“El Espiritu de la Colmena” (1973)
Directed by Victor Erice
MANILA, Philippines – Although “El Espiritu de la Colmena” (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) was made in the early 1970s, it resists attachment or association with any cinematic movement or period, and retains the timeless quality of great films. While even masterpieces like “Citizen Kane” and “Ladri di Biciclette” are tied irrevocably to the eras that produced them, “Espiritu” remains fresh and undated even after 36 years.
Director Victor Erice is a cerebral, meticulous filmmaker (his oeuvre consists of less than a dozen shorts and feature-length films over a 40-year career), and his work bears careful attention, each film the product of careful deliberation. Images are composed as much for their beauty as for their need to communicate information.
In “Espiritu,” Erice and cinematographer Luis Cuadrado draw from visual sources as diverse as 17th-century Dutch interiors to Edison Kinetoscope shorts, delighting in these quiet, simple homages without calling unnecessary attention to them.
Darker magic
The film opens innocuously enough, with a series of children’s drawings overlaid with film credits in a schoolbook typeface. It then sets another tone with a title: “Once upon a time,” suggesting the magic of a fairy tale.
This is again upended by a series of neorealist vignettes in which a traveling cinema arrives in a rural town and sets up a screening in the town hall, recalling the warmth and whimsy of Fellini. Magical events do happen here, but in this grim, harsh world, the magic must be of a darker sort.
A town crier announces the film to be screened – James Whales’ “Frankenstein” – and townsfolk gather. Two young girls, sisters, watch the flickering illusion in fascination, and the younger Ana is particularly affected by the scene in which the monster inadvertently drowns the little girl in the lake. This vivid impression is the kernel of the fever dream that ensues.
Childhood terrors
For one is never sure if the images onscreen are a representation of post-Civil War Castile, or projections of Ana’s obsessions and nightmares.
The adults of the story – an aging father tending to his beehives and his research, and a much younger mother distracted for unclear reasons – are presented credibly enough, but it is Ana’s world that we appear to have entered, and we experience the mysteries and terrors of childhood along with her.
Very little happens in Ana’s world, but even small events have the power of a bomb, and their veracity is ambiguous.
When she encounters an intruder from the “real world” – a tramp, possibly a Loyalist soldier – Ana arrives at an awareness of the irrationality and impersonality of evil, and this knowledge burrows deep into her core, from which it releases nightmares.
“El Espiritu de la Colmena” is a challenging, opaque film, but one that gleams with golden light. An ideal strategy would be to surrender oneself to the quiet power of its images and its drifting pace.
Throughout the film, the Castilian plains roll away from the viewer in gradations of yellow and orange, while clouds waft bands of umber across them. Ana’s dark, wide eyes drink in the world around her, and she all but drowns in its terrible beauty, while we come to understand that if we are to survive in such a world, we must all learn how to float.
“El Espiritu de la Colmena” will be shown during the 8th Película: Spanish Film Festival, ongoing until October 11. For screening schedules, call Instituto Cervantes at 5261482; visit http://manila.cervantes.es or www.pelicula.ph.
An award-winning fictionist, the author teaches Film and Literature at De La Salle University.
