Sole Criterion: The Spirit of the Beehive
By Brett Ballard-Beach
November 23, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Summary of The Spirit of the Beehive from my county library’s online catalogue.
With this week’s entry for Sole Criterion, I achieved close to my stated goal from last December: to push myself to choose films that were, if not necessarily so by country of origin, nonetheless foreign to me. The above summary, running time (99 minutes) and year (1973) were about all I knew in regards to this week’s film before watching it. I didn’t even know the director and didn’t look up his filmography until afterwards. I went in as blind as I ever have (and admittedly rarely do) in order to avert preconceptions and form my own undiluted opinions in advance.
For those who like the short of it upfront, I offer this: The Spirit of the Beehive is Pan’s Labyrinth minus about 98% of the fantastical elements and with a far more ambiguous and unsettling view of its characters. It contains a deep-seated sadness that is disturbing, all the more so because it steadfastly refuses to exploit that emotion or push it to the forefront. It’s a part of the film’s foundation, or its bloodstream. As director Victor Erice notes in an interview that accompanies a 25th anniversary documentary about the making of the film, his screenplay was not about presenting psychological portraits, but about a glimpse from a distance of a family observed with detachment, and of the power of film to capture the imagination, particularly of children.
The key image of the film (and one which The Spirit of the Beehive boldly chooses to recreate towards the end) is from the 1931 James Whale movie Frankenstein, with the escaped monster and a little girl facing each other alongside the shore of a lake. The moment culminates in the monster’s accidental drowning of the girl and for six-year-old Ana, who is watching the film with her older sister Isabel in their isolated Spanish village in 1940, it becomes a touchstone. She wants to know why he killed her and why the villagers then killed him. Isabel’s eventual reply skirts the issue in two ways, and showcases both her trickery of her little sister and her own naïveté: 1) No one really died because it’s a movie and movies are fake. 2) The monster’s spirit lives on nearby and if Ana really believes and wants to, she can talk to him. Ana takes this at face value.
But the film isn’t simply a fable about how her belief and imagination lift her up out of her isolation. Erice considers the family as a whole, each segmented from the other, and how the family unit is fragmented as a result, if not necessarily dysfunctional. (On a side note, I considered that an American take on the tale would have to be an indictment of middle-class suburbia a la American Beauty and that a French version would have to involve incest and/or repressed emotions bubbling up the surface.)
For the first third of the film, Erice introduces us to his lead characters in an off-hand fashion, such that it is wonderfully impossible to tell which characters we will end up following or what tangent(s) the storyline will pursue. The father is first viewed in his beekeeper garb out in a field, in a cut away from the girls watching Frankenstein, and the effect is that he does look like a fellow sad monster, face viewed through a mesh mask. (Two of Erice’s strengths are this use of juxtaposition through editing, and his use of a mixture of dissolves, fade-outs and lyrical but very subtle time lapse photography to upend the normal feeling of a day-to-day flow. Together, they keep things just out of kilter enough to render them mysterious.)
The mother is introduced in her bedroom, penning a letter which it seems is to a former lover, a soldier in the now-ended war perhaps, and then bicycling into town to mail it. By this suggestion, a rebel fighter who takes refuge in an abandoned barn, and is cared for by Ana in the final third of the film, could be taken to be this same soldier. It is only when the father, and later the daughters return to the house that we piece together they are indeed a family (Tellingly, Erice never films them all together at any one time. The only event in which all four are present at the same time is the sole family dinner that the film showcases, and Erice keeps them all isolated in their own shots during this sequence.)
As isolated as they may be individually, Erice also frames their isolation from the town. They are not the only four characters, but they are about the only ones given any depth, dialogue and/or significant screen time. We see a good portion of the village assembling for the Frankenstein screening, and observe the girls in their classroom setting, and see a few tableaus of the townspeople going about their day, but very little else that sets them off in contrast. One can imagine similar stories and films being made about the other villagers.
One of the most unsettling aspects of the film, ironically, comes from its golden/honey tones. Cinematographer Luis Cuadrado employs as great a use of the “magic hour” of sunlight as Nestor Almendros subsequently would in Terrence Malick’s 1978 feature Days of Heaven. There is abundant sunlight throughout the first half of the film but it all feels like it’s captured at just that moment when the sun is about to go down, the day is about to close, and it becomes both dizzying (to pinpoint exactly what time of day it is) and unnerving (a feeling of eternal sunshine). The second half features more post-sunset events (including an eerie sequence of Isabel and friends perilously leaping over a bonfire) and nighttime sequences (including when Ana runs away and the final moments of the film.) Cuadrado was in the early stages of blindness while filming Spirit of the Beehive and would take his life several years later.
Erice frames his tale somewhat as a fable early on and maintains that air with the rest of the film, which though not viewed exclusively through Ana’s eyes, could be said to come from a child’s (or at least more innocent, less cynical) state of mind. The music by Luis de Pablo is built around simple melodies and simple instrumentation (a pan flute figures in the opening/closing credits theme) but which contain a bent towards the melancholy. During the opening credits, a series of about a dozen crude color drawings are displayed which, when considered in retrospect - I watched the film twice over consecutive nights - lay out some of the plot elements and key visual motifs of the story. The film also begins with an intertitle “Once upon a time . . .”
Erice was in his early 30s when making the film and was born the year that it is set. He directed half a dozen short films in the decade before The Spirit of the Beehive and the same number between 1993 and 2010. The Spirit of the Beehive was his feature-length debut and the first of only three he has made to date (the others followed in 1983 and 1992.)
He grew up under the reign of dictator Francisco Franco, who seized power in the wake of the successful military rebellion during the Spanish civil war, and ruled until his death in 1975. The decades from the 1940s though the 1970s were marked by death or imprisonment for Franco’s enemies and accompanied by a heavy censorship for the arts. Erice relates an amusing anecdote of how his film, which while not overtly political, contains allegorical critique of the time in which it is set, managed to escape being cut or banned. The censorship board couldn’t find anything specific they disagreed with or found offensive, and let it off the hook, because they felt audiences would find it dull as they did and it wouldn’t attract attention. Forty years on, The Spirit of the Beehive remains one of the most acclaimed Spanish films of all time, both within its borders, and internationally.
Much of the film rests on the shoulders of Ana Torrent, the actress who portrays the heroine. Like the other family characters, Ana isn’t explained but presented and because much of her internal journey involves her relationship with the fantasy life she creates (which as stated isn’t dramatized or made visceral, save for a few instances), and because she doesn’t converse with others about this, her performance rests almost entirely in her eyes and in her posture. It reminds me of another great child performance, that of Victoire Thivisol (as a four-year old dealing with the loss of her mother) in the French film Ponette. Torrent was six at the time The Spirit of the Beehive was filmed and if nothing else, her visage was appropriately grave for the role and she found ways of reflecting the smallest nuances.
Cuadrado used a handheld camera just once during filming for the sequence in which Frankenstein is screened for the village and he and Erice managed to capture the reaction of Torrent upon seeing the moment where the monster and the young girl meet. In an occurrence of magical happenstance, it was precisely the reaction her character was supposed to convey. Like many other moments in the film, it is not oversold with a close up (and again, at that point in the film, we don’t know she is to be the lead character) and the subtlety can easily be missed.
Erice often frames the two sisters against the vastness of the plain, or in my favorite image, the roar and power of the local train speeding by as they stand just off to the side (this is captured in a medium distance shot). They have that peculiar but recognizable older sibling/younger sibling dynamic in which the moments in which they can play alongside one another are tempered by the ones in which Isabel delights in teasing or tormenting Ana. This leads to the centerpiece of the film, in which Ana responds to Isabel’s cry for help from another wing in the house, and discovers Isabel apparently dead. This sequence lasts about five minutes and toys mercilessly with the audience in a manner befitting Hitchcock. The audience gets to mirror Ana’s concern and conflict (“She can’t really be dead. Can she? Can she?”) The unease that is crafted is potent, even after one knows how it plays out.
I am a fan of ambiguity, of not having my hand held and told how to feel, of not having everything explained to me, but I also respond to the emotion that cinema can evoke, particularly when it isn’t trying (or refrains from) bludgeoning me over the head with sentimentality. Erice shows such restraint, which I respect, and made precisely the film that he wanted to. And yet, in the final analysis, I felt left out in the cold by the film, a feeling confirmed by my second viewing. There is definite circularity to the movement of the film (confirmed by Erice and his collaborators) and the end result isn’t so much “ah, this is where I came in” or a return to the beginning, but puzzlement over what if anything has changed.
There are suggestions that warmth that was missing may be returning to the family (contrast the mother’s gestures towards her husband at the end, with the single shot sequence towards the beginning where she feigns being asleep as her husband prepares for bed) but I remain uncertain (or perhaps) unconvinced about the act of faith that closes the film. As with the rest of the film, it is not a bold gesture, but one that takes place internally, between Ana and her imagination. I listened to Erice explain his feelings about it, but as presented I don’t regard it as a summation, or an (up) lifting moment. It feels curiously muted to me, the one moment where a swelling of feeling might have been welcome. As it fades out and the opening theme reprises, I feel more unmoved than I would like, a failing I acknowledge that might be entirely my own.
Next time: DVD Spine #482. Paris in the mid-1960s as related by Godard.