Spirit of the Beehive

by Yuki

Spirit of the Beehive (El Espíritu de la colmena) Dir by Victor Erice, Spain, 1973

I saw Spirit of the Beehive just after a long subway ride where I was thinking about childhood and how strange it is that humans forget most of their early experiences.  It struck me as wasteful, and a little cruel, that much of these experiences slowly vanish, as they are often kept secret from our parents, from the world at large, and then from us as we age.  The origins of our lives are shadowy.  Already in this mindset, watching Spirit completely blew me away.  A film whose every scene is just as beautiful and breathtaking as the story's message itself, it is a pure meditation of a child's inner life (and really for a child, there is only inner life) and of the mysteries that enshroud us though we struggle to know.

The film is largely from the perspective of six-year-old Ana, who lives in a large stone house in a rural Castilian village in 1940.  Her mother and father are strangely distant from one another and their relationship seems to be at a precarious point.  One day a truck drives down a dusty dirt road into town carrying canisters of films.  One of the movies is Frankenstein, and when Ana and her older sister, Isabel, go to see it, Ana becomes completely mesmerized by the monster.  He seems to represent a darkness she has never before encountered, but is somehow drawn to.   "Why did he kill the little girl?  And why did they kill him?"  She asks Isabel during the film.  "I'll tell you later,"  She whispers back.  But of course neither of them understand, and this tension between knowing and not knowing is echoed throughout the film, both in the relationship between their parents as well as between the sisters.  Isabel, being slightly older, takes on the role of knowing, even when she doesn't.  She tells Ana she knows the monster and can talk to him, even shows her an abandoned farm house in the distance where she claims he lives, fueling her little sister's fascination.  

Throughout the movie, Ana and Isabel roam the wide, barren land surrounding the village doing everything parents try to protect their children from.  They listen with their ear to the train tracks, peer into open wells, jump through little camp fires.  These scenes are poignant illustrations of our fascination with death and danger from the perspective of a child.  One day Ana goes out to the abandoned house alone and finds an injured man there – a soldier who has escaped into the countryside.  She begins to care for him, sneaking him food and clothing from her house.  

On the level of pure storytelling, the film is genius.  I don't think I have ever seen a film that has done more with less.  Practically the entire story is told with no dialogue, using haunting images and  cuts with a precision and depth of meaning that today's Hollywood directors could never hope to accomplish.  The audience is given the bare minimum to piece together the story, but everything is there.

While Ana is asleep at home one night, the soldier she cared for is shot by the local police.  The reasons remain ambiguous, but the event links the small village to the turmoil of the greater conflict of this era.  By the time she returns the next day, she sees the man's blood and realizes he has been killed. Her concerned father, who follows her to the abandoned house, tries to talk to her, but she runs away into the woods. A search party brings her back the next day, but she is strangely changed.  She stops speaking and seems distant to her parents.  The doctor tells her mother that Ana has been profoundly effected by whatever she experienced on her own, but that she will eventually forget and return to normal.  How strange it is that we forget those qualities of childhood – curiosity, pity, fearlessness, and wonder – that seem so important now that we are older.