Friday's Old Fashioned: The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

“The Spirit of the Beehive” begins with a print of James Whale’s 1931 silver screen adaptation of “Frankenstein” being trucked into a small Spanish village for an evening’s entertainment. It is 1940, a year after the Spanish Civil War, and everybody’s living in a Franco world. The movie in the movie begins with Edward van Sloan’s famous introduction at the request of producer Carl Laemmle, warning audience members of the story they are about to see but advising “not to take it too seriously.” Ha! Try telling that to Ana (Ana Torrent), six years old and at that pre-adolescent stage where you are just becoming aware of the larger world but still prone to child’s view of it. In the story of Frankenstein’s monster, she intrinsically senses a kindred spirit, and when her older sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería) says she has seen Frankenstein’s monster lurking near a sheepfold in the middle of nowhere, Ana becomes shaken by the thought, going out to the remote shack with her sister and then by herself. It’s remarkable how director Victor Erice conjures that familiar youthful feeling of absolute inextricable fear and wonder in these moments from nothing more, really, than building it up in our minds by building it up in Ana’s mind, rendering how the imagination does all the work. And yet, something is out there, evinced in the footprint she finds, as Erice cagily, craftily sculpts a movie of awakening consciousness.

What affects Ana most from “Frankenstein” is the scene in which Maria, the farmer’s daughter, dies after Frankenstein throws her in the lake, thinking this small human being no different than the flowers the two of them had been innocently tossing in the water moments before. We never see the scene of her death, though, just the aftermath, and Ana appears not to have seen it either, asking her sister what happened to Maria. This, as many have noted in the years since, is likely because in the movie’s world, they were watching a censored version that removed the death scene. If it evokes life under a Fascist regime, never getting the full story, it also evokes the life of a six-year-old, of wanting to know more than you do, of not being told what you want to know for your own protection, or something to that effect. Indeed, Ana and Isabel’s parents are present in the movie but often feel far away, almost never sharing the same frame, or the same scene, attendant to their own interests and laments, and we hardly ever see either of them with Ana or Isabel, imbuing a sense of isolation that only underlines the former’s the search for Frankenstein’s monster in the sheepfold.

It's not the monster, though, as it turns out. It’s an injured Republican soldier, one whom Ana eventually discovers and helps as much as she can, but who eventually meets a grisly end. You can imagine this all slipping through the Franco censors because of that grisly end; he gets what he deserved! And yet, Erice is not even being all that subtle about it; he’s telling him what he thinks right to their face. By linking the spirit of Frankenstein’s monster with the Republican guard, Erice is essentially blessing his youthful protagonist with a revolutionary spirit, and by linking the anti-Franco faction with Frankenstein, he is also intertwining that sense of rebellion with cinema. Erice often deploys high-angled shots looking down on Ana, suggesting not just a child in a bigger world but someone looking up at a movie screen, quietly reinforcing the idea that sometimes, maybe, you should take these things seriously after all.