spirit of the Beehive Erice demanded that the other actors speak in a whisper when Ana was around. Anything else would ruin the moment.
Isabel and Ana see the house in the distance. (Earlier, the girls put their ears to the train tracks to hear something new.) When they approach the abandoned well next to the empty shack, it is both frightening and a little anti-climactic, but in a good way since you can only handle so many small deaths.
When she returns to the house, Ana finds a mustached man fleeing the Franco regime. He is an enemy of the state and he has been wounded. Naturally she provides this person with medical aid and sustenance such as she can find:
Next she huddles over the refugee's leg to change the bandage. The Spirit of the Beehive is often discussed as a film about childhood, but Ana discards any naivete through Isabel's psychological torture and the realities of her provincial life.
In another scene, she is instructed by a nun about the facts of the human body; nearly every part of the lesson is wrong. She is happier to be of use in the dessicated residence at the end of her prairie, or among her fantasies brought to life.
Throughout, Erice's use of light and composition was wildly ahead of its time in independent filmmaking, and it also set a new mark for cinema in general. We never see this kind of naturalistic work anymore, since all the abandoned places are far away and Vancouver's a lot easier if you're going to leave L.A. Then again, Victor did not go very far either.
Audiences were initially quick skeptical of The Spirit of the Beehive. The film's first viewers even expressed their condolences to the film's producers after an early screening. When The Spirit of the Beehive won the grand prize at the San Sebastian FF, half the crowd booed.
Isabel tells Ana that in order to summon Frankenstein, she must simply call him by saying, "It's me Ana." This incantation brings about all the ghosts in her life: a frightened man destined to be gunned down by his captors, her sister playing dead, her father in a hallucinatory dream.
When Ana sees the blood she is no longer a child, yet Erice never lingers over anything obvious like that — his principle seems to be that is whatever is on the surface, let it lie. Whatever is underneath will have to breathe eventually.
In order to solve the mystery of Frankenstein, Ana has to give over to her desires. It is something her parents never learn to do. Her mother flirts with her daughter's doctor when Ana runs away; her father meekly views the rebel corpse. He remains more concerned with his bees than his young family.
Isabel holds very different priorities. She torments her younger sister, and it goes slightly beyond the normal persecution of an older sibling. Erice pushes the envelope until his audience itself feels Isabel's victim. We have no way of lashing out at her for what she puts us through, at least not in the way the family cat does when it scratches her finger trying to get away. There are so many difficulties.
I don't know to what extent The Spirit of the Beehive operates on a subconscious level. It appears sometimes to be a magic eight-ball of cinema, in the fashion in which it pulls up a different fortune for each person who watches it, a sort of proto-version of the videotape in The Ring. Some of its inhabitants must feel betrayed: by their government, by their families, by those closest to them. It was that sort of time in Victor Erice's home country, and he wrote of this pain in the only way he could.
Some of Erice's audience must have resembled the cynical caricatures of Ana's world, so it is no wonder they did not like to see themselves painted in such a light. Erice shows many different sides of the story, never doing the judging for us. We all have periods when we get lost inside of ourselves, when we find it difficult to admit that we are only one of many. We feel that collected way that Ana does when she watches Frankenstein: the unusual mingling of fear and fascination nothing else can inculcate.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about Roger Ebert and Persona and the romance between Peggy Guggenheim and Samuel Beckett. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.
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