The Spirit of The Beehive (1973)

The year is 1940, and seven year old Ana lives in an isolated Spanish village with her parents and older sister Isabel in an eerily silent house. Director Victor Erice begins the film by showing Ana and her sister watching a production of Frankenstein in a makeshift cinema. Watching Frankenstein awakens something inside of Ana as she becomes curious and detached from reality, in hopes to find the monster she seems to sympathise with. Isabel tells Ana that if she closes her eyes and calls the monster then his spirit will come. After hearing her sister's words Ana attempts to find the monster's spirit, searching in a nearby abandoned sheepfold where she finds a large footprint. 

Ana does not find the monster, instead finding a fugitive soldier whom she cares for. The two never speak, although they are quite clearly found of one another. Silence is very characteristic of the film; with the long and still camera shots, the silence adds to the film's allure. The silence not only penetrates the camera work, but oozes into the film's character relations. The family are isolated from one another; Ana's father spends most of his time writing in his journal and tending to his honey bees, her mother harbors a secret in the form of letters, whilst her sister seems close to Ana, but somehow the two are still detached. Aside from the distance between the family, there is one touching moment when Ana, Isabel, and their father go mushroom picking, and it looks something of an idyllic family day out. 

Later when Ana goes missing the silence becomes disrupted as her family calls out to her in the middle of the night. Perhaps it is Ana who is the one that holds the family together; she may be quiet, but when she runs away the film hits an ultimate disequilibrium. 

So, the title of the film... what's it all about? Firstly, the theme of bees runs throughout. Ana's father is shown at the start of the film tending to his bee hives, collecting their sweet honey. The bees resonate elsewhere in the film, as the windows of the family house largely resemble the hexagonal structure of the inside of a bees nest, seeping through amber light. Erice only ever allows the symbolism of bees to remain trapped inside the windows, correlating with Ana's frame of mind - stuck between reality and her dream world in which Frankenstein's monster exists. 

Without doubt the most captivating essence of The Spirit of the Beehive is the use of the film's lighting. Soft glowing amber creeps in from the beehive-like windows, illuminating characters faces, while Erice masterfully employs shadow and reflection, perhaps hinting to a world outside of reality, just beyond the light. 


7.2/10