Join us at 1 p.m. Sunday, November 3, for a screening of Victor Erice’s spellbinding fantasy-drama “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), about a sensitive seven year-old girl living in a small Spanish village who drifts into her own fantasy world after watching and being traumatized by the movie Frankenstein in 1940.
THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE | 1973 | DIRECTOR: Victor Erice | WITH: Fernando Fernan Gomez, Teresa Gimpera, Ana Torrent | RUNNING TIME: 1H 38M | IN SPANISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES | UNRATED: Contains adult themes | DIGITAL PROJECTION
Widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, director Victor Erice’s drama unfolds in a small Castilian village in 1940, in the wake of the country’s devastating civil war. Six-year-old Ana attends a traveling movie show of Frankenstein and becomes possessed by the memory of it. Produced as Franco’s long regime was nearing its end, The Spirit of the Beehive is a bewitching portrait of a child’s haunted inner life and one of the most visually arresting movies ever made.
“Released in 1973, in the dying days of General Franco’s forty-year dictatorship, The Spirit of the Beehive soon established itself as the consummate masterpiece of Spanish cinema. Yet, strangely, many of the gifted artists who collaborated on Víctor Erice’s first feature, an atmospheric exploration of a child’s experience in a bleak village just after the civil war, have had troubled afterlives.
“Erice himself, acclaimed by critics as Spain’s greatest auteur, has completed only three features since. The career of Luís Cuadrado, the creator of the luminous cinematography, was tragically cut short by blindness. Ana Torrent, the six-year-old star, remains haunted by the role that made her a Spanish icon. In 2003, on the thirtieth anniversary of The Spirit of the Beehive’s release, she posed for the poster for the San Sebastián Film Festival. Re-creating a scene she had shot so many years before, she stood solemn faced on the railway tracks. Erice has said, “When I’ve finished a film, it’s no longer mine—it belongs to the people.” Surely few films have had such an enduring effect on both their makers and their audience.
“The Spirit of the Beehive was controversial from the start. Although it won the main prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival on its release, the jury’s enthusiasm was not shared by all the public. Some of the audience, restless at the film’s slow pace, even booed. Yet The Spirit of the Beehive is a classic example of one strand of Spanish filmmaking at that time.
“Like many repressive regimes, Francoism attempted to use cinema to change its negative image abroad and to create the impression that freedom of expression was permitted. By producing some internationally successful “quality” films, the regime also hoped to raise the status of Spanish cinema generally, which was at that time dominated by crude, mainstream comedies. By the early seventies, these policies had led to the production and export of many experimental and even discreetly oppositional films, although, of course, no overtly leftist movies could be made.
“The gaping holes in the plot of The Spirit of the Beehive and the mysterious motivations of its characters are typical of this “Francoist aesthetic,” a term used to describe artistically ambitious movies of the time that made use of fantasy and allegory. These characteristics, which remain so magical to modern audiences, were used in the period as a form of indirect critique.” — Paul Julian Smith
Tickets are $5 and available at link below. Students use code UMSTUDENT at checkout for free admission (must show Cane card at the door).
