THE DUKE ON
SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE
SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE
Haunting, mesmerising, unforgettable, beautiful… All these
adjectives and many more have been flung at The Duke in his time.
But whilst The Duke may fit the criteria required should one wish
to be paid any such compliments, it would be fair to say that
Victor Erice’s 1973 Spirit Of The Beehive, or El Espíritu de la
colmena, does a reasonable job of fulfilling at least two and a
half of them.
What The Beehive Film concerns itself with, is being about “the
childhood” and “the humanity” and so on and so forth. Other
weighty issues concerning the “existence”. Don’t worry though, if
you think maybe it’ll be difficult for to keep up with all the
necessary pondering, since Erice has the decency to ensure that
nothing of much importance occurs for at least three quarters of
the running time, meaning you could feasibly have reached any
number of profound realizations by the time you need to read
another subtitle.
What happened, was that whilst General Franco was scowling about
the place and generally being, in the fabled words of
Shakespeare, “A right motherfucker”, his countryman Erice was
making a film about two young children go to see Frankenstein in
a little cinema during 1940. For one of the children in
particular, a lass by the name of Ana, the film has a profound
effect, and following conversations about said cinematic wonder
with her sister, she comes to believe that the spirit of Boris
Karlof’s lurching creation lives in an abandoned bungalow outside
the village.
The Beehive Film is, at its core, a meditative, hypnotic, eyes-of-
a-child type deal, allowing the viewer to observe the world with
the kind of awe and reverence that folks tend to forget about
once things like mortgages and pubic hair come into the equation.
This sense of childlike innocence is applied also to our
understanding of the adult characters, in that we know very
little about them. The father and mother rarely communicate with
one another, the latter preferring to post letters to some
mystery individual, and the former tending his glass beehive. We
sense there might be some other shenanigans going on, but we’re
not old enough to be burdened with such unnecessary
information.
All we need to be concerned with is playing around the abandoned
house, and looking down a well, and then some stuff about
mushrooms.
You might think, since the film has Spirit in the title, that no
good can come from playing around a well, and that most likely
there was a psychic lass flung down it a few years ago and next
thing anyone knows there’s gonna be a cursed video tape doing the
rounds and then freaky motherfuckers are gonna start crawling out
the damn telly.
Don’t be ridiculous, friends. I mean this was 1973, which was, I
believe, at least three decades before video cassettes were even
invented.
No one was flung down this well, but that’s not to suggest there
aren’t atrocities going on.
The film is concerned with the Spanish Civil War, and the effects
of such upon ordinary, everyday folks, like the kinda people The
Arrested Developments used to sing about.
About an hour into the proceedings, a soldier shows up, and goes
into hiding in the abandoned bungalow. Ana meets him, and gives
him an apple and what not, but for reasons neither we, nor Ana,
can comprehend, he is killed.
Nowadays, we’d probably get mournful orchestral carry-ons and
slow-motion shots of him getting riddled with bullets, and then
we see the kid looking on, and maybe a poem or something that
he's been writing falls out of his trembling, bloodied fist.
The Beehive Film has no truck with that kinda shit though. We
just see a few shots in the dark, and follow Ana as she finds
bloodstained rocks and walls where her new friend should be.
It’s at least 98% more moving than, say, the bit in Platoon where
the fella gets killed for to go on the posters, with the arms out
and so on.
War is hell, motherfucker.
There’s no reason at all why a man shouldn’t admire the hell of
The Beehive Film, but there are sundry reasons why one might find
it lacking in the “adrenaline” and so on.
For example, anyone allergic to an allegory or two had best avoid
these 93 minutes of shots of mushrooms, bees crawling about in
prosthetic dwellings, children staring inquisitively towards a
village shrouded in darkness.
Similarly, if long takes are something you’d rather see less of
in cinema, then The Beehive Film may well send you over the edge
into some kind of enraged psychosis. If you found yourself
watching Weekend by John Luc Goddard and screaming “Cut! Cut you
motherfucker!” every couple a seconds during that opening ten
minute take, then you should know that Erice, unlike Goddard,
doesn’t even want to have a car-crash at the end of it all, like
a reward for your patience. All he’s gonna do is maybe show you a
cat getting mishandled by a youngster.
But what the hell did you hire out a film about a beehive for
anyway? Unless it’s been made by Pixar, you can be sure a film
about insects isn’t going to be all that action-packed.
Notable exception – The Swarm, another classic bee film, but one
about how the motherfuckers kill Michael Caine's acquaintances,
and less concerned with the psychoanalytical and what have you.
Erice doesn’t offer many answers, but then he doesn’t really ask
many questions, either. There are things to be considered, but
it's more like a kind of filmic version of that word association
game what psychiatrists are so fond of.
Childhood. Innocence. War.
Just think about those things for a while is all you’re being
asked to do, and while you’re at it, here’s some nice pictures of
mushrooms or a field or two.
The influence of Spirit Of The Beehive can be seen in films like
Cinema Paradiso, another flick about how cinema is great and also
kids are awful cute, and even Etre Et Avoir, what also concerned
itself with the children in rural settings getting all educated.
I’m guessing Nicholas Roeg may have seen it a couple times, too.
Even The Blair Witch Project owes something to The Beehive Film,
in that a supernatural entity is explicitly referenced in the
title, and yet the motherfucker never makes an appearance.
Maybe there’s a sequel – Spirit Of The Beehive Book Of The
Shadows or some shit, where a buncha folks go check out this
village for to investigate the claims about evil bees and then
get drunk and then they check back the footage and find ghostly
insects floating about the place.
Who knows what kooky shit could ensue?
“Mesmeric” is probably the most fitting description of Spirit Of
The Beehive. You may twitch a little during the first ten
minutes, maybe think about lifting that copy of Ninja Scroll off
the shelf instead, but before you know it you’re drawn into this
beautifully simple, evocative and atmospheric landscape.
It’s a bit like those relaxation exercises some folks like to do
of an evening. You feel a bit weird at first, wondering when
something’s gonna happen, and then next thing you know, you’re
legs are all heavy and warm, and you’re all the content in the
world, peacefully allowing yourself to disconnect and engage with
something eerily tranquil yet oddly comforting.
Or at least that’s what some folks might feel. A stone cold son
of a bitch like The Duke is too busy feeling masculine for to
worry about shit like that.
Like Porkys 2 – The Next Day, Erice disguises some fairly heated
political context by presenting to us seemingly inconsequential,
everyday activities. He has criticisms he wants to make about the
fascist régime he was working under, yet understandably stops
short of scrawling “Franco You Bastard” across the screen.
The overall success of the undertaking owes a lot to the subtle
brilliance of the two central child actresses. Ana Torrent is
magnificent, so magnificent in fact that she ended up starring in
Alejando Amenabar’s Tesis. Isabel Telleria is equally good as her
slightly-older sister, but for some reason she never made another
film.
It’s not the only Spanish beehive film, with Mario Camus’ 1982
The Beehive, or La Colmena, also being worth a gander, but it is
certainly one of the most unique films a fella could ask to spend
an evening with.
Erice has only made a handful of films in his life, preferring,
like Terence Malick, to take a decade or so off in-between
carving understated, poetic meditations. Thank God though that
when he finally gets around to it, he ensures that the
sabbaticals are well-earned.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
adjectives and many more have been flung at The Duke in his time.
But whilst The Duke may fit the criteria required should one wish
to be paid any such compliments, it would be fair to say that
Victor Erice’s 1973 Spirit Of The Beehive, or El Espíritu de la
colmena, does a reasonable job of fulfilling at least two and a
half of them.
What The Beehive Film concerns itself with, is being about “the
childhood” and “the humanity” and so on and so forth. Other
weighty issues concerning the “existence”. Don’t worry though, if
you think maybe it’ll be difficult for to keep up with all the
necessary pondering, since Erice has the decency to ensure that
nothing of much importance occurs for at least three quarters of
the running time, meaning you could feasibly have reached any
number of profound realizations by the time you need to read
another subtitle.
What happened, was that whilst General Franco was scowling about
the place and generally being, in the fabled words of
Shakespeare, “A right motherfucker”, his countryman Erice was
making a film about two young children go to see Frankenstein in
a little cinema during 1940. For one of the children in
particular, a lass by the name of Ana, the film has a profound
effect, and following conversations about said cinematic wonder
with her sister, she comes to believe that the spirit of Boris
Karlof’s lurching creation lives in an abandoned bungalow outside
the village.
The Beehive Film is, at its core, a meditative, hypnotic, eyes-of-
a-child type deal, allowing the viewer to observe the world with
the kind of awe and reverence that folks tend to forget about
once things like mortgages and pubic hair come into the equation.
This sense of childlike innocence is applied also to our
understanding of the adult characters, in that we know very
little about them. The father and mother rarely communicate with
one another, the latter preferring to post letters to some
mystery individual, and the former tending his glass beehive. We
sense there might be some other shenanigans going on, but we’re
not old enough to be burdened with such unnecessary
information.
All we need to be concerned with is playing around the abandoned
house, and looking down a well, and then some stuff about
mushrooms.
You might think, since the film has Spirit in the title, that no
good can come from playing around a well, and that most likely
there was a psychic lass flung down it a few years ago and next
thing anyone knows there’s gonna be a cursed video tape doing the
rounds and then freaky motherfuckers are gonna start crawling out
the damn telly.
Don’t be ridiculous, friends. I mean this was 1973, which was, I
believe, at least three decades before video cassettes were even
invented.
No one was flung down this well, but that’s not to suggest there
aren’t atrocities going on.
The film is concerned with the Spanish Civil War, and the effects
of such upon ordinary, everyday folks, like the kinda people The
Arrested Developments used to sing about.
About an hour into the proceedings, a soldier shows up, and goes
into hiding in the abandoned bungalow. Ana meets him, and gives
him an apple and what not, but for reasons neither we, nor Ana,
can comprehend, he is killed.
Nowadays, we’d probably get mournful orchestral carry-ons and
slow-motion shots of him getting riddled with bullets, and then
we see the kid looking on, and maybe a poem or something that
he's been writing falls out of his trembling, bloodied fist.
The Beehive Film has no truck with that kinda shit though. We
just see a few shots in the dark, and follow Ana as she finds
bloodstained rocks and walls where her new friend should be.
It’s at least 98% more moving than, say, the bit in Platoon where
the fella gets killed for to go on the posters, with the arms out
and so on.
War is hell, motherfucker.
There’s no reason at all why a man shouldn’t admire the hell of
The Beehive Film, but there are sundry reasons why one might find
it lacking in the “adrenaline” and so on.
For example, anyone allergic to an allegory or two had best avoid
these 93 minutes of shots of mushrooms, bees crawling about in
prosthetic dwellings, children staring inquisitively towards a
village shrouded in darkness.
Similarly, if long takes are something you’d rather see less of
in cinema, then The Beehive Film may well send you over the edge
into some kind of enraged psychosis. If you found yourself
watching Weekend by John Luc Goddard and screaming “Cut! Cut you
motherfucker!” every couple a seconds during that opening ten
minute take, then you should know that Erice, unlike Goddard,
doesn’t even want to have a car-crash at the end of it all, like
a reward for your patience. All he’s gonna do is maybe show you a
cat getting mishandled by a youngster.
But what the hell did you hire out a film about a beehive for
anyway? Unless it’s been made by Pixar, you can be sure a film
about insects isn’t going to be all that action-packed.
Notable exception – The Swarm, another classic bee film, but one
about how the motherfuckers kill Michael Caine's acquaintances,
and less concerned with the psychoanalytical and what have you.
Erice doesn’t offer many answers, but then he doesn’t really ask
many questions, either. There are things to be considered, but
it's more like a kind of filmic version of that word association
game what psychiatrists are so fond of.
Childhood. Innocence. War.
Just think about those things for a while is all you’re being
asked to do, and while you’re at it, here’s some nice pictures of
mushrooms or a field or two.
The influence of Spirit Of The Beehive can be seen in films like
Cinema Paradiso, another flick about how cinema is great and also
kids are awful cute, and even Etre Et Avoir, what also concerned
itself with the children in rural settings getting all educated.
I’m guessing Nicholas Roeg may have seen it a couple times, too.
Even The Blair Witch Project owes something to The Beehive Film,
in that a supernatural entity is explicitly referenced in the
title, and yet the motherfucker never makes an appearance.
Maybe there’s a sequel – Spirit Of The Beehive Book Of The
Shadows or some shit, where a buncha folks go check out this
village for to investigate the claims about evil bees and then
get drunk and then they check back the footage and find ghostly
insects floating about the place.
Who knows what kooky shit could ensue?
“Mesmeric” is probably the most fitting description of Spirit Of
The Beehive. You may twitch a little during the first ten
minutes, maybe think about lifting that copy of Ninja Scroll off
the shelf instead, but before you know it you’re drawn into this
beautifully simple, evocative and atmospheric landscape.
It’s a bit like those relaxation exercises some folks like to do
of an evening. You feel a bit weird at first, wondering when
something’s gonna happen, and then next thing you know, you’re
legs are all heavy and warm, and you’re all the content in the
world, peacefully allowing yourself to disconnect and engage with
something eerily tranquil yet oddly comforting.
Or at least that’s what some folks might feel. A stone cold son
of a bitch like The Duke is too busy feeling masculine for to
worry about shit like that.
Like Porkys 2 – The Next Day, Erice disguises some fairly heated
political context by presenting to us seemingly inconsequential,
everyday activities. He has criticisms he wants to make about the
fascist régime he was working under, yet understandably stops
short of scrawling “Franco You Bastard” across the screen.
The overall success of the undertaking owes a lot to the subtle
brilliance of the two central child actresses. Ana Torrent is
magnificent, so magnificent in fact that she ended up starring in
Alejando Amenabar’s Tesis. Isabel Telleria is equally good as her
slightly-older sister, but for some reason she never made another
film.
It’s not the only Spanish beehive film, with Mario Camus’ 1982
The Beehive, or La Colmena, also being worth a gander, but it is
certainly one of the most unique films a fella could ask to spend
an evening with.
Erice has only made a handful of films in his life, preferring,
like Terence Malick, to take a decade or so off in-between
carving understated, poetic meditations. Thank God though that
when he finally gets around to it, he ensures that the
sabbaticals are well-earned.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
