The Spirit of the Beehive

Víctor Erice’s debut feature El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) begins with a series of children’s drawings accompanied by a whimsical yet unsettling piano and woodwind score, imbuing the film with a fairytale-like quality. The illustrations foreshadow significant scenes and locations in the film, “suggesting a reality filtered through [a] child’s imagination,”¹ culminating with a final drawing of children watching a cinema screen. Inside the pencil-drawn frame is a recreation of a scene from James Whale’s Frankenstein (1935), where a girl plays with flowers by a lakeside while the titular monster watches from behind bushes. The text “Once upon a time…” appears alongside them, only for its promise of fantasy to be shattered by its own continuation: “…somewhere on the Castilian plain around 1940.” We see a mobile cinema truck travelling through a desolate farmland, passing by the symbol of the Falange as it enters the dilapidated and crumbling village of Hoyuelos. The whimsical instrumental slowly fading out into the silence of the lifeless town “becomes an image of the aftermath of the Civil War and of the poverty and hardship into which the Franco regime would plunge Spain for many years.”²

Born in 1940, Erice is part of the postwar generation who suffered under the oppression, censorship, and control of the Falangists – and discovered a sense of escape, resistance and wonder through the magic of cinema.³ The story of supressed Spanish youth is embodied in the film’s child protagonist, Ana (Anna Torrent), who becomes caught between the cold reality of war-torn Spain and her own imaginative fantasies. 

The Spirit of the Beehive makes use of symbolism surrounding the Frankenstein monster (and its spiritual manifestations throughout the film) as subtle political condemnation of the Francoist regime. Released only two years before the death of Francisco Franco and the end of his regime, the film was still subject to the conformist, traditional and anti-liberal values of his government enforced by the Spanish censorship board. With non-compliant literature, films and cultural ideas being supressed, censored, or outright banned, Erice had to disguise his critiques through allegory and symbolism that, while not explicit in their messaging, could still be understood by Spanish audiences who lived through Franco’s dictatorship. 

This process of censorship and control is made clear within the film itself as young sisters Ana and Isabel (Isabel Telleria) watch Frankenstein in a run-down makeshift cinema. They watch in awe and terror as Frankenstein plays with a little girl by throwing flowers into a lake, only for the scene to abruptly cut to the little girl – now dead – being held in her father’s arms, murdered by the monster. What the audience and sisters are unaware of however, is that this version of the film has been censored to remove the critical scenes showing Frankenstein throwing the girl into the lake as an attempt to play, believing that she too could float like the flowers. Through this removal, the nuance of the sequence is lost, and the monster becomes unequivocally evil, hostile and murderous. This manipulation reflects and propagates the violent, dogmatic thinking used by both sides of the Spanish Civil War to justify the atrocities committed during the Red and White Terrors. 

The symbolic idea of the “monster” extends to Ana and Isabel’s father, Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gomez), who is occupied with his beehives amidst Frankenstein’s ongoing screening, spraying tranquilizing smoke to turn the bees docile. Presented as “a great shape looming over the hive, [his] protective hood obliterating all human associations, he becomes a kind of monster”⁴ through his suppression and control over the insects. Through the evocation of Frankenstein’s monster, Erice creates a parallel between Fernando and the monster that was Franco. Just as the bees have been rendered inert by the smoke, so too have the people of Spain been shocked, paralysed and turned apathetically docile by the war Franco instigated.⁵

Despite the apparent scathing critique against Franco, Erice’s film nonetheless passed the censor’s strict review process “due to its seeming fear-mongering against science which, it was assumed, would be taken at face value by the naïve traumatised villagers.”⁶ This is ironically because of the inclusion of the censored version of Frankenstein, as the censors believed audiences wouldn’t be interested in the film’s slow-paced symbolic subtext and instead only understand Frankenstein’s superficial anti-science messaging. Even when political critique is hidden behind symbolic ideas, cinema can be a means of resistance in the face of oppression as audiences are still capable of recognising, connecting to and understanding the true meanings of a film. 

Just as film can be a method of resistance and implicit critique against an authoritarian power, it can also provide a means of escape and wonder for suppressed audiences. Ana’s experience of watching Frankenstein is “so overwhelming that she subsequently interprets the world around her through this encounter with cinema.”⁷ Her inability to discern fiction from reality leaves her haunted by the monster’s violent act and ambiguous nature, later asking Isabel “Why did he kill the girl, and why did they kill him after that?” Isabel however – understanding the fabricated nature of film – decides to play a trick on her sister. She tells Ana that the monster did not kill the girl and that he is in fact a spirit she can talk to, but only if she closes her eyes and calls to him, saying “It’s me, Ana.”

This lie serves as the catalyst for Ana’s journey in the film, searching for the spirit of Frankenstein’s monster throughout the lifeless landscapes of Francoist Spain. Isabel takes Ana to an abandoned sheepfold – which she claims is the spirit’s home – to further deceive her sister, seemingly for her own manipulative enjoyment. As Julie Gerhardt and Dan Slobin write, Erice invites viewers “to consider Isabel as being on a path to becoming a proto-fascist child,”⁸ who propagates falsehoods and delusions to subjugate others. But for Ana, “Isabel’s fantasy about a disembodied spirit with whom [she] can converse [with] is… a way of coping with their circumstances,”⁹ allowing her to escape the harsh reality of post-Civil War Spain. Later in the film, Ana discovers a wounded Republican fugitive who has taken refuge inside the sheepfold, hiding from Franco’s police force. Despite the frightened soldier initially pulling a gun on Ana, she chooses to befriend him – sharing an apple and her father’s pocket watch – believing him to be the physical embodiment of the monster’s spirit. Unlike the censored Frankenstein’s maligned portrayal of the monster, he is kind, friendly, and ultimately human just like her, someone whom she can speak with as a friend. 

Ana’s fantastical beliefs – brought about by the screening of Frankenstein – reveals not only the escapist qualities of film but also “the way in which imagination so easily transforms reality.”¹⁰ In so doing, Erice calls upon the audience to “witness the devolution… [of] Ana, whose reality-based, cause-and-effect thinking is appropriated over the course of the film into a fantasy-based, other worldly psychic state.”¹¹

The Spirit of the Beehive depicts the traumatic consequences of when Ana’s fictious beliefs collide with reality, causing her to surrender to delusion and propagandic dogma. Unbeknownst to her, the fugitive is discovered and shot dead by police in the middle of the night, his body and possessions taken back to Hoyuelos. For Gwenyth Edwards, the soldier’s death marks the coinciding of Frankenstein with reality, and “it is therefore no coincidence that [his] corpse… is laid out in the cinema, before the very screen on which the monster [first] appeared.”¹² Fernando stands over the fugitive’s corpse as the officers return his pocket watch – presuming the fugitive had stolen it – but Fernando suspects otherwise, revealing the watch to Ana during breakfast to her dismay. She then returns to the sheepfold in a desperate search for the monster, only to find the bloodstains left behind from his execution. Fernando’s sudden appearance at the sheepfold – having secretly followed behind Ana – “brands him… the killer,”¹³ prompting her to run away from the cruelty she is faced with. 

Wandering alone in the forest at night trying to rationalise the fugitive’s death, Ana stops by a lakeside and transforms “reality into the world of imagination,”¹⁴ seeing Frankenstein’s monster emerge from the trees and kneel alongside her “in a repeat of the scene [from] the film.”¹⁵ But she is not harmed or killed by the monster, rather she is found the next day by the worried villagers and brought back to Hoyuelos, traumatised by her experience. “Erice [informs] his viewers of Ana having crossed a threshold in becoming propagandised,”¹⁶ socially isolated and refusing to speak to her family. Only at night does she go to her window and whisper “It’s me, Ana” to the spirit – just as Isabel told her – leaving “the physical world of her home behind as she goes shut-eyed into a fantasy that she has come to believe in.”¹⁷

According to Gerhardt and Slobin, Erice “draw[s] attention to the implicit parallel… between Ana’s personal journey and that of the Spanish people: to survive, both have had to sacrifice their belief in an objective reality in favour of… fantasies, lies and propaganda,”¹⁸ to submit to the smoke that deadens them. The Spirit of the Beehive sought to reach those paralysed Spanish audiences, disguising its critiques using symbolism to avoid censorship from Franco’s government, constructing its narrative to illustrate how Ana – who was once filled with whimsical imagination and wonder in a war-torn world – became corrupted by deceitful ideologies espoused by the people she trusted most. “Erice’s film reminds us of what the aftermath of a fascist taking power might entail,”¹⁹ of how a society can be rendered inert by tragedy, destruction and censorship. The medium of cinema serves as a battleground for control over narratives, over hopeful escapism or state fabricated delusion, over what is considered reality or fiction. For Gerhardt and Slobin, the film retains “disturbingly current relevance in the world of alt-facts, fake news and conspiracy theories, election-deniers, and the ever-increasing number of authoritarian leaders around the globe.”²⁰

El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive (1973 Spain 99 mins)

Prod: Elías Querejeta Dir: Víctor Erice Scr: Ángel Fernández-Santos, Víctor Erice Phot: Luis Cuadrado Ed: Pablo G. del Amo Art Dir: Jaime Chávarri Set Dec: Adolfo Cofiño Mus: Luis de Pablo 

Cast: Fernando Fernán Gómez, Teresa Gimpera, Ana Torrent, Isabel Tellería, Ketty de la Cámara, Estanis González, José Villasante, Juan Margallo, Laly Soldevila, Miguel Picazo

Endnotes